Seems unlikely that this will happen. Remember the Scopes trial? Is culture steers in that direction, you can either live in and wine, or leave it, until the next revolution comes.

I'm sure you're right, they probably wouldn't even dare to start setting any sort of internal rules about what types of scientific research are acceptable to carry out, or pass laws at the state level to forbid teachers from mentioning certain topics...oh wait.

True. And then they are overturned because they are unconstitutional. Are you always this rude to people you don't know?

I'm sorry you mistook a sarcastic tone for rude demeanor. But I don't think we should bury our heads in the sand in the face what is repeatedly happening and what the stated anti-science intentions are.

"I mistook". Im the blame, eh? LOL. In every society we will have challenges to our culture. As long as the laws support our cultural narrative, then we are fine. If it changes (we become a right-wing theocracy) than you can leave it or begin a revolution. Activism now only fuels the right, IMO.

"Activism now only fuels the right"? So all the 'woke' liberals are to blame for the march towards fascist theocracy? I don't think that's who shoulders the responsibility. Unless what you're trying to say is that they're not doing enough.

What I should have said (apologies) is activism from scientists fuels the right. If this continues, the result will be a shut down of research in academia when you have a republican president. That will end all NIH research, even when you have dem's in charge, because projects are often multi year.

That's still "victim blaming". So, no, our activism cannot make someone a fascist. They choose that.

I appreciate the clarification, and you raise an excellent point about multi-year research, and you might even be right about how they're going to respond to scientists engaging an activism, but they started politicizing science and cutting funding even when scientists weren't being activists.

So I'm not sure that trying to stay neutral and fly under their radar is going to be a successful strategy either. It may just be a hard road ahead for scientific research no matter what.

When the NIH/academia started implementing DEI, resulting in race quotas, then it became activist and illegal. If that is ended, and scientists stayed away from hot political issues, that will increase the chance of sustained funding through admins. Also, getting rid of fraud as seen in pubpeer.

Scopes'Trial is probably not the most illustrative example - it was a completely contrived publicity stunt; John Scopes was a substitute teacher who agreed to let the ACLU use him.