The Friday Brief: April 18, 2024

Inside: American Lysenkoism, Forever Wars, Trump’s Tariffs Flop, Peter Thiel and The ICE Deportation Machine, Marco Pleases Daddy Vladdy, Watch Ed Martin, Kudos To Mike Fernandez.

The Big Picture

American Lysenkoism

The Trumpian whole-of-government effort to assault academic freedom and dismantle the American university system is the purest expression of the MAGA movement’s deepest insecurity: a bottomless, burning resentment of intellect, education, and expertise.

For all the online “statue guys” who cosplay as lovers of the classics, what truly powers the Trump base is a virulent hatred of “elites.” The disinformation ecosystem that shapes what they see, hear, (rarely) read, and think has identified higher education, particularly the concept of academic freedom, as the Main Enemy.

If colleges and universities cave to Trump’s demands for ideological conformity to the High Church of MAGA Populism, the process is straightforward.

The Trump administration will demand that they suppress research it finds offensive. Think: mRNA vaccines that might cure cancer, but enrage RFK, Jr’s conspiracy crew. Think about weather and climate research. You get the drill. On the flip side, expect lavish funding for flat earth theories, young earth science, and Tartarian archeology.

Punish institutions for protecting students’ rights to speak — even speech you or I may disagree with vehemently — and you’ll also punish them for allowing any student or faculty speech that offends the delicate ears of the Dear Leader. Students should be allowed to be young, dumb, and loud about it. That’s part of the purpose of higher education.

If you force schools to tailor curricula around ideology instead of facts, it’s not academic oversight or a fight against liberal bias. That’s American Lysenkoism.

I’ll spare you too much exegesis from my Soviet-studies rabbit holes, but this one rings right. Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist and a complete scientific fraud who rose under Stalin by telling the Russian dictator exactly what he wanted to hear.

He denied basic genetics—Mendelian inheritance was bourgeois nonsense, you see—and promised miraculous agricultural breakthroughs rooted in pseudoscience and ideological dogma. The scientists who dared to challenge him were fired, silenced, imprisoned, or shot. Soviet biology became a Potemkin discipline. Crops failed, and millions starved.

But Lysenko thrived not because his ideas were true, but because in the Stalin era they were — stop me if this sounds familiar — politically correct. (After Stalin’s death, his star faded, but he faced no real punishment for perpetuating a lie that killed millions.)