Today is primary day in Georgia. Jack Hassard offers as good an analysis of the Republican primary as you will see anywhere. Actually, better. Four men are running for the Republican nomination. They all rely on culture war issues, the red meat that gets voters excited, like immigration, crime, and low taxes. Most certainly, they are all conservative Christians. Sadly, none of them addresses the issues that matter most: the closing of hospitals, healthcare, education, the environment. They all embrace Trump, of course.
He blogs as “Citizen Jack.” He is a professor Emeritus of Science Education at Georgia State University.
The Georgia primary is today, Tuesday, May 19. The three weeks of advance voting ended on Friday. Although I didn’t vote on the Republican ticket, I’ve suffered through the continuous bombardment of TV ads by four white Christian pro-Trump men running to be on the November ballot for governor.
No Limit on Spending
The Republican primary for governor in Georgia has become one of the most expensive and combative races in state history. Right now, according to AJC’s Greg Bluestein, the quad has spent over $100 million in the primary. Attorney General Chris Carr, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, and billionaire businessman Rick Jackson are flooding television screens with nearly identical messages: they are Christian conservatives, loyal to Donald Trump, committed to cutting taxes, and determined to crack down on undocumented immigrants. Here is what they’ve pored into the local TV stations.
Chris Carr: Put in $4 million, raised $400,000, 2 million on hand
Bert Jones: Put in $16 million, raised &200,000, $2.1 million on hand
Rick Jackson: Put in $80 million, raised only $200,000, $7. million on hand.
Brad Raffensperger: Put in $6 million, raised $217,000, $2.5 million on hand.
What They Avoid Saying
What is striking is not merely what these candidates say, but what they avoid discussing.
Education funding, hospital closures, rising health-care costs, retirement insecurity, environmental threats, public transportation, affordable housing, and gun violence barely appear in their ads or debate rhetoric.
Instead, the Republican field has narrowed Georgia’s future to culture-war symbolism and tax-cut promises.
That narrowing says a great deal about the current direction of Georgia Republican politics.
Chris Carr
Carr presents himself as the polished establishment conservative. As attorney general, he has aligned himself closely with national Republican priorities and emphasized law enforcement and conservative social policies. His campaign argues that lower taxes and a pro-business climate will keep Georgia economically strong. But Carr rarely discusses the deep inequalities beneath the state’s economic growth.
Georgia continues to rank poorly in maternal mortality, rural health access, and educational equity. Thousands of Georgians live in counties with limited medical services, and many public schools remain underfunded. Carr’s campaign offers little indication that those issues are central to his agenda.
Brad Raffensperger
Raffensperger occupies a more complicated position. Nationally, he became known for refusing Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results. Yet in the governor’s race, Raffensperger has attempted to reposition himself as a conventional conservative Republican emphasizing tax cuts, Christian values, and public safety. His strategy appears designed to reassure Republican primary voters who still distrust him for defying Trump. Disappointingly he claimed he blocked Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams from trying to make it legal for illegal immigrants to vote. Simply not true, Brad. And he borrowed a campaign strategy used by Governor Kemp–a shotgun.
Among the four major candidates, Raffensperger is perhaps the least inflammatory rhetorically. Yet even he has largely avoided bold proposals on expanding health care, addressing climate risks, or improving public education.
His campaign reflects the reality that Republican primaries increasingly punish policy moderation and reward ideological conformity. Rather than using his independent reputation to broaden the debate, Raffensperger has mostly adapted himself to the same narrow framework as his rivals.
Bert Jones
Jones has campaigned as the most openly Trump-aligned candidate. Backed by Trump himself, Jones emphasizes immigration enforcement, conservative cultural themes, and tax elimination. His ads frame politics as a battle between “real Georgians” and threatening outsiders. Yet Georgia’s economy depends heavily on immigrant labor in agriculture, construction, hospitality, and logistics. Harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric may energize parts of the Republican base, but it risks deepening division while ignoring practical economic realities.
Jones also promotes eliminating the state income tax, a popular Republican talking point. But candidates rarely explain what services would be reduced to compensate for the lost revenue. Georgia relies on income tax revenue to fund schools, universities, transportation, and public safety. Promising massive tax cuts without explaining the consequences may be politically effective, but it is fiscally evasive.
Rick Jackson
Jackson, the billionaire outsider, has poured enormous sums of personal wealth into the race and attempted to position himself as a businessman who can “fix” government. Like the others, he stresses deportation policies, conservative Christianity, and tax reductions.
Yet Jackson’s campaign has already been shadowed by reports that undocumented workers were employed at his property despite his hardline immigration message. The contradiction highlights a larger pattern in modern Republican politics: immigrants are politically useful as targets even while the economy quietly depends on their labor. Jackson has the most offensive immigrant ad of the four candidates. He uses one case to demonize and lie about immigrants.
More broadly, Jackson’s candidacy reflects the growing influence of billionaire self-financed campaigns. When wealthy candidates can spend tens of millions of dollars on advertising, elections risk becoming less about democratic participation and more about financial saturation. That trend distances politics from the everyday concerns of working Georgians struggling with housing costs, child care, medical debt, and stagnant wages.
“Across all four campaigns, one theme dominates: symbolic politics over practical governance.”
There Are Real Issues
Georgia faces serious long-term challenges. Rural hospitals continue to close. Teachers leave the profession because of burnout and low pay. Metro Atlanta struggles with traffic congestion and housing affordability. Climate change threatens coastal communities and increases severe weather risks. Yet these issues receive little sustained attention in the Republican primary.
Instead, voters are offered simplified narratives centered on religion, fear of immigrants, tax reduction, and loyalty to Trump. Christianity itself becomes less a moral framework than a campaign brand. Faith is invoked constantly, yet there is little discussion of poverty, health care access, or social responsibility — concerns traditionally associated with religious ethics.
The candidates’ silence on environmental issues is particularly revealing. Georgia’s coastline, water systems, and urban air quality face increasing pressure from development and climate change. Younger voters increasingly care about sustainability and clean energy, yet Republican candidates seldom mention these topics except to criticize federal regulations.
The same absence exists around retirement and aging. Georgia’s population is growing older, and many retirees face rising housing and medical costs. None of the leading Republican campaigns have made retirement security a central issue.
In the end, the Republican primary reveals a party focused more on ideological signaling than comprehensive governance. The candidates compete aggressively over who is most conservative, most pro-Trump, and toughest on immigration. But governing a complex and rapidly changing state requires more than slogans and tax pledges.
Georgia’s future will depend on schools, hospitals, infrastructure, environmental stewardship, and economic fairness as much as partisan identity. A campaign that neglects those realities risks serving political ambition more than the long-term interests of Georgians.
This a great article that will uplift your spirits!
Jennifer Rubin is a journalist and lawyer who was hired by The Washington Post to be its conservative columnist. But Trump radicalized her, and she became a leading voice for liberal policies. After Jeff Bezos decided to placate and woo Trump, she resigned her job and started a new and wildly popular blog called “The Contrarian,” where she and other brilliant writers gathered to critique the madness of MAGA.
She recently posted an optimistic analysis of American politics. Despite the gerrymandering, despite horrible court decisions, Democrats are in a great position to wash the MAGA stain out of the nation’s government.
It’s the most optimistic piece I’ve read in a long while, and I think you will enjoy it too.
Rubin writes:
In a span of less than two weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court (contravening the text and intent of the post-Civil War amendments and decades of court precedent) and the Virginia State Supreme Court (overturning the will of Virginia voters and inventing a new definition of “election”) have bulldozed through the electoral landscape to slant the 2026 midterm playing field in Republicans’ favor.
In Louisiana v. Callais, the U.S. Supreme Court demolished 60 years of progress in voting rights, robbed Black and Hispanic communities of the power to elect representatives of their own choosing, and aimed to decimate the ranks of non-white U.S. House members, state legislators, and local officials. This is nothing short of an attempt to reimpose white supremacy.
This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation. It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’ judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation…. It protects Alito’s core constituency: aggrieved white Republican voters.
As infuriating, partisan, and legally unsound as these rulings are, they are not the final word on either the midterms or the future of our multi-racial democracy.
The Midterms
Even with the loss in Virginia, Democrats’ five-seat pick up in California should more than counteract the original Texas re-redistricting (where two of the five seats Republicans sought to steal may well go to Democrats). And despite the Virginia decision, Democrats may still pick up one to two more seats under Virginia’s old map. The net pickup for Republicans currently is less than ten before Democrats pursue their own redistricting in New York, Illinois, Colorado, and Maryland.
However, even with the advantage of, say, a dozen rigged seats, Republicans are unlikely to keep the House majority. Since 2024, Democrats have swung the electorate substantially in their direction, over-performing in comparison to Kamala Harris in 193 of 226 state legislative races, by 20 points in some cases. On average, Democrats are doing more than 10 points better than they did in 2024. (Brookings’ William A. Galston wrote: “In the six special elections for the House conducted in 2025-2026, the swing toward Democratic candidates averaged about 15 points, while the swing toward Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia averaged 14 points.”)
More than 20 Republican House seats were won by less than 10 points in 2024; 43 Republicans won by less than 15%. Given the electoral shift, Democrats’ list of targeted seats expands each week.
The New York Times reported that gerrymandering “tells only part of the story” about the midterms. While “Democrats could end up losing at least half a dozen safe seats, and possibly more,” depending on new maps drawn in Southern states, Republicans face gale-force “headwinds” thanks to Donald Trump’s atrocious approval numbers, his reviled Iran war, soaring gas and other consumer prices, snatching away healthcare coverage from millions, disaffection of Hispanic voters, and rampant corruption.
In short, gerrymandering, however outrageous, will not be enough to save Republicans if Democrats generate huge turnout, especially among those voters enraged that they have been stripped of voting power. (As Hungary demonstrated, a determined opposition can overcome a raft of unfair impediments imposed by a corrupt, unpopular regime.)
Democrats, independents, and disaffected Republicans know that the MAGA cult has no message — which is why MAGA lawmakers and courts must rig the election to cement white supremacy. That’s all they’ve got.
Democrats have their targets
The enormity of reversing 60 years of progress on voting rights necessitates a new era of intense organizing and public education — a new civil right movement to counter MAGA’s court-imposed Jim Crow. That effort kicks off with a grassroots National Day of Action on Saturday, May 16, in Alabama. Organizers declared, “The dismantling of the Voting Rights Act is a reminder that we have unfinished business. The fight is ours and we are going to finish it.” Scores of democracy groups, faith-based organizations, and civil rights organizations will rally to oppose Jim Crow redistricting and to support multi-racial democracy.
The goal: Democrats must win, and win big, in 2026 and 2028. Senate seats, governorships, and other statewide offices cannot be gerrymandered. A massive registration and turnout-the-vote operation must expand deep into Republican areas, appealing to disgruntled independents and Republicans while firing up the base. Democrats will need a broad, inclusive electoral coalition to pursue bold reform. As former attorney general Eric Holder likes to say, progressives “need to be comfortable with acquiring power and using power.”
What then? If Democrats come out of the 2028 election with House and Senate majorities, and the presidency, they will have all the motivation and tools required to reverse the slide into Jim Crow, beginning with substantial reform of the discredited Supreme Court. The MAGA justices’ willful misreading of the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution to concoct a “color blind” interpretation of voting rights (coupled with their monstrous expansion of executive power and abuse of the emergency docket) should unify democracy defenders on the urgency of Supreme Court reform through court expansion, term limits, revised appellate jurisdiction, and ethics reform.
The Supreme Court itself has shown itself to be the enemy of democracy. If and when Democrats retake control of the political branches, it will be incumbent on them not only to write new voting legislation protecting minority voters and all voters in the ability to participate fairly in elections that reflect the will of all the people. They will also have to consider reform of the Supreme Court itself.
With the election of aggressive Senate Democrats running in 2026 and 2028, Democrats should have little trouble carving out a filibuster exception, especially if they win by large margins that affirm voters’ rejection of MAGA assault on pluralistic democracy.
Though the tools to sustain multi-racial democracy may be different from those employed in the 1960s, Madeleine Greenberg of the Campaign Legal Center reminded us: “Every generation has faced attempts to restrict access to the ballot box, and every generation has pushed back.” If Democrats win elections decisively and fully exercise the power they obtain, they can fix what MAGA white supremacists have broken. Only then can we fulfill the promise of pluralistic democracy.
The midterm elections of 2026 are approaching. Start working now to reclaim our democracy! Our time is now.
Duaa Eldeib, health reporter for ProPublica, reports that parents who refuse the vitamin K shot normally administered to babies, are putting their infants’ lives at risk. Influenced by the anti-vaccine rhetoric that started during the pandemic, some parents no longer trust the standard of care developed and validated over decades by scientists and doctors.
How many children will RFK Jr. kill before he is either fired for incompetence or has four full years to discredit necessary medical care?
They entered the world the way babies should, with piercing cries announcing their arrival. They passed their newborn screening tests. Some made it to their 2-week wellness visits without concern.
Then, without warning, their systems began to shut down. A 7-week-old boy in Maryland developed sudden seizures. An 11-pound girl in Alabama stopped breathing for 20 seconds at a time. A baby boy in Kentucky vomited before becoming lethargic. A brown-haired girl in Texas, not yet 2 weeks old, bled around her belly button.
Desperate to save them, records show, doctors inserted tubes into their airways and hooked them up to IVs. They ordered blood transfusions. They spent half an hour trying to resuscitate one boy until his parents told them they could stop. They shaved another boy’s soft locks to embed a needle directly into his skull to reduce the pressure in his brain.
None of it was enough.
At the morgue, the babies were brought in with their diapers and blankets and with their hospital ID bracelets still wrapped around their tiny ankles. The pathologists’ findings were like those you would typically see in ailing adults, not newborns — the kind of bleeding seen during strokes or brain tissue loss similar to what happens when radiation is administered to treat cancer.
Their autopsies, which took place over the last several years, all came to the same conclusion: The deaths were caused, in whole or in part, by a rare but potentially fatal condition known as vitamin K deficiency bleeding.
In almost every case, the babies’ deaths could have been prevented with a long-standard vitamin K shot. But across the country, families — first in smatterings, now in droves — are declining the single, inexpensive injection given at birth to newborns to help their blood clot.
Many of them are doing so out of a well-meaning but ill-informed abundance of caution. In the hopes of safeguarding their newborns from what they see as unnecessary medical intervention, they have shunned fundamental and scientifically sound pharmaceutical intervention. The trend is also fueled by a contradictory pairing: families’ fierce desire to protect their babies and a cascade of false information infused into their social media algorithms.
Although it is not a vaccine, the vitamin K shot has been swept up in the same post-pandemic tide that has led to a drop in key childhood vaccines, including for measles and whooping cough.
The vitamin K shot is one of the three main interventions, along with the hepatitis B vaccine and an antibiotic ointment in the eyes, that newborns typically receive before leaving the hospital. Leading American institutions and the World Health Organization recommend that newborns get the shot.
In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped recommending that all newborns get the hepatitis B vaccine, which has been highly effective at fighting a virus that can lead to lifelong infections and liver cancer. A federal judge in March temporarily blocked the revised childhood vaccination schedule that included that recommendation. Some families are also rejecting the eye ointment.
Two weeks ago, at a House subcommittee hearing, Rep. Kim Schrier, D-Wash., pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reassure parents that the vitamin K shot is safe. He refused and pushed back.
“I’ve never said, literally never said, anything about it,” Kennedy said.
“That’s exactly the point,” responded Schrier, who is a doctor. “You don’t say anything about it, but the doubt you’ve created about all of medicine and science is causing parents to make dangerous decisions.”
An HHS spokesperson did not respond to questions but in an email blamed the administration of former President Joe Biden for the rise in parents rejecting vitamin K shots. “Vitamin K at birth,” the spokesperson added, “remains the standard of care.”
Meanwhile, families continue to be inundated with advice from self-proclaimed experts using medical terms incorrectly and misunderstanding science to convince parents that getting the shot could put their newborns at risk of grave harm.
Nearly a century’s worth of research and medical advancements shows the opposite to be true.
Trump was interviewed and asked his view of vaccines. He responded with a barrage of lies about how many vaccines babies get and the dangers of them. He claimed that babies get 80 or more vaccines, which is wrong. His ignorance could be deadly. His comments could discourage parents from getting their babies vaccinated, which will expose them to risky diseases.
Trump defended Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crackpot views about vaccines and their relationship to autism.
President Donald Trump made an outlandish claim about early childhood vaccine recommendations, lamenting that “beautiful little babies” were given a “vat … of stuff pumped into their bodies.”
Trump was then asked whether there should be a commission to scrutinize vaccine safety, as Kennedy has long advocated.
“I believe in vaccines, but I don’t believe that, you know, you have to have a mandate for all of them,” Trump said.
Then, he falsely claimed that children were required to receive more than 80 vaccines and argued for reducing the number of immunizations.
“I look at these beautiful little babies, and they get a vat, like a big glass, of stuff pumped into their bodies,” Trump said. “And I think it’s a very negative thing to do.”
Trump also claimed that paring back the childhood vaccine schedule would lead to a “better result with the autism.”
Despite extensive scientific evidence debunking a link between childhood vaccines and autism spectrum disorder, Kennedy has continued to push the theory. Last year, he personally directed the CDC to change its website to say that there was “not an evidence-based claim” to discredit the connection between vaccines and an autism diagnosis and that studies showing the contrary had been “ignored by health authorities.”
“The whole thing about ‘vaccines have been tested and there’s been this determination made’ is just a lie,” Kennedy told The New York Times in 2025.
ProPublica fearlessly reports on injustice, profiteering, and malignant public policy.
In this article,ProPublica reports on a decision by the Texas Medical Board to sanction three doctors who withheld treatment from pregnant women who needed medical intervention and died because they didn’t get it. The doctors were following the state’s strict abortion ban, which harshly punishes any doctor who aids an abortion unless the fetus is dead.
ProPublica reports:
Two of the doctors failed to properly intervene as a pregnant teenager repeatedly sought care for life-threatening complications, the board found. The third did not provide a dilation and curettage procedure to empty a miscarrying patient’s uterus, and she ultimately bled to death.
As ProPublica investigated thosepreventable deathsand five others across three states in the past few years, reporters found that abortion bans have influenced how doctors and hospitals respond to pregnancy complications. Facing risks of prison time and professional ruin, doctors have delayed key interventions until they can document that a fetus’ heart is no longer beating or that a case meets a narrow legal exception. Some physicians say their colleagues are discharging or transferring pregnant patients instead of taking responsibility for their care.
Doctors and lawyers have questioned why medical boards, which oversee physician licensing and investigate substandard care, have not played a more active role in guiding doctors on how to uphold medical standards within the constraints of the law. When asked by ProPublica in 2024 what recourse miscarrying patients had when a doctor denied them necessary treatment, the president of the Texas Medical Board said it had no say over criminal law but that patients could file a complaint and “vote with their feet” to seek care from another doctor.
Since then, the Texas board has taken more steps than those in other states, publishing guidance this year that provides case studies on how doctors can legally provide abortions to patients with certain medical complications. The state Legislature ordered the board to create the training materials as part of the Life of the Mother Act, which was passed after ProPublica’s reporting and made modest adjustments to the state’s abortion restrictions in an attempt to prevent additional maternal deaths.
Georgia, where Amber Thurman died after doctors did not try to empty her septic uterus for 20 hours, has not revisited its ban or disciplined key doctors involved.
Maternal care experts say health care providers will continue to hesitate to offer standard care as long as bans carry serious criminal consequences — Texas’ law can put a physician behind bars for 99 years. But those who spoke to ProPublica say that medical board sanctions are one of the few levers that can provide a counterweight, pushing hospitals and doctors to provide standard care despite uncertainty over vaguely written laws.
Michelle Maloney, who is representing the families of both Texas patients in malpractice lawsuits, said she was pleasantly surprised by the board’s recent actions. “Over the course of my career, I’ve had many horrific, horrific death cases. For someone to get disciplined by the medical board, especially while there’s ongoing litigation, is just extraordinarily rare,” she said.
In 2024, ProPublica reported on the case of 18-year-old Nevaeh Crain, who began experiencing severe pregnancy complications when she was six months pregnant in 2023. Although she exhibited clear signs of an infection, doctors at two hospitals sent her home. On her third visit, as Crain’s condition deteriorated, a doctor did not send Crain to the intensive care unit until he could confirm fetal demise with two ultrasounds. Texas law requires doctors to create extra documentation before performing procedures that could end a pregnancy. By the time the doctor had logged there was no fetal heartbeat, the medical record shows, Crain was too unstable for surgery. She died with her fetus still in her womb.
But on Friday night, when we weren’t looking for a controversial announcement, Trump fired every single member of the 24-person National Science Board. Why? The simplest answer is that the members of the board were not his sycophants. They allegiance is to science, not to the person of Donald J. Trump. He couldn’t control them. They had to go.
Dan Rather wrote:
We toss around terms like “American exceptionalism” far too easily. But there is little debate that, in areas of science and medicine, this country has long been the world leader. We have more top scientists, elite doctors, and preeminent researchers than anywhere else. Their work has meant people live longer, healthier lives.
It is also a cornerstone of American influence around the world.
Scientific and medical research requires significant funding. It has thrived because our elected officials have had the political will to provide a financial pipeline to the public and private sectors.
President Donald Trump is severing that lifeline.
As the mainstream media was renting tuxedos and getting manicures ahead of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Trump was busy pounding nails into the coffin of the American scientific research community.
Tucked away on Friday evening, in a terse, two-line email, the White House personnel office fired the entire National Science Board. “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I’m writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Science Board is terminated, effective immediately,” the email read.
No reason was given in the email, and the White House has had no additional comment on the firings.
The independent, 24-person board is made up of top scientists and engineers who serve staggered, six-year terms, to ensure overlap between presidential administrations. They are chosen “solely on the basis of established records of distinguished service.”
The board advises the National Science Foundation (NSF), which supports a wide range of research, from Antarctic exploration to quantum computing. NSF-funded research helped develop the MRI machine, LASIK eye surgery, and Wi-Fi, among many other innovations. It distributes $9 billion in research grants annually.
“[I]t is not enough simply to keep abreast of the rest of the world in scientific matters. We must maintain our leadership,” President Harry Truman said in 1950, when he established the board.
Keivan Stassun, a physicist and astronomer at Vanderbilt University who was appointed to the board in 2022, called the Trump purge “a wholesale evisceration of American leadership in science and technology globally,” to the Los Angeles Times.
Although the president is often reluctant to explain why he does imprudent and detrimental things, if one looks hard enough, a reason can usually be found. In this case, there may be two.
Reason one: to save face. The board was set to meet in early May to work on the release of a new report. The report outlines how the U.S., once the world leader in scientific research, is losing ground to China. If there is no board, the report can’t be released.
Reason two: money. In its 2026 budget, the Trump administration recommended a 55% cut to the NSF. After lobbying by the National Science Board, Congress rejected the White House’s proposal and funded the NSF at 2025 levels.
To avoid the same fate for this year’s budget, which again recommends slashing the foundation’s funding, Trump did away with the board before its members could convince members of Congress.
Friday’s firings are just the latest in Trump’s long list of objectionable actions to cast doubt on scientific findings and thwart research.
The United States has been on the cutting edge of scientific and medical research since the end of World War II. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been the world leader in funding biomedical research. A 2020 study found that NIH-funded research was associated with every new drug approved between 2010 and 2019.
But all of that is now changing. And Trump is to blame.
Science is “explicitly designed to counter human self-deception,” psychologist Steven Pinker told Chris Mooney in his book “The Republican War on Science.”
When deception is your modus operandi, you will naturally try to squash, discount, and demonize the truth. Being anti-science helps protect established special interests. Think climate change denialism and fossil fuel companies.
Trump called the climate crisis “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” at last year’s United Nations General Assembly. He said this even as the globe is in the midst of the warmest 10-year span on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The NSF’s board is not the first the Trump administration has hamstrung. In June of last year Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, fired the 17-person vaccine advisory board and replaced many with vaccine skeptics. Trump himself replaced leading scientists with tech billionaires on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
The administration significantly cut funding to the National Cancer Institute, once the gold standard for rigorous, evidence-based research. It no longer funds mRNA research, a revolutionary technology that has the potential to radically improve cancer care.
It canceled 22 separate mRNA contracts, including one working on a vaccine for brain cancer in children. Kennedy is an mRNA skeptic, claiming the vaccines aren’t safe while providing no evidence.
Pancreatic cancer is an incurable disease with a dismal survival rate. Fortunately for pancreatic cancer patients, research into an mRNA vaccine was far enough along that the cuts didn’t affect the very promising treatment.
BioNTech, a German biomedical research company, partnered with Moderna, an American company, to develop pancreatic cancer vaccines using mRNA technology.
The technology, already in development when the pandemic hit, was used to create the Covid vaccine. The Lancet estimated that mRNA vaccines prevented 14.4 to 19.8 million deaths just in the first year of use.
MRNA vaccine technology was in the pipeline thanks to billions of dollars in federal grants over decades. This allowed researchers to get Covid vaccines to market incredibly quickly. This technology is now helping people with pancreatic cancer live years longer than ever before.
Moderna is also using mRNA therapy in combination with other drugs to cut melanoma death rates by 49%. Applications for a variety of cancers are in the works.
Paul Darren Bieniasz, a British-American virologist, wrote in TheGuardian, “If we continue the destructive course plotted by this administration, medicines that would otherwise have saved lives in future generations, will not be invented. Technologies that would have ensured future employment and prosperity in the U.S. will not be devised. Solutions that allow the generation of power while causing less damage to the environment, will never be developed. Clearly, if we decline to nurture science, the lives of future Americans will be shorter, sicker and poorer.”
While Donald Trump won’t be around to see that, millions of Americans will. Trump doesn’t like inconvenient truths. Science is a kaleidoscope of inconvenient truths. Rather than deal with them like the world leader he should be, he gaslights, he rages, he denies all.
And as with so much else in this administration, we the people pay the price.
I first met Vivian Connell in 2012 at a conference for legislators in Raleigh, North Carolina. She was part of a panel of North Carolina teachers who spoke about the challenges and needs of their classrooms. She was brilliant and articulate. I later learned that she was both a lawyer and a teacher. I was impressed by her candor, her insight, her passion, and her deep connection to her students.
That happened to be the same year that the Network for Public Education was founded.
Four years later, the Network decided to hold its annual conference in North Carolina. The decision was controversial because the state legislature (the General Assembly) had just passed a bathroom bill requiring that everyone must use the bathroom aligned with their assigned gender at birth. HB2 was known as Hate Bill 2. Some thought we should avoid North Carolina, others said we should show up.
We decided to stay in North Carolina (had we canceled at the last minute, we would have gone bankrupt), and our decision was reinforced when our dear friends in the state were able to persuade the Reverend William Barber to be our keynote speaker.
Rev. Barber was indeed eloquent, and we were glad we decided to stand by our original decision to meet in Raleigh. Funnily enough, the major hotel we stayed in had three kinds of bathrooms: women’s, men’s, and gender neutral. I wondered if the General Assembly knew. Had it occurred to them that HB 2 was unenforceable unless they had an inspector at every public bathroom to visually inspect either birth certificates or genitalia.
One prominent North Carolinian was missing from our conference: Vivian Connell.
Vivian lived about an hour away but she couldn’t travel. She had ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, which causes physical degeneration and has no cure.
At the end of the last session, on April 17, 2016, several of us joined Bertis Downs to pay a visit to Vivian. Bertis is from Georgia; Colleen Wood is from Florida; Phyllis Bush, now deceased from cancer, was from Indiana; and I am from New York.
Surrounding Vivian at her home, Mr, Bertis Downs, Colleen Wood and Phylis Bush. Vivian, in her wheelchair, holds a first edition of one of her favorite books.
When we arrived at Vivian’s home, we met her husband Paul, her children Hadley and Hagan, and her aide. Vivian was in a wheelchair. She had no physical mobility and could not speak. She was able to communicate via an amazing device. She “typed” by looking at letters on a computer screen, which then expressed words. A member of our group gave her a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird, one of her favorite books. Her husband announced that he was taking the kids to see Hamilton, their favorite show (they had memorized the lyrics.)
Soon after she received her diagnosis of ALS, she began writing a blog called “finALS.” When she began, she was still fully mobile. She documented her activities, checking off the items on her bucket list, and describing her deteriorating condition.
What follows is her final blog, which she wrote after we visited. We know that every word was laboriously written in a transfer from her eyes to the machine.
I hope you read it. You wil get a sense of her beautiful soul, which could conquer any obstacle but ALS.
One Last Time
[Prelude: It is June 24th, and I have at last finished my final post for finALS. It is not the masterpiece I dreamed of writing, but I am not a writer, and it is from my heart. This Monday, my medical team, husband and I will explore palliative sedation to manage the terrible choking and gagging that now dominate my waking hours. Some people adapt; some never wake up.
Before I go, I must spotlight my husband, Paul Connell, who has, from the beginning, eschewed any limelight. Never has a spouse been more constant or devoted. And though we each have big personalities that clash, he has never wavered in his devotion or care.
I dedicate all I have accomplished in law school and after my diagnosis to Paul, without whose selflessness, I could have done little.
VRC]
Well, I am back at last.
My doctor has called in hospice and used the phrase “last few months.”
And I have been paralyzed by the composition of this post.
You should all thank my writer friend David Klein that you are not reading my original idea. It involved stories of seeing Ken Burns speak in 2008–a version replete with quotations and commentary, I assure you–of how I wove segments from my beloved TV favorite, Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing, into my teaching (again, with no shortage of inspirational anecdotes) and of how I discovered that the author and star of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, shares my love for the show.
But this is not to be an artful feature delineating again the ideals that inspired my teaching or the late-life leap to law school that validated my life’s work and filled the 27 months since I was diagnosed with ALS with wonder and opportunity. And I would love to regale you with the story of my Network for Public Education friends and colleagues visiting my home with both a signed first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird ( I know, right?) and my education policy hero, Diane Ravitch. I want to describe the tears of joy I cried when they left and the tears of joy my family enjoyed when we were gifted tickets to Hamilton! My husband wept because I couldn’t go. I bawled like a baby because they could.
And I want to tell you how my daughter ended up with an older script of Hamilton that Miranda had given to a journalist!
But this is not another post about serendipitous meetings and virtually miraculous joy that have so fully packed my life since I was diagnosed with this heinous, degenerative, and terminal disease.
I have covered my blessings pretty well.
These are to be my final words. Not a lesson from a dying teacher. Not an argument from a dying lawyer.
But one last time to attempt candor and artless honestly about my passions, my regrets, and wishing that this cup could be taken from me.
A LAST LITERARY LESSON
It feels important as well that I not leave anyone thinking too highly of me.
I was blessed to accomplish much I am proud of, mainly because I genuinely bought in to the best ideals of those before me and found the courage to follow my callings–to strive always to do more and do better.
Deepest thanks to my teachers and heroes.
I would be terribly remiss, however, if I failed to share at least a few of my representative fears and failings.
I’ve thought often of Hawthorne’s exhortation in The Scarlet Letter:
“Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!”
While I will not spend this post mimicking the poor guilty minister’s self-flagellation (you’re welcome), I will be sharing some of my less admirable choices. In retrospect, in fact, I am certain that my shame and regret–my failures–motivated me to keep striving to do better.
A loud conscience is a benefit, I think. At long as it brings about striving to do better rather than paralysis via self-loathing.
I diverge from many of my progressive parent friends because I take to heart that a reasonable and loving authority figure is healthy and character building.
I have no regrets about that aspect of my parenting: I think my kids knew that we rode them because we love them.
And I think this model is more effective when I ride myself equally.
And I encourage you not to procrastinate or ignore an urge to change or do better. Following these feelings brought all the most rewarding experiences of my life. And though I am far from done–though I have more public ( political) and private ( personal) battles to wage and improvements to make, I am out of time. And terribly sad about it.
So emulate the best of the heroes in Hamilton, our flawed founding fathers–yes, many of whom were paternalistic slave owners, but–who genuinely wanted to do better. The tireless work of Diane Ravitch, who once embraced the errant ideology of the failed Bush education mandate, No Child Left Behind (newsflash: many of our most vulnerable populations were “left behind”) but who now is standard-bearer for Valerie Strauss of The Washington Post, hundreds of leading education researchers, and hundreds of thousands of teachers and parents who are committed to the civic imperative of excellence and equity in public education.
And maybe even me: a self-absorbed, working-class only child who grew up oblivious to her privilege, pursuing only middle-class self-interest, but who learned through education and experience to change…
… To strive to be better, and in so doing, lived an adult life that makes it much less difficult to face death.
ON FAITH
I know my redeemer lives.
I did not embrace this belief until I was 28. And it is and has been the greatest gift of my life. I thank G-d for making him/herself real to me.
Every worthwhile accomplishment of my life–especially my love for my students and my passion for justice and tolerance–came from my faith.
My worst failings–especially my impatience, a hardness on others to live up to my (unjustified) expectations, and my intolerance for the intolerant–come from my failures to live out my faith.
I am grateful for forgiving friends and a forgiving G-d.
Regrets: Though I raised my children in church and strove to find churches that reflected the love of Jesus of Nazareth rather than the rules of so much organized religion, I never really prioritized participation in my church communities.
We moved several times when my kids were small, and I never fought hard enough to find the right church–a place that worked for social justice and where I could be confident that any person I invited would feel welcomed and loved for who they were.
For a couple of years, I asked my husband for us to tithe on our net, but I worried too much about birthday parties, vacations, activities, and home lifestyle to put giving first.
No Regrets: I did keep trying though, and about a year before leaving Charlotte, I bit the bullet and began shlepping my family to Warehouse 242, a place where I once saw one of my gay/trans high school students visit, and knew I had made the right decision! And when we moved to Chapel Hill, I at last found United Church of Chapel Hill, an open and affirming church community that focuses on serving “the least of these,” is active in the North Carolina Moral Monday movement for social justice, and actively promotes racial equity.
Despite my failures to live out my faith as I would have hoped, I was gifted lifelong friendship with several teens I led in a small group at a church in Charlotte that was much too legalistic for my comfort. I think I won these friendships because I never lied to the girls. I acknowledged the dissonance they perceived between the Jesus they knew or wanted to know and the legalism of our church and /or the politics of their parents.
Somehow I always respectfully challenged those I believe misrepresented the G-d who made himself real to me.
And for that, no regrets.
I do apologize to those with whom I disagreed, but failed to always love or respect. For example, the three arrogant social conservatives who poisoned my law school class: I held my ground against you in public, but I’m afraid I also referred to you surreptitiously as the unholy trinity.
And Andrew Brown, if you wonder why you practically had to rewrite your Law Review piece in which you demonized homosexuals and their rights as adoptive parents, well, that was me spending over twenty hours to eviscerate your pseudo-academic arguments and discredit your sources.
Oh, and Andrew, if you were my student and had used brackets to skew a quote to dishonestly promote your argument, I would have disciplined you to the outer boundaries of academic protocol.
Did you see what I did there?
I showed you that I enjoy kicking over the moneylenders’ tables in the temple a bit too much.
I think I was called to be a fighter, but I don’t think I always fought with love and humility.
May we all seek truth and justice while simultaneously striving to love our enemies as they are loved.
G-d help us all. S/he loves when we try and shows us unlimited forgiveness. This I know, and for this I am grateful.
ON RACE
It’s been a major issue in my life. And one I hate to leave on the table. Along with money in politics, corporate personhood, and the future of public education.
And so I find myself thinking of Greensboro.
The legendary lunch counter sit-ins.
This North Carolina city is now home to the Racial Equity Institute. My principal at Phoenix Academy, the alternative high school, sagely invested in each of his employees by sending us to the two-day introductory seminar of REI. The main reaction of attendees is “life-changing.” No guilting or emotional manipulation in sight, but two days of systematic realities steeped in history and taught by a diverse and largely dispassionate team. They are not crusading, but if you are interested in the statistics–the outcomes for people of color in health care, financial services, law enforcement, education, and other social structures, then they have the facts.
If you are ready and willing to face the not-so-just realities.
And Greensboro is also the home of my former law school classmate and honors writing scholar, Jessica. She married an African-American man, and they have three of the most beautiful biracial children I have ever seen. And though she has been busy with three children under five, she has come to Chapel Hill and fed me and my family on multiple occasions, and today she drove round-trip from Greensboro so that I could meet her two-month-old daughter before she had to pick up her toddler boys … or be charged a dollar a minute.
When I see the videos of those bad apples in law enforcement dragging black teenage girls in swimsuits to the ground or toppling one out of her school desk, or arresting Sandra Bland, I think of Jessica’s daughter. When I see the statistics and remember the stories of everything from violence to injustice to mere humiliation endured by my former students and my friends, I think of all our citizens of color and the ugly truth of Americans who must raise their children in fear.
And I hurt for white America, too many of whom deny the reality of our country’s latent and simmering injustice to so many people of color.
A child of the Deep South born in 1964 to parents raised on farms and in rental shacks around Vidalia, Georgia, I was lucky.
My parents taught me the right words:
Don’t judge people by skin color.
Everyone should be treated equally.
Don’t use the N-word.
But there were no black kids in my Mississippi elementary school and no black families in my neighborhoods… ever.
And the bulk of my south Georgia relatives never got the N-word memo.
By high school, I was passively non-racist but had never had a non-white friend.
Regrets : My worst memories…
When I was a high school sophomore, some popular girls I longed to befriend me asked me to go out after the football game. We got sundaes at the McDonald’s, and one had a hair in it. And so we circled round to request a replacement. Four privileged white girls in nice clothes carrying their generous allowances and riding in a parent’s new sedan. When we returned to the drive-thru, my new friend spoke into the speaker to the African-American girl at the window: “We need another sundae, and this time, hold the ni–er hair.”
I alone didn’t laugh, but I also didn’t speak up or get out of the car. And I still burn with shame at the memory.
No regrets: Junior year University, I brought my roommate home for Thanksgiving. I did not even think to tell my parents she was black. But when my poor mother said that she was afraid of what the neighbors would think, I stood up.
Dr. Anne Sharp, Dr. Albert Somers, Dr. Zach Kelehear and the wonderful English and Education professors unmasked the systematic racism of our education systems and even our very linguistics.
Never in my teaching career could I say “with liberty and justice for all” without adding “someday, if we all work for it.”
I am proud to have passed these lessons to my students and to reap the harvest of watching them work for a more just society. And of course, the root of the problem is not race alone, but the evil human propensity to divide ourselves by skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, social class, and myriad other traits. We declare our own group best or righteous, then marginalize and scapegoat “the other.” And in doing so, we undermine the promises of equality in both our Declaration and Constitution. We also fail to love our brothers as ourselves. As shared before, here is the story of my finest hour. Which I pray will counter the all-too-prevalent voices of evil flourishing in our political, and even religious arenas.
I have celebrated the election of our first biracial president only to witness a stunning political backlash and obstruction. I have witnessed racial attacks on President Obama and even his family. I witnessed the police attacks on black men and women, and the overtly racist slaughter in a Charleston church.
And now I have seen the most openly racist candidate become the GOP nominee for the upcoming presidential election. Ken Burns shares my concerns.
But:
I go with hope.
My children mirror my generational progress. My professors at UNC Law and the leaders in my church are standing up… and long have been. And oh, my amazing law school classmates, at so many centers and organizations, working for true equality for all.
I am so grateful to know them all. And to see Ta-Nehisi Coates win a genius grant. And to see Hamilton become the greatest Broadway sensation with a predominantly non-white cast portraying our crusty white founding fathers.
My hope is that America’s majority culture can admit that it is harder to be a person of color here and that this reality does not comport with our ideals.
For soon after that tipping point, this ugly reality will cease to be part of our identity.
“Someday… If we all work for it.”
ON LAW & POLITICS
I am failing fast: my abilities to swallow and breathe are plummeting. I will therefore need to be succinct and, hopefully compelling in this potentially off-putting yet crucial section.
REGRETS:
In 1981 I told my A.P. English teacher that I was apolitical. Though I doubt I knew that term. I’m sure my arrogance was less articulate.
I believe I made this claim because she asked me a question about politics, and I was far too self-involved to watch even the evening news, and so I could not give a knowledgeable answer to her question.
But I remember her upbraiding, partly because she was right, and partly because this truth haunted me and grew in me for decades.
She called bullshit like only a legendary, scholarly, and terrifying old English teacher who has been setting entitled little snots straight for decades can.
She looked me in the eyes and told me not delude myself. For we are all political. She described how almost all of our choices–where we shop, what we buy, where we live, where we educate our children–are all political actions. The only question, she assured me, was whether these choices would be informed decisions or whether I would be too lazy to become informed.
I am loath to admit how slow I was on this curve.
No regrets: During college, life abroad, graduate school, and almost two decades of teaching, I never forgot the clarion truth of Ms. Braswell’s words. I only wish that I had been more informed and much more civically active sooner.
Two tough truths I learned along the way:
“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” ― Paulo Freire
“Allowing the ratio of time we spend enjoying our freedom, wealth, and justice to materially surpass the time we spend preserving those blessings virtually guarantees they will diminish, or even be lost while we are not looking.” – Vivian Connell
When I came to UNC Law in 2010, North Carolina was a moderate state, considered progressive for the South. The Triangle of Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill topped lists of best places to live in America.
But then moderates and progressives busy enjoying this status looked away, and paid a disastrous price when dark money flipped our General Assembly to the radical right. It hadn’t happened in a century, but it happened the moment citizens disengaged from civic attentiveness. We have seen national model education programs dismantled, and our voter suppression laws, gerrymandering, and, most recently HB2,”the Bathroom Bill,” have pitted us against federal authorities and made us a national laughingstock.
Of course, these developments are no joke to the poor without health care, to minorities facing all kinds of discrimination, or to public school teachers and advocates who have seen their resources and rankings plummet.
Here are a few of the fights that must be fought when citizens in a democracy cannot be bothered with the work of politics:
It is really this simple: you are political whether you knowingly control the influence you wield or whether you cede your power to others through superficial participation or non-participation.
Informed participation, though. How the hell does one manage it?
Where can one find the truth untainted by special interests?
Obviously, by reading and viewing a variety of sources, some of which do not rely upon special interests for funding.
And if you become frustrated by how “they” have made terrible laws or skewed public policy in a way in which you disapprove, you might want to become one of “them.” I did, and I sought to get to the heart of the democratic process by attending law school.
Now would be a good time to be succinct.
The gravamen of almost every issue demands that we prioritize either our ideals or our economy. And while we need to maintain our economy, there are two essential ways that we have prioritized money to an extent that it is undermining our democracy.
money in politics
quarterly capitalism
Money in politics
Because of a Supreme Court decision called Citizens United–often named along with Dred Scott, Plessy, and Bush v. Gore as the potentially worst Court decision ever–uber-wealthy entities can buy elections.
We must support campaign finance reform so that ideas determine victors. We must find, recruit, and elect representatives who will govern for the greater good. We must recognize and reject empty rhetoric in superficial, soundbite ads.
When one of our most conservative representatives challenged Democratic senator Kay Hagan in 2014, I agreed to act as spokesperson in a $3 million ad buy for the NEA. I loathed the simplistic script because I knew Thom Tillis’s record on education and would have vastly preferred an hour-long, fact-based debate on a website that would not have cost the educators I represented a penny.
But the National Rifle Association outspent the teachers, and Tillis won by roughly a percentage point. I wrote about it for Salon.
I pray that with Citizens United‘s author, Justice Antonin Scalia, deceased and the legion of young Sanders supporters, the coming years will see true campaign finance reform. The reality of special interests and corporations disproportionately deciding ought to horrify anyone who loves this country and the truly democratic ideals for which it stands.
Or consider the words of the inimitable Andy Borowitz.
Quarterly capitalism
My Business Associations class–a course called Corporations at some law schools– enlightened me as to the core legal atrocity that undermines the ability of American companies to contribute to not only our economy but also to the greater good of our society.
Do you wonder why so few corporate officers or companies ever pay for their bad, or virtually fraudulent choices? It’s because our laws protect them from virtually any risk they take. If they can concoct any rationale that their risk was a potential money maker for share holders, then they are protected.
Worst, this singular focus on immediate profit means that corporate leaders face not only disincentive but potential lawsuits should they wish to take a longer and broader view of corporate citizenship. The law prevents them from investing in worker training, more research and development, community betterment, education enhancement, programs to reward and protect their consumer base, or other forward-looking ideas that would enrich all of the corporation’s constituents.
Please listen to this indictment of this system, in which corporate officers decline to consider actions for the long-term benefit of their companies and their constituents–investors, workers, clients, neighbors, and their habitat–if doing so might mean dropping even one penny off their stock price for the quarter.
Thus, we have codified greed and outlawed wisdom.
Our companies should make more than money. They should enrich their communities, workers, business, and society.
Even our Judeo-Christian tradition tells us of a year of jubilee in which debts were forgiven and indentured servants freed. And while I suggest nothing so radical, I insist that we must reform our corporate law AND adhere to financial reforms in Dodd-Frank if we are to retain a robust middle class and remain a society in which business serves people, and not vice versa.
It is funny–not “ha-ha” funny, of course–that I wanted this to be the richest section, a big finale, but it is likely to be the most truncated. I am sleeping more each day and struggling to swallow and breathe during the hours I am awake. And as much as I might write about various policy initiatives, like charter schools, vouchers, merit pay, and especially the insidious philosophy of market-based reform (that would have us apply profit-making principles to the complex, subtle, and sacred art of educating our populace), I want to get to the core.
REGRETS:
I have spent over three hours this morning working with my hospice nurse, my saint of a caregiver husband, my tireless and loyal assistant, to clear my secretions and stop this horrific gagging and choking, so I regret leaving this section for last!
But seriously, folks…
I regret failing to integrate the promotion of civic engagement during the early years of my teaching. It certainly distinguished the final years of my career, and I am grateful to have lived to see so many of my students become teachers, lawyers and activists.
No Regrets:
The hundred-plus emails and messages from students, the tens of visits ( most from Charlotte to Chapel Hill) made by students and even a couple of parents who helped unpack from my move (Jodi Brown) and even execute a plethora of retirement and insurance documents to assure our children’s trust would be the beneficiary (Hallie Hawkins) are major blessings. A couple of weeks ago, two young women visited– including one who feels a profound connection with my daughter, for which I am so delighted – – and when we had a nurse cancel, they cared for me like I was their own mother.
I hope this means that they know I really loved them.
Even when overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, and demeaned by many who genuinely believe that “those who can’t, teach, ” I regret not even one day I spent in the classroom.
Closing comments about education policy:
First, in lieu of embarking upon a treatise on education policy, I’ll let a passionate young history teacher who just marched to Raleigh to practice civil disobedience tell the story in a much more engaging manner.
And if You wish to remain informed about public education and align yourself with one of the most important social movements of the age, follow Diane Ravitch and support The Network for Public Education. They will be on the right side of history.
I am most concerned with all schemes to create “for-profit” charters for K-12 education. A quick Google search of charter school and fraud yields over 1 million results. Which makes sense: as you will remember from our discussion of quarterly capitalism, businesses exist to serve their owners. (If anyone wants to read my rather prescient Law Review note eviscerating corruption in for-profit higher education.
Can any first-rate, moral country exist and thrive without providing its citizenry with quality education?
I want my final commentary to address the purpose of education, a topic which ought be at the heart of every education debate yet which too often parents, businessmen, and the general populace presume to be settled.
But is the goal of education to produce a workforce or enlightenment? Should it indoctrinate children to sustain and succeed within the status quo or to challenge what is and strive ever for progress, even if change is painful?
As a country born of revolution and the Enlightenment, our answer must be the latter. Every educated citizen should have a working understanding of our government, as well as a belief that their civic engagement is essential to maintaining our democracy and that they can make a profound difference in their worlds.
Children in our best schools already come away with this understanding. Unfortunately, many of today’s education reformers are powerful business entities and politicians who would defund the liberal arts.
North Carolina governor Pat McCrory made the following telling remark: Liberal arts Programs, he said, ought to continue, but not receive government subsidies.
Let me translate: If you are wealthy enough to attend a prestigious private university, then you may study whatever you like: anthropology, minority Literature, developing political systems, gender studies, dance. But if not, you ought to be required to study subjects that promote the economic interests of those in power–business, technology, and skill majors. The goal of the education haves can be enrichment; the education have-nots will be herded into a compliant labor force.
Governor McCrory did not mention that his undergraduate degree from a private school is in philosophy.
Or that the majority of U.S. senators majored in the liberal arts. So did the majority of lawyers.
The study of history, Literature and the arts inspires and empowers, and it must remain accessible to all. And all of our public schools must equitably prepare every child to pursue his or her calling, whatever it may be.
And as long as there exist schools in our communities that are not considered good enough for some children, yet which remain the only option for other kids, we must acknowledge that the playing field of the American dream is not level.
And that until it is, we continue to fall short of justice for all.
Finally, most of you will have heard of “the achievement gap”–the disparity in educational outcomes between the predominantly successful students and those who fail to thrive or become functional members of society. Researchers have long (and largely accurately) identified poverty as the key demographic of “failing schools.”
But about a year ago, a Gallup poll found a more specific predictor of academic success: hope. And the miracle of Tangelo Park has born out the truth of this finding.
These poor minority students–kids many middle-class and affluent parents don’t want their kids to have to go to school with–suddenly began graduating at over 95 percent, one of the best in the country. Why?
Because they knew that if they got into college, they could go. It would be paid for. They were given the power to win in a system stacked against them.
They were given hope.
And none of us should rest until every American child has that hope.
GOODBYE
I have arrived at the end time of this disease, and it is horrific as they say. As I struggle not to choke and gag, I do wish that I had fewer regrets. Of course, these wishes that I had been a better wife, mother, and friend are tempered by all the love and mercy with which I have been blessed.
I want to thank the many amazing and generous people who have helped us in too many ways to innumerate. And thank the thousands of you who have read and shared my blog ; I am deeply honored that anyone has found value, comfort, or inspiration in my words.
May G-d bless and keep you all.
As I often told my students, few of us will be a Mother Teresa or a Hitler, but we will each make the world a little better or worse.
May we all strive to make it better. May we engage responsibly in the miraculous gift of our democracy and support public-interest lawyers and entities working for social justice. It feels so much better than following thoughtlessly in consumerism and self-interest.
History has its eyes on us all.
And as for death, I will quote Grandpa Blakeslee from Olive AnnBurns’s novel, Cold Sassy Tree: “Hit’s what you get for living.”
And though ALS is one of the worst demises imaginable, I’ll take the trade.
Love,
Vivian
P. S. I will be listening to the beautiful Gilead, the Harry Potter audio books as well as all my favorite playlists. (As Dumbledore says, “Ah music. A magic beyond all we do.”) My whole family will be listening to Hamilton–and how lucky I was to be alive right now. And I made it through The West Wing and The Newsroom again. Bless all of you who listened and watched with me, especially my patient and loving husband and my wonderful and Sorkin-savvy children! Thanks also kids for sharing Doctor Who. I would not have missed it for the world.
A good way to start off April Fool’s Day is by listening to this song by a group of young people in Colorado. The lyrics were written by Kevin Welner and are posted at the website of the National Education Policy Center.
The Trump regime says clearly “We believe in local control.” Except when they don’t.
Trump has issued executive orders about what may or may not be taught. Trump’s executive order #14253, signed on March 27, 2025, was titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” What it meant in practice was to censor any teaching or displays that showed the shameful aspects of American history, and to focus instead on “patriotic history.”
Trump has launched a campaign to oust diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as gender studies, African-American studies, and studies of other groups.
Trump has tried to seize control of institutions of higher education institutions by falsely accusing them of anti-Semitism. He has sought to control the admission of students, the curriculum, and the hiring of faculty.
Trump has taken institutions of higher education hostage by withholding or cancelling billions of dollars for research into medicine and science unless they turned control over to the federal government.
But, as the song says, “We believe in local control!”
The Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg in Gothenburg, Sweden, publishes an annual report on the state of democracy around the world. In the recently published report, the authors made clear that democracy in the world is in retreat. Nowhere has it declined as dramatically as in the United States.
A special section of the report is focused on the United States. Under Trump, democracy in the USA is under attack. The President has centralized power in his office. The Republican-dominated Congress has ceded almost all of its Constitutional powers to Trump. The word “almost” may be an overstatement, as it’s difficult to remember an issue when Congress said no to a Presidential power grab.
The V-DEM report begins its special section about the “autocratization” of power in the United States:
*Under Trump’s presidency, the level of democracy in the USA has fallen back to the same level as in 1965.
Yet the situation is fundamentally different than during the Civil Rights era. In 2025, the derailment of democracy is marked by executive overreach undermining the rule of law, along with far-reaching suppression and intimidation of media and dissenting voices.
*The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history.
*Legislative Constraints – the worst affected aspect of democracy – is losing one-third of its value in 2025 and reaching its lowest point in over 100 years.
*Civil Rights and Equality before the Law are also rapidly declining, falling to late 1960s levels.
*Freedom of Expression is now at its lowest level since the end of WWII.
*Electoral components of democracy remain stable. Election-specific indicators are re-assessed only in electoral years, and the 2025 scores are based on the quality of the 2024 elections.
The scale and speed of autocratization under the Trump administration are unprecedented in modern times. Within one year, the USA’s LDI score has declined by 24%; its world rank dropped from 20th to 51st place out of 179 nations. The level of democracy on the LDI is dwindling to 1965 level – the year that most regard as the start of a real, modern democracy in the USA.
Yet the deficiencies of American democracy today are fundamentally different from that of the Civil Rights era. As the V-Dem data and other evidence below show, the autocratization now is marked by executive overreach, alongside attacks on the press, academia, civilliberties, and dissenting voices.
The Most Dramatic Decline in American History
In 2023, the USA scored 0.79 on the LDI – shortly before the 2024 election year when first deteriorations were registered. The scores plummeted to 0.57 in 2025 (Figure 22). With such a sharp drop on the LDI, the level of democracy at the end of 2025 is back to the 1965 level. Symbolically, that is the year that most analysts consider the USA began its transition to a real democracy.
Democracy in the USA is now at its worst in 60 years. We are not alone in this assessment. Professor Steven Levitsky at Harvard University says the regime in the USA is now some type of authoritarianism. The Century Foundation argues that “American democracy is already collapsing…”
By magnitude of decline on the LDI, the 2025 plunge is the largest one-year drop in American history going back to 1789 – that is, in the entire period covered by V-Dem data. Only Trump 1.0 compares, when the LDI in the USA fell from 0.85 to 0.73 in four years, bringing the country back to its 1976 level and far below the regional average (Figure 22). American democracy survived Trump 1.0 but did not recover fully.
One notable shift is the transformation of the Republican Party to endorsing a far-right, nationalist, and anti-pluralist agenda. Nationalist, anti-liberal, far-right parties and leaders have largely driven the “third waveof autocratization.” Yet the USA stands out as the only case where such movement seized control over one party in a rigid two-party system.
Please open the link and read the report to review the sources and to understand how dramatically democracy has been undercut during the first year of Trump’s second term.
The Founding Fathers thought they had written a Constitution that would prevent the rise of tyranny. They were wrong.
The New York Timespublished this excellent article by Jeneen Interlandi about the Trump administration’s mad effort to defund and distort science. Our nation’s leadership in science has been extraordinary. Our scientists have led the world in discovering cures for diseases, extending the human life span, exploring space and the oceans, and extending the bounds of knowledge. This is a gift article, meaning you can open it without a subscription. You should open it to see the many photographs and illustrations.
Interlandi writes:
Thirteen months into the second Trump administration, science, medicine and public health have been hijacked by a cadre of grifters and ideologues and by the politicians in obvious thrall to both. Federal institutions have been all but dismantled. Researchers have been defunded en masse and the universities that support them deliberately destabilized. Discourse on crucial scientific questions and key public health challenges has been stifled. And along the way, trust has been broken between scientists and the nation’s leaders — and the people that both are supposed to serve.
It’s tempting to view this undoing as temporary. Americans love science and revere innovation, almost as a rule, and politicians of every stripe have spent the better part of a century promoting and protecting both. However imperfect the resulting system was, hardly a modern convenience exists that can’t be traced back to it — central air-conditioning, the internet and ChatGPT; polio vaccines, statins and weight-loss drugs; the human genome sequence and CRISPR gene editing. The National Institutes of Health alone generates about $2.50 in economic returns for every dollar of investment. It’s also the largest government-funded biomedical research agency in the world and until recently was the envy of scientists across the globe.
The president’s attacks on this legacy have been relentless and all encompassing. He has turned the federal health department over to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most prominent anti-vaxxer. For months, President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget all but froze operations at the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. His newly established so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, fired thousands of civil servants from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a process that was wildly disorganized, frequently unlawful and needlessly cruel. Global health initiatives were also eviscerated.
Stacked against these measures, the administration’s explanations — which focus on cutting waste and eliminating so-called woke politics from science — have been inadequate and disingenuous.
It can be difficult to imagine a future in which American science does not prevail. But, as the president’s many critics have warned, institutions like the C.D.C., F.D.A. and N.I.H. will be far more difficult to rebuild than they have been to destroy — especially if their intended beneficiaries lose all faith in them or forget why they existed in the first place.
The current administration seems to understand as much. Top officials have taken pains to describe the nation’s scientific bodies as corrupt and ineffective and the nation’s scientists as elitist and excessively woke. “Science and public health have achieved much more than current leaders seem to recognize,” said Tom Frieden, the author of “The Formula for Better Health” and president of the public health nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives. “We actually know a lot about how to make America healthier. But very little of that knowledge is in line with what the current administration has done so far.”
Nowhere is this disconnect on fuller display than in the long war against H.I.V. Forty years ago, the infection was a mystery and a death sentence. Today, thanks to a combination of biomedical breakthroughs and diligent, boots-on-the-ground public health (testing, education, robust social safety nets), it is a chronic but manageable condition that really flourishes only among society’s most marginalized groups.
The first Trump administration vowed to finally end the American H.I.V. epidemic no later than 2030 by doubling down on prevention efforts in the hardest-hit communities. The resulting initiative has clearly paid off: Transmission rates are down in the targeted ZIP codes, according to the National Minority AIDS Council, a nonprofit devoted to stopping the virus’s spread. Racial health gaps are narrowing as a result, and because prevention is cheaper than treatment, money is being saved.
The second Trump administration seems determined to reverse course anyway.
On March 20 of last year, Kathryn Macapagal, a clinical psychologist and a faculty researcher at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, was sitting at her in-laws’ dining room table when her phone and laptop began pinging and ringing furiously.
Ping. The Adolescent Trials Network, a huge research apparatus focused on treating and preventing H.I.V. infection in teenagers and young adults, was abruptly closed. The network was responsible for several studies that Macapagal and her colleagues were collaborating on.
Ping. A close colleague’s 10-year study on H.I.V. and substance use in L.G.B.T.Q. teenagers and young adults was suspended. So was another project on reducing H.I.V. risk in relationship.
Ring. Another of her projects, on how to improve the measurement of sexual orientation and gender identity in federal surveys, was also done for. So were at least two fellowship programs for early-career scientists who wanted to specialize, as she did, in L.G.B.T.Q. health and dozens of other projects affecting just about everyone she worked with or knew professionally.
Her husband, Dan Fridberg (also a scientist, also reliant on N.I.H. funding), paced frantically behind her as she announced each new bit of carnage. “At this rate, you’ll be out of a job by dinnertime,” he said. “Oh, my God. What are we going to do?”
“I cannot go there right now,” she replied. She was determined to remain calm. She was also too stunned to panic, although in truth, she was not surprised. Her research sat in just about every one of the administration’s cross hairs: All of her projects included the new red-flag terms, and most of the researchers on her staff fell into at least one disfavored category. All of their salaries (including hers) were reliant on N.I.H. funding, and all of their jobs were now gravely imperiled.
And not just theirs: Federal grants were the lifeblood of academic research. They supported scientists and students, institutes and administrators. They covered overhead costs. It was not uncommon for one person to be funded by several grants, nor was it rare for professors like Macapagal, working at elite universities like Northwestern, to be wholly dependent on grants that had to be renewed every few years. It was a deeply precarious arrangement, sustained for decades by the certainty that, come what may, the federal government would honor its commitments.
When the dust finally settled, four of Macapagal’s grants had been terminated, nearly a quarter of her salary was gone, and a project she had spent many months developing was on seemingly permanent hold. As they struggled to make sense of what was happening, she and her colleagues found themselves drawing grim battlefield analogies: It was as if a bomb had gone off and some of them were dead on the field and others, like her, were maimed. “One colleague who lost everything told me that he thought I actually had it worse,” she said. “Because, you know, if you’re going to die, it’s probably better to do it quickly.”
Of the 1.2 million people living with H.I.V. in the United States, more than 60 percent are Black or Latino. Transgender women, gay and bisexual men and teenagers and young adults of color face the greatest overall risk of contracting the virus in any given year.
Those inequities are no mystery: less access to health care, more social stigma and a negative feedback loop, wherein a higher prevalence of the virus in certain communities begets a higher prevalence of the virus in certain communities. But resolving them is no small feat.
In the years leading up to 2025, as she tried to do exactly that, Macapagal was consumed by several thorny challenges. A troubling dichotomy had emerged since the medication that prevents H.I.V. transmission (known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP) first became widely available. Within the gay community, middle-aged white professionals had embraced the treatment as an ordinary component of overall health and wellness. But younger adults, immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities still had not.
“It’s not unlike birth control when it was first introduced,” said Jim Pickett, a board member of TaskForce, an L.G.B.T.Q. youth center on Chicago’s West Side and a collaborator of Macapagal’s. “It’s pretty straightforward as a treatment, but it’s attached to all of this cultural baggage that makes it challenging to get across.”
In 2018, when PrEP was approved for adolescent use, Pickett and Macapagal began searching for ways to overcome these challenges. They knew teens would be an especially tough sell. Health care systems intimidated the boldest of them, sexual identities were still developing at that age, and this particular form of protection could easily become a source of embarrassment or even shame.
They enlisted, among others, Skai Underwood, TaskForce’s dance instructor and youth engagement specialist, in their quest.
Underwood, who was assigned male at birth, knew by the age of 5 that she was a girl but did not medically transition until her early 20s. She was intimately familiar with the shame and isolation that gay and transgender people often faced — how even friends and family would signal their rejection when you declared yourself, how that rejection could lead you to retreat inward. Her goal was to help TaskForce teens resist that impulse, so that instead of hiding, they might thrive.
To her, the solution to Macapagal’s public health conundrum was clear: If you wanted to teach teenagers — or anyone else — to take safe sex seriously, you had to convince them that there was something to protect in the first place. “What it really comes down to is self-love,” she told me when I visited TaskForce in November.
With that in mind, she, Macapagal and Pickett created a two-pronged public health initiative called PrEP-4-Teens. The first prong involved a media campaign linking safe sex to empowerment and joy. The second wove an L.G.B.T.Q. sexual education curriculum into a suite of community-building activities. “They basically come together to dance and make art,” Underwood said. “We celebrate queer identity, and then in between all of the fun, we teach them how to protect themselves.”
The program’s early results were promising: Among other things, participants came away with an understanding of PrEP and a sense that it was no more shameful to use than condoms or birth control. But before they could scale it up or study it in greater depth, a new administration began.
On his first days in office, the president issued a flurry of executive orders rolling back transgender rights and bringing federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives to an abrupt end. By many accounts, the DOGE officials tasked with carrying out those orders had little to no understanding of the projects they were supposed to evaluate. “They seem to have confused D.E.I., which is about diversifying the work force, with health equity, which is about reducing health disparities in marginalized communities,” Amy Knopf, a professor at Indiana University’s School of Nursing, told me. “They’re making it so that you can’t study certain groups without violating these edicts. But you can’t really tackle H.I.V., or any number of other conditions, without looking at those exact groups.”
In the weeks afterthe March 20 Massacre (as some of them had taken to calling it), Macapagal and her colleagues began working furiously to cover as much and as many of their salaries as they could. The main conference space morphed into a war room of sorts, as her boss, Brian Mustanski, tried to match any open position or bit of unused grant money he heard of with whichever recently defunded staff member who was qualified.
Macapagal’s job was saved by one colleague who stepped up without even being asked. “We have some money that we’re not using yet and some work that you could definitely do,” the woman explained. “Let me add you to that project.” Macapagal accepted and for many months afterward would tear up just recalling the kindness.
In April the federal government froze some $790 million in funding for Northwestern, without notice or explanation. The university was apparently being accused of antisemitism and racism over its diversity initiatives, but it was unclear whether the freeze was related to those charges, and no one seemed to know when or whether or how the funds would be restored. Researchers would have to tighten their belts as much as possible, university officials explained, while they tried to sort out the situation.
Among other things, the new strictures meant that Macapagal would not be able to pay Pickett for all the work he had done on her projects. He had presided for decades over a community center that prided itself on perseverance, and he took the news in stride. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll make do.” But she felt awful.
Nobody outside the scientific community seemed to realize what was happening. Friends and family had all tried to reassure her that everything would be fine in the long run, that she just needed to hang in there until the midterms or the next presidential election. She found it exhausting to explain how irreversible the damage was. They had lost years of research in a matter of weeks. Whole labs had been closed, and successful, decades-long careers ended — and none of it appeared to have anything to do with the quality or import of the research itself. The decisions were political and ideological. They were also arbitrary and needlessly cruel.
Trust had been broken as a result, at just about every level of the scientific enterprise (between study participants and scientists, between scientists and universities and between universities and the federal government). Whatever came next, it seemed extremely unlikely to her that any of them, let alone all of them together, would be able to just pick up where they had left off.
In the meantime, those who were left — the maimed but still breathing — leaned on one another. When they were advised to pre-emptively change the language in their public-facing documents, Macapagal and her colleagues did the edits together, grousing in unison over the aggravation of revising terms like “inclusion criteria” and the moral grossness of erasing the word “transgender” from their work.
It was not the first time their field had been forced to make such compromises; the eldest among them remembered culling words like “gay” and “sex” back in the early 1990s. But this was different. In the past, even if they had to change a word or two, they still got to do their research. Now Macapagal found herself contorting a study on H.I.V. vaccine misinformation (her attempt to get ahead of the hesitancy that had plagued Covid vaccines) into something else entirely.
She found herself making other changes, too, including dyeing her pink hair back to a soft brown. “It might be safer for me to not be so out there with how I look,” she said. Some of her friends and colleagues were taking similar precautions. They were losing facial piercings and gay pride stickers. They were also changing slide deck images to include more white people, even when the conditions they studied did not, for the most part, affect white people. It felt gross because it was gross, but what else could they do? They had families and mortgages and work that they still wanted to complete. They knew people who had been doxxed and threatened — and worse — just for studying gender-affirming care. And they were anxious and, in some cases, afraid.
As spring bled into summer and the university explained that it could no longer provide offices with free coffee or free tissues, Macapagal turned a worried eye to her lab and began doing what she could to help people secure other jobs. It was a risky gamble: If they left and her funding was then restored, she’d be hamstrung. But she thought of the group as a kind of family, and she wanted to protect whomever she could.
Her lab manager, Andrés Alvarado Avila, was here on an H-1B visa, and if his funding was cut, he would have just 60 days to find another job, secure an exception or return to Mexico. Her project coordinator, Zach Buehler, was only a few years out of college. Shefound herself wondering if it was fair or right to encourage him down a career path whose future looked so bleak. Like many of her lab members, Alvarado Avila and Buehler were gay men. As anachronistic as it sounded, she could not help but worry about what that might mean for their futures, in an America that was less recognizable by the day and that seemed to be coming for them all.
In the past year or so, scientists funded through the National Institutes of Health have developed potential treatments for pancreatic cancer, broken the logjam on Huntington’s disease, shepherded a male birth control pill through clinical trials and saved a baby’s life with the first personalized gene editing procedure. In a different time and place, any one of those breakthroughs would have been hailed as the triumph of an epoch and might have lured a new generation of talent to the cause of scientific research.
Instead, six years after the pandemic began and one year into the second Trump administration, we have the opposite: seasoned scientists fleeing the profession (or the country) and younger prospects deciding not to pursue it at all. It’s impossible to say what new medicines those minds might have developed or what wicked problems their efforts might have solved.
What seems clear is that Americans have entered a grim new era, one in which science itself is a political weapon, rather than a tool for the collective good. It would be simplistic to argue that the two — science and politics — should be wholly disentangled. (As a human endeavor that involves trade-offs and requires public support, science is inherently political.) But real data and hard, neutral facts still drive the work that most scientists do, and the best of that work should still frame public discourse and, ideally, inform public policy. And right now, it does not.
Last June the F.D.A. approved the latest version of PrEP: an injection that patients would need to receive only twice a year and that appeared to work even better than its predecessors at preventing infection. In July the N.I.H. director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, laid out yet another strategy for eliminating H.I.V. in the United States. Rather than pour limited resources into more basic research, his agency would simply deploy existing PrEP medications. “Why is there any reason to wait?” he asked on his podcast. “Why don’t we just really commit to ending the H.I.V. epidemic, actually doing it with the tool kit we have now?”
The director’s epiphany frustrated H.I.V. specialists. He was right about the import of using existing tools more effectively. But many of them, including Macapagal, had been working on exactly that challenge when Bhattacharya’s agency cut their funding back in March. What’s more, almost all of the current administration’s stances — not only on science but also on health care and public health, immigration and social safety nets — were anathema to his stated goals.
If health officials really wanted to extirpate H.I.V. from the United States, they would increase access to health care, ramp up testing and education and fortify the social safety net.
At every turn, Trump and his deputies did the exact opposite. They tried to eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for H.I.V. testing, treatment and prevention services. They cut Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars and played chicken with Democrats over Affordable Care Act subsidies. They also weakened the social safety net, sowed terror in immigrant communities and upended public health programs just about everywhere.
If those policies persisted, even as the newest PrEP medication was made commercially available, H.I.V. would continue to linger. “Most of what we’ve done to beat back AIDS comes down to this extremely fragile safety net that is right now being destroyed,” Dr. Jon Mannheim, a pediatric H.I.V. specialist who sometimes collaborates with Macapagal, told me when I visited Chicago in November. Illinois was facing one of the largest Medicaid cuts in the nation, and his clinic was already bracing for impact. Among other things, he worried that fewer social workers would be hired for even less pay than before.
Without them, he said, the whole system might collapse. Patients who lost health insurance would have a harder time getting into the fail-safe programs meant to keep them on PrEP (and to keep AIDS at bay). The pregnant women he treated would lose their main point of contact for a whole suite of stabilizing services. “I don’t know how many babies would have to be born with H.I.V. for the federal government to care,” he said. “But I guess we’ll find out.”
In the meantime, his Latin American patients were still avoiding the clinic altogether, months after ICE had descended on the city. He had lost several of them to follow-up care over the summer. The one that troubled him most was a 10-year-old girl from Venezuela who lived in a car with her mother and whose H.I.V. infection might have already progressed to AIDS. “I have not seen her in months,” he said. “She could be dead by now.”
A few miles away in Chicago, the TaskForce community center was facing similar challenges. It had lost some $500,000 in anticipated funding, thanks not only to state and federal budget cuts but also to a new reluctance among donors. “We heard a lot of, ‘Hey, these dollars that we thought that we could give you we actually can’t now, because you’re L.G.B.T.Q., which is a no, and BIPOC, which is also a big no,’” said the center’s director, Chris Balthazar, using an acronym for “Black, Indigenous and people of color.”
It was getting by, but the strain of moving through the world with so many targets on its back was starting to show. One of its regulars, a 15-year-old Haitian boy, had nearly taken his own life after his parents were abruptly deported. And Underwood had detected a new reluctance in some of her L.G.B.T.Q. students. They were not expressing themselves as freely as they did before, she thought. Some mentioned creeping anxieties, when she asked. Others talked about fear.
She wanted to prevent those feelings from dimming the light she saw in each of them, but it was complicated. Self-expression and personal safety could cut brutally against each other for a gay or transgender teen, and a lot of her TaskForce students had bigger worries, in any case. They did not always have enough food to eat or safe places to stay; winter was coming, and they needed warm coats. “It’s OK,” was sometimes all she could think to tell them. “This is nothing new. We’re just going to keep on jumping these hurdles, one at a time, until we’re free and clear.”
By the start of 2026, Macapagal and her colleagues had settled into an uncertain quiet.The university’s funding was unfrozen in December, and thanks to a couple of lawsuits, most of the grants that her group had lost were in the process of being restored. But confusion still reigned: When would that money be disbursed? Would researchers be given additional time to complete their work? What would happen when those grants came up for renewal in the coming year?
No one seemed to know, but the N.I.H. was still expecting annual progress reports from all its grantees in the meantime. “We are supposed to tell them what we did with the money they gave us and what progress we’ve made in our research,” Alvarado Avila explained. “But they did not really give us the money, and our biggest barrier to progress has been them. How do you say that in a way that’s diplomatic?” The institute where Macapagal worked had 30 fewer staff members now and lots of empty offices and cubicles. One conference room had become a storage facility for the H.I.V. and sexually transmitted infection test kits that they had planned to send to study participants.
“These are supplies that your tax dollars paid for, to get people tested for H.I.V. and S.T.I.s in the context of a research study,” Macapagal said. “And now they’re just sitting there, and like any medical kit, they will eventually expire.” She was torn about the future. On the one hand, she could not help but hope. State officials had expressed interest in partnering with her and TaskForce to expand the Prep-4-Teens program, and she had just applied for yet another N.I.H. grant based on the agency’s stated interest in using implementation science to conquer H.I.V.
On the other hand, hope seemed a delusional response to the events of the past year. Word was that new grant applications would ultimately be decided on not by fellow scientists, as had always been the case, but by political appointees who had apparently effectively taken over the N.I.H. Macapagal had spent nearly all of her adult life cultivating expertise in behavioral health and disease prevention and then training the next generation to do the same. She could not help but wonder now what the point of any of that had been.
She still wanted to show up for her team. She believed that the work was important, and she knew that Alvarado Avila, Buehler and their peers were its future. But truth be told, she was also thinking about going into private practice.
Alvarado Avila was holding off on applying to graduate programs for now, in part because prospects were skimpy for noncitizen scientists who wanted to stay in the United States and also because he had watched ICE agents descend on Chicago and raid the communities around him. He had also watched them kill an unarmed woman in Minnesota — who was a mother and a poet and a white U.S. citizen and who happened to be a lesbian — and his heart was sick and he was angry.
“They say that by focusing on marginalized groups, we are discriminating against everyone else,” he said. “But those are the communities most impacted by these issues. They say visa holders like me are stealing jobs from Americans. I don’t think they understand that, one, for a specialty visa, you have to prove to the government that you can do the work and, two, we contribute to a tax system that we have no assurance that we will get back from.”
More and more, he wondered what fighting back looked like and whether it was incompatible with a career that forced you to erase whole categories of people from your work or treat words like “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” as toxins instead of virtues. More and more he wondered if America, where he had lived, studied and worked for most of his life, was still the place for him.
Buehler, for his part, had applied to more than a dozen Ph.D. programs, almost all of them focused on exactly the kind of research he was doing in Macapagal’s lab. “I love this work,” he told me. “I really want to create the kind of programs that I wish I’d had when I was coming up.” He knew the risks, knew that he was probably consigning himself to a path marked by deep uncertainty and that he would find neither glory nor gratitude on the other side of that struggle. But he also knew that perseverance was the key to progress. And the way he saw it, resilience could be an identity, too.
Diane Ravitch's blog 