QOTD -- The New Dark Age

 

"... The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.

"By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age." -- Adam Serwer, writing in The Atlantic, on the Malignant Fascist's furious assault on knowledge (and truth), as seen by his punitive and destructive actions toward higher education, government- supported science and technology, public health, cultural institutions, libraries (!), and more.  The retreat into a New Dark Age is also mirrored on the world stage by the Malignant Fascist's bullying and abandonment of traditional allies, his cutting off of international aid, and his wrecking of America's trading alliances with his illegal tariffs (and the subsequent wrecking of our economy).  At the same time, he admires and models the behavior of authoritarian regimes whose countries have already fallen into their own Dark Ages.  It can't get much clearer.  His determination to wreck America is so comprehensive and sustained that it lends more credence every day that the Malignant Fascist is, wittingly or unwittingly, Putin's puppet.