12 April 2025
By Gonzo Poltergeist
America’s most dangerous export isn’t bombs or burgers. It’s ideas — the kind that rearrange atoms, rewrite genomes, or collapse regimes before breakfast. Most of them came not from think tanks or tech bros but from battered university labs where the floors are sticky, the grants are late, and some overcaffeinated grad student is three weeks into a quantum breakthrough he doesn’t fully understand yet. The internet was born from federally funded research in smoke-filled corners of Stanford and MIT. mRNA vaccines were cooked up at Penn before half of Congress could spell “lipid nanoparticle.” CRISPR was built in Berkeley with pipettes and insomnia. AI was forged in basements at Carnegie Mellon and MIT while the rest of the country argued about goddamn fonts. The atomic bomb was born in a squash court beneath the University of Chicago, and with it, the postwar order Trump now seems determined to unravel.
These miracles weren’t the product of corporate synergy. They were paid for with tax dollars and academic freedom — two things this administration now considers threats.
Because Donald Trump — failed casino mogul, insurrection cosplayer, reality TV star who can’t stop the show, and President of the United States by some unholy clerical error involving electoral math and a dying empire’s sense of irony — has decided to start pulling the plug. Federal research dollars are now political ransom. Comply, or watch your next-gen battery tech turn into a paperweight.
Harvard folded faster than a lawn chair in a hurricane. Yale, under the watchful eye of its president Peter Salovey, issued a statement that read like it was written by The Dude on cocktails, a Xanax, and a fat J. Columbia mumbled something about “policy alignment” and crawled back into its hedge fund.
But one school — just one — threw the middle finger in the air and said: not today. Princeton stood up. Its president, Christopher Eisgruber, didn’t couch it in polite deference or institutional hand-wringing. He didn’t “respectfully disagree.” He simply refused to play the game. And for that, he joins a very short list of people in this country still capable of dignity under pressure.
But one university isn’t enough. You can’t save the Enlightenment with a single endowment. Not while the rest of the Ivy League is lining up to curtsy. Not while state universities are being gutted into diploma mills. Not while every dissenting lab report is treated like an op-ed from Antifa.
This isn’t about free speech. It’s about obedience. And in the current administration, obedience trumps possibilities — like the next pandemic hitting harder, not because we weren’t warned, but because the virologists were muzzled. Or letting China win the AI arms race, not for lack of talent, but because we chased researchers out of the country with loyalty tests and funding threats.
We’re not just cutting research. We’re cutting the brake lines of civilization. The lights won’t go out tomorrow — that’s the trick. But they will dim. Gradually. Institution by institution. Lab by lab. Until we wake up in a country where the smartest people all left five years ago and the only thing still funded is a think tank called Patriots for Proper History run out of a strip mall in Boca.
As Eisgruber warned in The Atlantic:
“The attack on Columbia is a radical threat to scholarly excellence and to America’s leadership in research. Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.”
Make America Dumb Again isn’t a punchline. But it’s also not a campaign slogan anymore. It’s policy.
Filed from a fallout shelter full of Nobel laureates who couldn’t pass a Trump loyalty test.
