From The Ink ― KEEP UP: Is Musk pro-Mars — or from Mars?

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The attack on science, brainworm confirmed,

citizenship for me and not for thee, and more

By The Ink

The Trump-Musk administration’s assault on the Constitution and the American people has been hard to keep up with — even for us! So we’re digging into the biggest stories of the day, surfacing some important ones that have flown under the radar, and looking at what they mean, beyond the headlines. And, since it’s never too soon in our book, we’re going to get snarky when it’s called for. We hope you’ll follow along with us.

Today we take on:

• Why is the new regime dismantling American science — and are they in league with…alien invaders?

• With Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. confirmed as Health and Human Services secretary, have we handed public health policy to the brain worm?

• Texas Congressman Brandon Gill tries his hand at crowdfunding white nationalism as he looks to revoke Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s citizenship by petition.

• Everyone’s getting fired — but it’s a great time for private prison owners!

And on a more positive note:

• Speaking up is something everyone can — and should — do. Editor Rob Spillman shows us the way to hold on to the truth.

In Cixin Liu’s massively popular sci-fi epic The Three-Body Problem, an advanced society abandons their collapsing planet and sets out to take over the Earth. But to pave the way and make sure they don’t meet effective resistance, they monkey wrench human progress by distributing viral propaganda, recruiting allies in the gaming community, cutting sweetheart deals with oligarchs, and interfering with scientific research. Ummmmm. Think about it:

“Musk has access to all the data on federal research grantees and contractors: social security numbers, tax returns, tax payments, tax rebates, grant disbursements and more,” wrote physicist Michael Lubell from City College of New York. “Anyone who depends on the federal government and doesn’t toe the line might become a target. This is right out of (Hungarian prime minister) Viktor Orbán’s playbook.”

As for the long-term impact of these changes, James Gates — a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland and a past president of the US National Society of Black Physicists — is blunt. “My country is in for a 50-year period of a new dark ages,” he told an audience at the Royal College of Art in London, UK, on 7 February.

 The Three-Body Problem was received (and possibly intended) in China as a critique of the forced transformation of Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution, but here in the U.S., it hits different.

It’s as if the tech oligarchs who’ve journeyed from South Africa to remake America — the guys who, as therapist Daniel Shaw remarked, “read Orwell's 1984 and decided the hero was Big Brother” — read Liu’s trilogy and decided the San-Ti (the alien invaders) were the heroes.

In the books and TV series, humanity pushes back. And it’s time to get moving, before future generations lose sight of the future.

Republicans in the state, fresh off of introducing a resolution that would “acknowledge the Kingship of Jesus Christ over all the world,” have proposed Senate Bill 2355, a straightforward bill that would require the state’s superintendent of public instruction to “include intelligent design in the state science content standards”—in other words, make teachers tell kids some unnamed Higher Power may have poofed them into existence—by the start of the 2027-2028 school year.

Makes you wish Elon Musk would get to work on occupying Mars.

Triumph of the brain worm

In another blow against science and possibly the future of humanity, the Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary, putting a vaccine denialist and dangerous health fad hobbyist with no experience in healthcare administration in a position to reshape the country’s approach to public health. The timing couldn’t be worse, coming as Donald Trump withdraws the United States from the World Health Organization, tries to defund the NIH, and defang the CDC and FDA — and while another pandemic waits in the wings.

The lone Republican holdout was again reformed institutionalist Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who — and it’s painful enough to admit this, given that he’s the one who set the country on this path in the first place — spoke for many when he said:

“In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world,” McConnell said in a statement, according to NPR. “I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”

Nice citizenship you've got there. Shame if something happened to it 

Texas Rep. Brandon Gill, son-in-law and former business associate of right-wing provocateur and convicted campaign finance fraudster Dinesh D’Souza, called for the deportation of congressional colleague Ilhan Omar of Minnesota this past week, circulating a petition to garner support — basically, trying to crowdfund his white supremacist deportation effort. It’s transparently a fundraising gesture since no mechanism exists to denaturalize a U.S. citizen by petition (as of now, once granted, citizenship can only be stripped in extraordinary circumstances).

Gill suggests that Omar’s address to a group of Somali immigrants at a public forum on how to deal with ICE questioning was evidence of treason, and somehow part of “facilitating a full-scale invasion of our country.”

Rep. Omar is unfortunately accustomed to regular attacks from the right, and shockingly enough this isn’t the first time they’ve had to do with her addressing constituents in the language they speak. So it’s easy to dismiss Gill’s petition as the stunt that it clearly is, but in all seriousness, the fact that the idea of denaturalization is even in the air at all should give every American pause.

Citizenship by naturalization is defined right there in the Constitution (it’s Article I, Section 8, Clause 4, if you want to look it up); animus against it goes beyond the usual far-right complaining about birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. Over the last few decades, denaturalizations have happened very rarely — on average, less than a dozen times each year.

If only Gill were alone in this. Sadly, he’s not.

Trump, of course, has promised to expand the practice, suggesting that more resources needed to be devoted to denaturalization cases in an executive order that hasn’t gotten anywhere near enough attention yet. It’s yet another direct assault on basic rights and freedoms that needs to be called out, and defended against.

Are we the baddies?

It’s been a bleak week. At least the private prison industry is happy now:

“I have worked at CoreCivic for 32 years, and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career with the company,” Hininger said, adding that he expects “perhaps the most significant growth in our company’s history over the next several years.”

Speaking up

Against it all, that’s what everyone can do and must keep doing. Veteran literary editor and Tin House founder Rob Spillman has it exactly right:

It is our job as writers and editors to step into this breach and say what the vulnerable are rightly afraid to say out loud. To bear witness. To document. To not only preserve these words and their meaning, but to use them to fight back. To not let Trump and Musk rewrite reality with their Orwellian doublespeak. To not let them take words from us. To instead use these words loudly, clearly, and share them as widely as possible. To not obey in advance.

Please go here for the original article: https://the.ink/p/mars-attacks