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But won't this move only encourage them to vote blue in greater numbers? If one team says, "We're okay with burning down legitimate scientific research along with illegitimate politicized pseudo-science, as long as we're owning the outgroup while we're doing it," and the other says, "Yeah, science is important we'll throw a bunch of money at it," then the deal is always going to be that scientists will vote for the money-for-science team.
As a long term strategy, I think there's things the Trump administration could have done to either depoliticize publicly funded science or to increase the amount of legitimate scientific research that might come to anti-woke conclusions, and this probably would have been better for getting scientists on side. If scientists were able to look back in 4 years, and say, "Trump's presidency revolutionized America's approach to funding science, and improved it in a way that no one is likely to want to change" then wouldn't that be a lot better for the MAGA movement?
I've seen estimates of Academia as high as 20-to-1 on left-right splits, which is to say less than 5% right. Saying they'll vote 'more' blue is reaching levels of statistical impossibility- you can't have a 10% swing if less than 10% of the voter base is up for grabs.
Yeah, the institutions left themselves vulnerable to this by backing one side so heavily.
I also noticed that there is new proposed legislation which increases the tax on the investment income of private university endowments from about 1% to 21%.
This is common sense stuff that should have happened long ago, but couldn't because powerful institutions had friends on both sides of the aisle. But now that they put themselves "in play" so to speak they lost their political cover.
There's no reason for the US to continue to subsidize Harvard's $50 billion endowment.
I like the endowment tax. But what's the actual game plan here, if there even is one? Fire or force out half the academics and researchers, and then maybe 20 years later the ones who replace them will magically be 50-50 red and blue? Even if you think that this will absolutely happen, that leaves a giant 20-year chasm of scientific slowdown. If some of the "burn it down" people here actually do have some kind of proposal, I'm all ears, but I haven't seen one yet. If such a proposal doesn't exist, this is just a Chinese Cultural Revolution 2.0 and could well lead to an intellectual Great Famine.
We're already in the intellectual Great Famine. We've got billions of dollars pouring in to researchers who are producing authoritative nonsense; not just not-knowledge but in many cases anti-knowledge, false information accepted as true. In genetics, the US even maintains datasets which it does not allow researchers access to unless they promise not to use it for certain conclusions. That's a recipe for intellectual famine right there.
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Good news: We've cleansed the hated outgroup nearly completely from the institutions!
Bad news: The hated outgroup is now shelling the institutions from the outside!
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