Representatives from scientific organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science, said during a press conference Wednesday that decades of federal funding cuts for research, scientific misinformation, and world-wide attacks on the free exchange of ideas were drivers for the movement.

— Wall Street Journal

As demonstrators in over 500 locations around the world marched in support of science yesterday, I am again reminded how our current government is working really hard at making America dumb again. It’s almost like they don’t realize that without science, there would be no drugs, no medical care, no cars, airplanes, computers, cellphones, videos, Google, YouTube, iPhones, Netflix, and most of the stuff we buy at Costco.

There seems to be a strong anti-science message, covered by deliberate misinformation and obfuscation, distributed by our government, including DeVos, Pruitt and, of course, triggered by Trump, and supported by some of our Congressmen and Senators.

We forget that this is not happening in China, and Germany, and Japan, and many other countries. So while we’re caught up in whining about experimenting with embryonic tissue in this country, China is advancing with human cloning experiments. We’re cutting the funding of NASA to the point where we do not have any ability to put humans into and out of orbit, Russia has had the monopoly on that, and China is the only other nation that has the ability to launch humans into space. While we’re spreading misinformation about vaccines, Chinese scientists are making advances. While we’re promoting and pushing coal, “clean coal” to quote the president, European nations are rapidly converting their entire electricity grids to renewable sources, and Asian nations are at the lead of research in this field. China is on pace to become the global leader in implementation of renewable energy.

If we want to make America great, we need to drive education in science and all the related areas. Within just a few years of such an effort, we’d see a renaissance of scientific activity in this country.

Yet, we shut down initiative and funding for organizations that work on cloning, we pretend that global warming is a hoax, and by doing so, we’re pushing the edge of scientific research and activity to other countries. Our current administration is actively squelching research and gagging scientists whose findings it does not politically agree with. That’s how you drive scientists to work in other countries.

In our schools, we’re more concerned with reintroduction of prayer than we are of science. We’re obfuscating science with religious drivel and pseudoscience. This is diverting the attention of our children from what really matters to what religion and government wants them to be concerned with. Religion has always been on the side of stalling scientific advance. Galileo is an example. Darwin is an example. Most climate scientists today are examples.

It will not be long before we have to buy all our renewable energy technology from China, and our ability to grow replacement organs, and get vaccines, and drugs, and reproductive controls, all need to be purchased from foreign sources.

It does not sound to me like we’re making America great. It sounds to me like we’re making it dumb.