UC Santa Barbara on February 11, 2014

The necessary long-term strategy has been nicely outlined by Eric Reinhart and Craig Spencer at the Boston Review. The public is more likely to support research funding that has direct and visible public benefits, like affordable treatments, rather than today’s funding that serves as an input to Big Pharma mega-profits and maximized care rationing for patients. They are completely right to say, “The path forward cannot be simply to defend the pre-Trump status quo; we must go far beyond it.”

 

The same also goes for the short-term strategy. The courts have stayed the NIH cut of indirect costs to a flat rate of 15%.  It’s good that universities are explaining what indirect costs are and that they are real costs. The Editor-in-Chief of the Science journals, Holden Thorp, wrote a strong editorial (“A Direct Hit”) saying how these costs work and suggesting that “these cuts should be a rallying cry for higher education to come together to make the case for the American system of research and teaching.” 

 

That case, however, will have to include direct public benefits of research that cut through the monopoly profit system—Reinhart and Spencer’s point—while also explaining the necessary public funding contribution to the initial research. People don’t know why the funding should be public rather than corporate and also how much money is required. 

 

There’s now been some progress on the public funding issue.  Universities and their organizations are starting to contest the core Republican narrative about research grants. That narrative is that grants make big money for the rich universities that have them. The conclusion is that lowering the research profits at universities won’t hurt them and will increase fairness and efficiency for the taxpayer.

 

The narrative is nonsense but university managers have never properly taken it on.  They aren’t comfortable with the reality they must disclose, which is that universities lose money on sponsored research, and plenty of it.  Big science is a big loser for universities.  If you were running universities as a business you’d get rid of sponsored research. In other words, you’d do what most businesses have done.  But universities aren’t businesses, though their leaders haven’t wanted to stress this point to a misinformed public.

 

I’ve stressed at length in many places—most recently in Liner Note 15 and Inside Higher Ed – that this has been both a data and a strategic disaster. No doubt university managers have worried than disclosed research losses would encourage voters to cut research in a (neoliberal) culture in which pecuniary gain is the measure of all things.  It’s a rational fear, but a bad policy. The result has been decades of miseducating people, politicians, business executives, and their own campus scientists, leading to general confusion about how expensive research actually is and why it depends on public funding and not just on Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

 

The truth was always out there, but buried in obscurity. The Council on Governmental Relations (COGR), an association of research universities, has long published an annual report called “Finances of Research Universities.”  There they would regularly observe that much of a given university’s research expenditures comes from the university’s own “institutional funds.”  

 

For example, in 2008, COGR wrote, “According to the 2006 NSF Survey, Institutional Funds account for 19.0% of all R&D expenditures, compared to 12.0% of all R&D expenditures in 1976” (author’s files).  The real story of federal funding is that the share of total costs pushed onto universities has doubled to around 25% over the past fifty years.  

 

COGR is now getting more company.  Duke University officials have disclosed a potential loss to their NIH indirect cost recovery of $194 million, which is nearly the same as their NSF “institutional funds” disclosure (Table 22).  (Such reports encourage me to stick with my higher calculation of losses (I ran UCSFs), in contrast to than those from The New York Times’  national data base of institutional losses that relies on calculating indirect costs on every single NIH grant in 50 states.  I commend their heroic effort of public education on this key infrastructural issue even if I think they’ve come in rather low.  Dan Mitchell compiled their lower figures for UC campuses.)

 

In the past, universities have taken the hit rather than make a public issue out of it, and now in the current emergency they are now backed into a corner.  But the truth is slowly groping towards the fore. 

 

Another example: if a nerd like me reads the declarations in the lawsuit that led to the temporary stay on the NIH cuts, one can read the following from a Brown University official: 

Importantly, if NIH’s indirect cost rate is reduced to 15%, Brown cannot simply make up for the resulting gap in funding through alternative means. Brown’s full cost of research is already significantly more than what is covered by sponsored direct costs and indirect cost recovery. In the 2022 fiscal year, for example, Brown’s full cost of research was estimated at $315 million, which was $66 million more than sponsored direct costs and indirect cost recovery. Brown made approximately $37 million in additional investments, including through research incentive programs, cost-sharing, and other programs. And Brown took on $28 million in “unrecovered” indirect costs.

 

Great.  It’s paragraph 23 of one of many declarations and it goes on to say something confusing that I don’t quote here.  But it’s a lot better than nothing.

 

Meanwhile, COGR has moved into getting the word out with video animations.  The result is very good, and I encourage everyone to watch it if you need to refresh yourself on the basics. Here are two key moments.

 

Figure 1.

 

“Wrong” means the idea that Congress covers all research costs. “F & A” means “Facilities and Administration,” which have been capped at 26% for decades, regardless of actual costs. The key figure is the big number universities hand over.

 

Figure 2

 

Emptying the piggy bank is right.

 

It should go without saying that money-losing STEM research is not subsidizing the arts, humanities, and social science fields who mostly don’t have extramural funds in the first place. But apparently it doesn’t, so I’ll do a separate post on this later.

 

We can see this as too little too late, or as better late than never.  My heart says the former, since I’ve known this for 25 years, going back to a time when the country had a good chance of fixing the problem were it to have admitted its existence. But my head goes with better late than never—we now need to mad dog this issue and that means universities everywhere coming clean. 

 

Here we get to the next huge issue: the (public) university piggy bank didn’t have money in it.   Their money comes mainly from student tuition and state funding. Neither of these sources are large enough, and have been for quite a while.

 

I just watched the most recent University of California Board of Regents budget presentation (January 2025, Board, Finance and Capital Strategies Committee, 1’58” to 2’04”, discussion to 2’14”). it’s a good example of what I’m talking about. 

 

Knowing perfectly well that Trump was trouble, California Governor Gavin Newsom cut public higher ed anyway.  Here’s a UC Office of the President (UCOP) slide that sums up the breaching of the latest “Compact” that was supposed to assure reliable funding.

 

Figure 3.

 

This is some pretty dumb futzing around with the University by a state with a $230 billion budget. Newsom also insists that UC must take additional resident undergraduates even as he declines to pay anything for them.  The state has done this off and on for years.  There’s always room for more sacks of turnips on the turnip truck. 

 

The UCOP presenters noted that UC campuses have structural deficits, and the state is assuring they will increase.

 

Figure 4.

 

 

Even if the state funds what it says it will, UC has a half-billion-dollar deficit in 2025-26. And that’s before the NIH cuts were announced.

 

This confirms what campuses already know in the form of hiring freezes, grad admissions suspensions, course overcrowding, and systemic shortfalls in professional resources.  

 

And it also means that UC is not able to backfill the federal cuts with state money, not for one month, to say nothing of covering the coming cuts across the entire Trump administration.

 

The original federal research deal---1950s, 1960s—was that states would fund some of the research done at their universities because they got direct and indirect benefits.  State residents got jobs and paid state taxes, and also got skilled graduates and new knowledge. The past 30-40 years of flat or falling state funding (depending on the state) destroyed that tacit cost sharing.  

 

UC’s budget VP through most of the period 1985-2010, a shrewd and likeable guy named Larry Hershman, had decided that state legislators didn’t know what research was and had no reason to care.  So he never brought it up when lobbying for funds—it was always undergraduate education.

 

Throughout the 2000s, those of us on the Academic Senate’s Planning and Budget Committee (UCPB) literally begged Hershman on a monthly basis that he had to teach them about research. All of us classroom teachers face “don’t know and have no reason to care” in Day 1 in every course we have ever taught—it’s the proverbial “teachable moment.” Hershman always said it was hopeless and wouldn’t (and didn’t).  This meant that the state funding and student tuition cross-subsidy of research has remained the invisible part of the funding iceberg that sleeps beneath the surface. 

 

So now no one in state government seems to be in a position to understand the damage their permanent austerity budgets have done to UC teaching and research.  The Legislative Analyst Office’s new comment is a good example. Stop pretending you’re going to increase UC funding, they say to the legislature, and just don’t increase it.

 

The UC Board of Regents don’t understand either.  Their budget presentation lasted a total of 6 minutes.  The only real questions came from graduate student regent Josiah Beharry and another young person I couldn’t identify. Beharry pointed out that the university needs to rethink the compact with the governor if it’s “hurting us rather than helping us right now.” No comment from UCOP.  The other regents sat in total silence.  

 

16 minutes after the presentation began, Regent and committee chair Michael Cohen, formerly Gov Jerry Brown’s budget director, closed the session.  Cohen noted that the Board may need to look at campus budget problems more than it has in the past, but don’t forget the state has a deficit. So UC needs to focus on “long term ways to reduce our costs.”  In other words, Cohen is offering the University more cuts!  

 

The lack of engagement with decades-old campus budget problems is Board malpractice.  The refusal to deal with resulting quality problems is completely irresponsible. This is a frozen governance crisis, and UC finances won’t improve at all until faculty, staff, and students can find a way to overcome it.

 

The lowest estimate of UC’s losses to NIH cuts adds $427 million, bringing 2025-26’s shortfall to about $1 billion.  However, UCLA’s CFO told a town hall that $1 billion is the potential loss from various Trump threats just for that campus.   

 

So what is the real estimated problem? Official figures would be nice. In the meantime, here are mine.  

 

UC campuses spent $4.6 billion in federal research funds in FY2023. If we average indirect cost recovery rates at various campuses at 58% (UCSF’s NIH rate is 64%), UC campuses received something like $1.69 billion of that in the form of indirect costs [x=(4.6b/1.58)0.58].  One can easily come up with a scenario in which UC’s 2025-26 budget deficit is $2 billion.

 

Just to focus the mind, this comes on top of an existing shortfall in which campuses in FY2023 also spent $1.9 billion of their own “institutional funds” to support federally-funded research. (This and the previous paragraph are calculated from Table 22).  That has been covered with (inadequate) state funds and student tuition in the main. 

 

This all sounds crazy because it is. This is how the US funded research has been before Trump came along.  It’s not a normal we want to restore, and disclosing it is the only way to get to something better.

 

The regents can’t really see how bad the long term state trend is from Figures 3 and 4, which is what they get in meetings. UCOP sometimes has longitudinal charts in the Budget for Current Operations, but they need to be part of the live meetings where UC people and journalists sometimes attend. 

 

Here’s  the updated version of the state general fund trend (for background see The Essential Charts).

 

Figure 5. 

 

 The blue line is a benchmark, tracking growth in state per-capita income.  This measures the strength of the economy as it exists in people's pockets.  It goes up 4-5 percent a year most of the time.  If a state wanted to fund an agency in an average way, it would make that agency's revenues rise at the same rate as per-capita income. In such a case, the legislature isn't treating it as essential or special, but just letting UC or CSU or public health or transportation grow with the state.

 

The yellow line takes the per-capita income benchmark and corrects it for actual UC student growth.

 

The purple line is the California state budget (right-hand scale).  State government--health, corrections, transportation, K-12 education, etc.--has grown at around the same rate as personal income.

 

The red line tracks the state's actual general fund allocation to UC. 

 

None of this is corrected for inflation.

 

The chart shows that UCOP and the Board of Regents have failed over many years to keep UC’s state resources on par with state growth.  Regent Cohen is completely wrong to look for still more reductions.  The University has the opposite problem--lagging pretty much everything  associated with state government throughout the 21st century.  And this substandard funding when California is supposed to be a world-leading knowledge society.

Now,  when state funding is needed to fill in for some likely federal cuts, Cohen and the rest of the Board of Regents have left UC unprepared.

 

UC is certainly not alone in this.  Across the country, universities are enduring a “phony war” period like Christmastime 1914: World War I on research funding has started, mass firings are happening, agency leads are capitulating to the Trump administration, staff are furious and demoralized, review panels and grants have been blocked, and confusion has settled over the national pride and joy that is STEM research.  

 

While the cuts are still suspended, universities need to launch a massive campaign to explain public good research and its sources in public funding.  I’d like to think UC people could help show the way.

Outside Lafayette, La. on October 27, 2018

By Leslie Bary, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

I just wrote a mini-grant for $858, to cover flight and hotel for a speaker. To justify the choice of speaker and the validity of event, I composed a few hundred words, to explain to an audience out of field and possibly outside of academia why one invites speakers from other institutions to share their expertise. My speaker is a full professor and department chair at a major research institution. They are a noted scholar in our field of Latin American Studies. Their appropriateness as a speaker is not in the slightest doubt. 

In the past, the $858 would have come out of a departmental speaker budget. I would not have to spend the afternoon explaining in words of one syllable why the event was being held and who the person was, nor creating documentation to prove I really had looked up and compared flight costs. But that was how I spent a lot of time today that would otherwise have been dedicated to research and teaching. 

I have been a professor for many years and before that, I was a graduate student with a teaching role. I have written many small internal grants. Initially, it was only one every couple of years, for special activities like summer research travel. Now almost every routine activity requires a mini-grant. The five-year vita I recently prepared listed ten in a category I now call “Selected Internal Funding.” A complete list would have crowded the document, since as departmental budgets shrink, funding requests for everyday operations are needed more and more often.

I have never been turned down for a funding request. Never. I suspect the reason is that the institution funds all legitimate proposals. I repeat, these grants are for amounts that in the past department chairs or deans would have controlled and would have simply authorized. They would do this not out of corruption or favoritism, but because they were familiar with the field and could exercise good judgment about it.

When I raise this issue, some faculty say they have given up writing mini-grants and only apply for major external grants. I am also a good writer of these, but major grants, at least in my field, do not fund everyday operations. And by major grants I mean grants from national research organizations like the NEH or ACLS. I do not mean fundraising. I also lobby civic organizations to support campus projects, but such fundraising covers different kinds of activities than do research grants to the Guggenheim Foundation. 

The mini-grants address needs not covered by other mechanisms. That is why I continue to apply. I do have some better paid and wealthier colleagues who dispense with the mini-grants and support university activities with personal funds, but they are few. Others take consulting gigs to substitute for the mini-grants, pointing out that if it takes five hours to write and then administer a mini-grant for $750, and they can raise $750 in three hours’ consulting, they’ll do the consulting. 

My research office suggests that applying for mini-grants helps us to reflect and articulate our research programs to ourselves. The fact is it doesn’t. Writing a book proposal or a major external grant can do that, just as updating and reformatting a vita can help rethink a career trajectory. But explaining basic things like why we go to conferences or, as I did for one mini-grant, why professors read books, does not help me clarify my ideas. At the outside, it might help explain what I am doing to an uninformed auditor. But that kind of explanation to such a person makes a negative contribution to my scholarly life.

The formulae for the mini-grants typically imitate those of major grants in the sciences, as does the idea that everything done should be grant funded. But in these fields, people spend as much as half of their work time applying for the funds they need to do their jobs. Rather than address that impractical situation, universities now replicate it at every level. The exercise seems particularly absurd when we are asked by our university to defend our job positions, or to explain that conducting research is part of our contract with them, and we are complying. 

But what is happening here? Every time there is a new, allegedly competitive, centralized internal funding opportunity, it is presented as new funding intended to help us, yet simultaneously, money disappears from regular departmental budgets and the regular library budget. A central committee reviews all the proposals, and individual units across campus lose autonomy. The university says this reduces “siloing.” In some cases it can be fairer since there are always people involved who do not know the applicants. But overall, it seems to be about a reduction in shared governance.

That is to say that every mini-grant application is a symptom of a department without a budget and, in the case of many of mine, a library without materials. When departments do not have budgets for research and libraries do not have them for materials, and faculty instead apply for funding to a mysterious committee in Academic Affairs, that committee has taken over functions that multiple department chairs, librarians, and others would have shared in the past. This is a concentration of power in a rather faceless group. Even if there were a Senate committee administering such things, the atmosphere would be less corporate. 

I note further that Human Resources nowadays is not a department of my university, but a service we have outsourced to a corporate “partner.” People who have increasing power over us are not colleagues or university employees. I wonder when the same will happen to the committee that judges the mini-grants.

What should be happening instead? Universities should restore department budgets for routine scholarly activities that are central to university education, central for undergraduate students as much as for everyone else. This would increase the use of decentralized academic expertise, lodged in departments, which would in turn increase the efficiency of the overall system. And it would reduce the excessive administrative labor of the many, many scholars in my position.

University of Louisiana, Lafayette on October 25, 2018

Yonsei University, Seoul on February 11, 2025

I’ll give this to Trump.  He makes more and bigger mistakes faster than any politician in US history. And his mistakes are also more angry, insulting, and destructive than those of other politicians.  He is the GOAT in these areas. But we need to see this as a weakness more than a strength.

 

I was half-way through a post refuting the Muskian project’s claim to knowledge when I saw that the Post’sPhilip Bump had written it for me.  There’s been a lot of progress in the past two weeks about the Trumpian project as knowledge destruction, particularly through Musk’s military wing. 

 

A lot of good knowledge work has been degrading Musk’s research credibility. For many people, it’s basically over. The Bump Rule is now widely in effect: “The safest approach to Musk’s rhetoric  . . . might be the one he wants to apply to government funding: reject it all as dubious until there’s reason to think it isn’t.”

 

The most famous example is that Musk’s big X announcement of widespread Social Security fraud, concealed by bureaucrats and exposed by DOGE, was based on ignorance of an old software program’s convention for dates.  A twitter swarm of experts posted about his COBAL knowledge gap.

 

 

Journalists wrote fact-checked stories. Others offered Musk advice about how to conduct actual research.  Many said that Musk should have some evidence of his claim before POTUS holds a press conference about it.

 

Journalists have been checking DOGE work in the way research colleagues would normally check work inside an academic research team before it is released.  They find low standards. “DOGE’s Only Public Ledger is Riddled with Mistakes,” the New York Times finds, having previously exposed basic mistakes with decimal points.

 

 

Bump laid out the conclusion about Muskian knowledge:

Musk isn’t very interested in the truth. His interests are in slashing government funding, undermining the political left and, where possible, both. So he kept at it, sharing numbers over the weekend that suggested the Social Security Administration had 1.5 million people aged 150 or older in its database, a subset of the nearly 21 million aged 100 or older.

 

Trumper error combined with brutality—fuelled by the stated desire to traumatize workers—depends on a multi-dimensional lack of knowledge.  It also depends on making followers think knowledge is irrelevant and opponents think knowledge completely powerless.

 

I’ll discuss some strengths of this machine before going on to say why they are vulnerable.

 

It intimidates people to watch Trumpism makes war on knowledge, civil service, skilled employees, general competence, non-corruption, constructive government itself, and of course independent expert authorities. Friday night, while firing the Black head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to replace him with a less qualified white man, and removing the first female head of the Navy, Trump also fired the senior lawyers in three military branches.     

 

It intimidates people to think about Musk’s treasure chest and the power to threaten every single elected Republican in the US with political extinction if they stray out of line. 

 

It intimidates people to think about the orc army of knowledge refusers known as MAGA.  

 

It intimidates people to think about civil service employment law being categorically voided through sheer arrogant executive belligerence. It’s designed to make people think, “no one is safe, including me.” And it does.

 

There’s Trumpism’s control of 2.5 of the 3 branches of government (it doesn’t quite command the lower courts). 

 

There’s Trump’s claim to be dictator and king, his unlimited aggression in the display of total power, his casual destruction of all relationships, and the apparent ease with which he intimidates even billionaire oligarchs through threats of retaliation.  

 

Trumpism draws power from its anger and violence, coupled with its confusion and ignorance.  Violence that cannot be addressed with facts, arguments, or other elements of reason is the most frightening kind.  Trumpism channels the political version of the culture of casual abuse, masquerading as a special vitalism, and carrying a head on a pike.

 

This nexus of threat turns wrongness itself is a power, as Bump notes about DOGE’s repeated bungling. 

The result is a weird variant of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which Musk and his lackeys appear to know too little about how government systems work to understand what they don’t know. Instead of then realizing the gaps in that knowledge and tempering future comments, Musk builds a defensive position around his claims, constructed of partisan tropes and attacks on his critics. It unfairly reinforces skepticism in the government. But that’s entirely the point.

 

All this is true.  Wrongess in the pursuit of power is no weakness.  It proves the power. 

 

And yet all of this is not working as well as one might expect.

 

We should take stock of the fact that the reign of (t)error is revealing the limits of Trump’s mandate. Here’s a recent Post-Ipsos poll.

 

 

Trump has famously split the country, but the result is widespread revulsion for his policies.  Non-Republicans—the country’s numerically dominant group—give him majority support on only one of these 33 policies.  Three-quarters of his policies receive 25% non-Republican support or less. 

 

That’s a base to build on. It can assume majority rejection of Trump’s policies and decline of the status of Trump’s superstar Musk.  

 

Anti-Trump lawfare continues to expand and is doing well in the courts. For example, on Friday a judge extended the injunction on the NIH cuts. (The Lawfare tracker can help you keep score.)  

 

We’re seeing wide circulation of stories of the pointless immiseration of good workers, posing the biggest public test ever to Republican claims to care about working people as more than human shields for their tax cuts and giveaways of public resources to business.

 

The core premises of Trumpism can be readily undermined, sometimes in one image, from US history’s most repressive effort to erase words referring to women and people of color to the DOGE war on government bloat that doesn’t exist.

 

 

Then there’s the sheer repetition of the unending everyday Trumpian offensive: it signals that its victories depend on lying, cheating, and stealing, including public resources and people’s careers.  

 

Concealed weakness is also the meaning of the extremely belligerent treatment of Europe in the Munich meetings, or the escalating craziness of the CPAC conference, which brought a new Nazi salute—this one from Steve Bannon—and Elon Musk wielding a chain saw like the federal government’s serial killer. 

 

It’s important for strategy to stay clear about the weakness signalled by these things. Oppositional strategy has to be clear about the hidden meanings of the show. As Trumpist spectacle requires an ever grander ritual sacrifice, Trumpism will remind more people of the end of Dr. Strangelove on a loop, and see its destructiveness as an anti-knowledge project.

 

 

 

This brings me to the position of the anti-Trump opposition. To succeed, it has to bind expertise to a new narrative project, not move away from expertise in search of affective power.  

 

I mention this because so much critical theory and social science has decided that argument and evidence are relics of our failed Enlightenment and are no longer relevant to mass politics.  To put it more subtly, though the professional-managerial class (PMC) may still prefer rationality the masses do not, and this is why the PMC backstabs social movements and is despised by everyone.  

 

William Davies’ Nervous States(2018) made a good systematic case that affect has replaced reason as the medium of politics.  On this model, we are in the period of what the philosopher Brian Massumi (2015) called “ontopower,” operating through the intuitive and the speculative, leading to pre-emption, or Deleuze’s control.  Or in Carolyn Pedwell’s terms, understanding current technological society requires that we “relinquish our persistent attachment to human-centric notions of will, agency, and intentionality” (unpublished ISRF AI Group Paper). Trump’s rise, in its dependence on affective spectacle and bullshit of every kind, seems to confirm the need to cling no longer to fact-checking, argument and evidence. 

 

Many people have pointed out that the right beats the left in the department of grand narratives and affective attachments to them. But what does this really mean about the role of expertise in the overall ensemble?

 

The historian John Ganz has taken this issue up in his important history of the U.S. right, particularly his book on the Bush I period that produced Pat Buchanan and the culture warriors that prequelled Bannon and Trump. He’s come back to this issue a lot, most recently in a post about Republican mythic politics.  But to repeat the question, what is the relation between knowledge and narrative in a leftist mythic politics?

 

I completely agree that the left needs a positive narrative about the society it wants and why it would be so much better than what we have. It has to involve pleasure and liberation, and freedom from oppression, from the shattering of hatreds, and from the depredations of contempt.  I’ve written a cumulative and positive left narrative around higher education—many many posts of the 2010s on this blog, the “recovery cycle” in The Great Mistake, etc.  Some phases of this narrative seem reformist, some more radical, and all have fallen outside the Hallin spheres  of consensus and of legitimate controversy as policed by academic administration. (I like the Hallin spheres better than the Overton window.)  This kind of narration has to be built out for the whole range of institutions and communities.

 

This can and must be done.  It overcomes the endless distraction of playing defense, of being trapped in the unending series of critiques that have to be levelled at bad ideas coming from inside the house—from university admin for example—as well as out.   To build the alternative narrative takes discipline and sustained collaboration.  Both are really hard. 

 

And yet, to ask the question again, does the new narrative achieve mythic power only when it overcomes the limitations of intentional knowledge and critique? Ganz seems to be saying yes. He invokes a passage from George Sorel, quoting Sorel as follows:

The idea of the general strike, engendered by the practice of violent strikes, entails the conception of an irrevocable overthrow. There is something terrifying in this – which will appear more and more terrifying as violence takes a greater place in the mind of the proletarians. But, in undertaking a serious, formidable and sublime work, the socialists raise themselves above our frivolous society and make themselves worthy of pointing out new roads to the world. 

 

I agree that expert analysis has to join with and become a movement for it to change society or point out the new road towards it.  But I don’t agree with the opposition between fact-checking and the sublime strike in which the latter is the source of the new mythic narrative.  Ganz elevates Musk and DOGE to the level of myth, and writes, 

 

This mythic nature of these notions makes the liberal attempts to fact-check or dispute their contents piecemeal a futile exercise. The positivistic approach of liberal pundits, as expressed most characteristically in the unimaginative vox.com mentality, is completely out of its depth when it tries to deal with the policy merits or demerits of these new right-wing myths

 

We are indeed sick of our pathetic liberalism—and its enablement of the worst projects like Israel’s annihilation of Gaza.  But that does not include Vox’s fact-checking and other earnest and learned effects to expose lies as an essential part of the defusion of violent Trumpian control. 

 

The left absolutely needs to keep and to rebuild knowledge as such. That means radical knowledge and social movement knowledge and also very much knowledge based on professional expertise—on electrical engineering and ethnic studies alike.  

 

The appeal to the imagination has to arrive on this basis of knowledge if it is to arrive from the left.  The left is not about regeneration through violence, to recall Richard Slotkin’s great title incarnating the meaning of the US as a permanent frontier.  The right is about that.  The left is about the end of that myth, to misstate the title of Greg Grandin’s excellent book analyzing and debunking. the long violence of US national history.  

 

So Musk must be fact -checked.  We know that Musk is bullshitting us in the Henry Frankfurt sense of lying in order to control of the audience, and we know this because of some experts in things like COBAL and some medical statisticians on social media and because of reporters like Makena Kelly at Wired, whose editor set up a unit dedicated to tech in government in anticipation of the need to report out on a crusade.  

 

“Imagination” in the new myth cannot skip data, analysis, argument, persuasion, or organization on the basis of all these things.  It’s where the left’s new narratives will come from.

 

Seoul National University on Feb14, 2025

It’s increasingly clear that knowledge destruction is not a side effect of Trump’s regime but its central mission. 

A four-year presidential campaign based on lies, disinformation, and abusive accusations was the means. The elimination of knowledge—because it competes with power--is the end. 

This project has a number of branches.  One is to make corruption great again. This involves the suspending or dismantling of business law.  The law, for all its problems, encodes a long history of social knowledge that its practice always considers.  That’s why Trump lost a civil suit to E. Jean Carroll for sexual abuse. That’s why U.S. corporations have lost cases for bribery of officials of foreign governments under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.  The law knows and uses understandings of sexual abuse and of bribery that emerge from culture over generations and are then applied through dynamic legal processes.  This knowledge places real constraints on executive power. Trump’s war on the law is a war on legal knowledge. 

The nuclear war on DEI is another.  This has exploded from criticizing specific course requirements and administrative policies to seeking the erasure of the words, the practices, the offices, and the people involved with any whiff of it. It has become one of the most repressive political crusades in modern US history. It engages in censorship and erasure as a proxy for thought control.  

It goes beyond McCarthyism in the 1950s, which created a climate of fear by rooting out some finite number of Communists in the US government, to creating a climate of fear by defining the entire government workforce as the woke enemy. Woke is “gender ideology,” trans rights, civil rights, all the raced, gendered, sexual things not plainly supporting white patriarchal order.  Woke is the commonplace “belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”  The project is self-evidently ridiculous, understood literally as replacing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with Uniformity, Hierarchy, and Exclusion. It is that, but also extremely damaging, since it aims at the destruction of the knowledge that underlies the banal procedures manged by DEI offices and personnel—knowledge from feminist studies, the sociology of race, biology and cognitive psychology and many many other fields and movements whose discoveries imposes constraints on the will to power. 

I have three points about this. It’s a total war on knowledge. The point is to eliminate interpretation, discussion, dispute, litigation, and debate, and to create reality with assertion as an act of power.  This was also the Bush II strategy, but Bannon, Trump et al. have brought it to a new stage of universal application.  

Trump doesn’t (and can’t) debate. He goes for the knock-out one liner, which is why his assertions are so often absurd. Saying “the U.S. will own” Gaza annihilates discussion of all the central issues about self-governance and right of return, which is the point; infuriating delusion is a feature not a bug: the only response is total rejection of the premise, which also stalls debate and Trump gets his way again.

You’ll remember all the decades in which we had to rebut right-wing arguments that professors were brainwashing students into political correctness by teaching Toni Morrison novels in humanities survey courses, down to the argument that the purpose of critical race theory was to make white students ashamed of their identities. 

The new Trump regime doesn’t argue. It eliminates the knowledge people who would do the arguing.  The purpose of Elon Musk’s DOGE is not to study the information systems and admin structures of the federal government to make them, say, 15% cheaper.  The purpose is to fire people who know things—the empiricists with data—so they can no longer participate, complicate, expose, or propose alternatives.  The purpose is not to fire some of them but all of them. Hence the lack of numerical goals – “we’ll reduce costs 18%, or the workforce 12% or 31% through the introduction of AI,” whatever.  Efficiency isn’t the point; destruction is. 

Second, the purpose is to harm people. Certainly they want to hurt poor people and people of color in order to silence them or to drive them off. It’s also very much to harm the government’s knowledge people. Trumpers explicitly seek to traumatize them.  The idea is to make them quit, take them out of the action, thus paralyzing the knowledge function and makes it go away.  

Ditto the attacks on the infrastructure of academic research at NIH and  (here, and at Inside Higher Ed)—starve the beast, hurt the scientists. The new head of Health and Human Services to which NIH reports, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is widely described as anti-vaccine.  But more deeply he is anti-knowledge—ignorant of and hostile to the collaborative system of millions of professional researchers who study, test, debate, circulate, challenge, and revise knowledge. All of this is to be overruled by his own impressions.  

Same goes for the destruction of the Department of Education's Institute for Education Sciences, which includes the National Center for Education Statistics.   “It basically literally means we are stepping back in time decades,” one scholar said. That’s the idea.  Strip knowledge people of their knowledge and you control them absolutely. No data, no backtalk.   It’s the end of knowledge’s intrinsic constraint on power—and all that attitude. 

Musk sets the pace: he manages his conflicts of interest by eliminating the people who have knowledge of them. Again, this is not only to eliminate the rules that use the knowledge, but to eliminate the knowledge itself, at its root, by harming or purging the people that have the knowledge. 

My third point is that Trumpism is a total war on culture. Culture is the source of all the offending knowledges. It is the place where the multitudes abound and clash. It generates radically multifarious knowledges by its very existence, and also diverse methods of adjudicating these.  Some of the most settled of these wind up as law, but most remain in solution in the society, to use Raymond Williams’ metaphor. They are embodied in structures of feeling, where identity, experience, and more abstract political questions and economic questions exist indissociably together. They interact with each other sometimes in political movements and debates, and routinely in the social sciences, humanities, and the arts—poetry, commercial filmmaking, music, criticism, everything. 

Trumpism hates culture, starting with its innate diversity—culture is always a relation among plural cultures, as Fredric Jameson among many others have insisted across the decades. Trumpism also hates culture for its complexity and its power. It is too multitudinous and also simply intelligent to be assimilated or destroyed. It is rooted in millions of concrete experiences that cannot and will never be dispatched with the great man’s abusive assertion or his claim to ownership. One example is the unfathomable courage of Palestinians living in the ruins of their deliberately destroyed cities, homes, schools, universities, shops, and hospitals. Among other things, that is will as culture, in all its power.

The dumb stuff Trump does, like firing the board of the Kennedy Center in D.C. and replacing it with one that then appointed him chairman, shows the anxiety that lies behind his contempt for culture outside of television.  Apparently the Kennedy Center once had a drag show.  One can imagine Trump’s lifetime of offhand comments about culture, history, and feelings, that never fail to displease the listener. Same with Musk, a terrible bungler outside his core expertise of capitalizing tech monopolies. Culture delivers these men that little jolt of humiliation.  It’s their zone of confusion and weakness. Hence their attempts to establish the one knowledge to rule all others—the “deal” for Trump, some physics of social Darwinism for Musk. But it never works outside its own self-defined terrain.

The hatred behind all this will cause widespread suffering and death.  The default is move fast and kill folks.  Destroy their workplaces, labs, clinics, food distribution networks, institutes.  Fire everyone, burn everything.  If you don’t like it, try and sue me.    

Because of the abuse and the violence and the hostility baked into every statement and announcement and goal, it’s easy for us to see this engine of knowledge destruction as tremendously powerful.  It’s point is to make us too afraid to fight. It’s easy to take the bait. 

It’s made easier still by the total capitulation of the country’s corporate and tech elite to Trump’s lifelong practice of extortion through abuse of counterparty.  We were right to be alarmed when billionaire overlords Bezos and Soon-Shiong blocked Kamala Harris endorsements at the Washington Post and LA Times papers that they own: if these supremely powerful people are afraid of Trump, and appeal to him by stepping on their knowledge professionals, then shouldn’t I be too?

The right answer is no.  Trump’s hatred flows from anxiety, shame, and fear in the face of the general culture. It has often detested him but more importantly is indifferent to him and will proceed in its infinite variety and unpredictable directions on its winding course.  Trump’s sociopathology expresses his experience of his own weakness, which no success has ever overcome. He focuses on exterminating internal enemies because absolutely everyone is a threat. 

We should see ourselves that way, as what we actually are—a mortal threat to Trumpism.  We should side with the culture, because it is going to win.