How Science Can Resist Trump [Greg Laden's Blog]

The March for Science, in April, may be a June to September romance between academia and and political activists, but prior experience in Canada suggests we are in it for the cold hard winter.

A conservative government in the land of the maple leaf took wide ranging action to shut down and control science and science communication. The populous became outraged, and the politicians were put on ice. The fight continues, and it looks like the position of science in Canada will end up more secure than it ever was before. Don’t mess with Canadian scientists and the citizens that respect them.

Meanwhile, in the United States we have good news and bad news. The bad news is that the Republican Party has taken over the country, led by an oligarch by the name of Trump, and science is under more severe threat than ever before. The good news is that the United States has Canada to serve as an example, and, as Katie Gibbs notes, the US also has a large number of powerful institutions already in place to fight the new repressive regime.

So, now it is a race. How fast can the Republicans remove voting protection and continue their ongoing gerrymandering, so a small right wing majority can continue to rule? How fast can Progressives shift the Congress so Trump can be stopped and the Republicans, ultimately, pushed out of government? (And, make no mistake: we can no longer have a two party system where one of the parties is Republican. They are traitors and we must fully marginalize them.)

I assume that by now you know that I have a podcast, with Mike Haubrich, called “Ikonokast.” We interviewed the aforementioned Katie Gibbs, Executive Director of Evidence for Democracy, which took part in organizing the Death of Evidence March of July 2012. Dr. Gibbs gave us the lowdown on what happened in Canada, and we discussed what we might to in the United States to Resist Trump. Please go listen to our podcast, which is available here, on iTunes, and Google Play.