RFK Jr brought roadkill home to cook and eat multiple times.

Occam's Razor says he is a crank.

Sure! Which means he’s either a really effective covert operative, or just a crank. To be clear I’m not arguing in support of crack science. I’m arguing against him being plugged into some broader insidious agenda.

If you've got a broader insidious agenda, installing useful idiots is definitely a way to enact it.

He is a dangerous crank, but fresh roadkill is a perfectly fine practice.

You have to cook it thoroughly, same as any other game meat. Do not eat the central nervous system, again same as game. But dead is dead, and a car is no worse than a bullet.

That does not alter that we have a dangerous idiot running out health care policy.

Dead is dead but for how long? If you hunt, you know when the animal died and presumably cleaned it promptly. It didn't bake on the pavement with all its guts inside for hours or days.

Zoom out and you’ll see that there is a broad attack against science institutions going on right now. RFK is just one aspect.

NIH funding down 60% compared with one year ago: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/03/report-us-scientists-...

UMass disbands its entering biomed graduate class over Trump funding chaos: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/03/umass-disbands-its-en...

Not to mention the defunding of anything to do with climate change.

Zero effort was put into deciding what is wasteful. They just cancelled everything.

But that doesn't mean the administration is anti-science. It means they believe the situation is dire enough to justify drastic cuts. And that is a policy call regardless of your scientific beliefs.

In other words, one can reasonably take a position of “don’t publicly fund addressing an issue even if research supports it existing and even if that same individual espouses the conclusion of the research and might fund it privately”.

Call that what you want, but it is not a grand scheme to undermine science and replace it with fake propaganda.

The science projects are a tiny fraction of the budget. Cancel all of them and you won't make a dent in the deficit.

Add to that the administration's deliberate rejection of climate science and putting an anti-vaxxer in charge of the health department, and there is no way to avoid the straightforward judgment of "anti science". This is ideology and nothing else .

It’s a big jump to assume competence in targeting half of all science funding. As you saw in my link above they eliminated an entire graduate class of biomedical researchers. That’s a few dozen lifetimes of research that won’t be done now, delaying breakthroughs

What’s the alternative if you believe we can’t sustain the funding? Who is competent enough to decide whether “a whole class” of biomedical researchers are worth spending public money on or not? These aren’t easy questions with happy answers.

And if I am tuned in at all enough to take a guess at the impetus, it would be “why are we giving exorbitant grants to academic institutions where 90% of the money goes to support their administrative process instead of actually fund grad students doing research?” And the message from the government might be “cut the fat” and the response from the academic institution is either “no” and the students are collateral, or it’s “yes” and the college, not the gov’t, decided the specific grad program wasn’t valuable or important enough to retain.

This is happening concurrently with a 2.5 trillion dollar tax cut for the billionaire class. So if your concern is with the deficit then maybe reconsider doing that.

The basic science research that’s being cut is responsible for the US being at the technological forefront. Cutting that pipeline will mean that industry will fall behind.

The administrative costs allow researchers to focus on research and not on administration. Also if that’s your issue then maybe don’t pull the rug from these institutions by canceling grants that were already approved. The financial urgency does not warrant it. You can have a conversation about admin costs that takes place over a year or two. That’s not what’s happening here.

The head of OMB pretty much directly said that science backed departments, like the EPA, are being destroyed/hamstrung so that they can't regulate industry, like our energy sector.

The fluoride thing alone wouldn't even move the needle or be too worth talking about on its own, but when you see everything that is happening and you know it's just the public things, it gives a distinctly different context around what is happening. You know we are overtly threatening Canadian sovereignty right? Countries are setting up travel warnings. Plain clothes officers have abducted people in public. People have been robbed of due process. The head of the office of management and budget said he wants to put government workers in trauma. Deleting public data sets... At least two second in commands to the entire US military have said he is unfit. A chief of staff said the president said "I wish I had Hitler's generals." At least 4 prominent republicans have Sieg Heiled in front of a crowd, including Bannon who did not put his hand over his heart first.

> question status quo institutional knowledge

I am in favor of this when its done in good faith, but good faith hasn't been established.

> It’s honestly really disingenuous and disheartening to hear people towing this “the right is trying to take over the world and install fascism” line.

I find it disheartening that people are in denial about it.

What does Canadian sovereignty have to do with even a broader picture argument that the right is using illiberal science to undermine and dismantle political institutions?

“Anybody who wants to debate me must first demonstrate good faith by espousing my political stance before we can continue.” Really now…

People can’t be in denial about something that isn't happening. That’s called crazy.

This is a direct quote from the guy running the Office of Management and Budget, Russel Vought:

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

We want to put them in trauma.

Edit: Sieg Heil from Trump's ex Chief strategist in a speech to CPAC (Tea Party/GOP conference): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E9pXCuJnbc&t=10s

It’s being premised on tariffs being good for the economy, contra to a century of demonstrated proof they aren’t.

Tariffs aren’t a binary good/bad. They’re a tool in the policy toolbox, one that Canada has no problem using, by the way.

If you're alluding to the tariffs on things like dairy and egg products, those are only applicable beyond a set quota which the US has not exceeded.

The Republican party has been trying to squash inconvenient science for a long time.

One of the signature pieces of Gingrich's "Contract With America" in 1995 was the elimination of the Office of Technology Assessment. The office had the unfortunate duty to communicate well researched facts, and these facts contradicted conservative policy positions. (OTA: The planet is warming. R: No it's not. Exxon says it's not.) So the OTA had to go.

There are a nearly endless list of these things over the last 30 years.