Fintan O’Toole: Trump is complaining that we pick America’s pocket. Fair enough – we should instead pick America’s brains
Robert F Kennedy jnr with US president Donald Trump. Kennedy, who has made a career out of cynical lies about medicines and vaccines, is now in charge of the department of health and thus of public funding for medical research. Photograph: Eric Lee/The New York Times’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity. The idiot wind now howling through the United States is also blowing a potentially transformative windfall across the Atlantic.
Now let’s consider what’s going on on the other side of the Atlantic: a war on science. The Trump-Musk idiocracy is attacking the whole idea of evidence-based understanding of reality. Its twin pillars are climate denial and “alternative facts”, both of which require a literal dumbing-down. The US is now like the village in Vietnam that had to be burned down in order to save it.
This is insane. One of the few things we know for sure about the future is that medical science is making huge breakthroughs and that the development of new treatments will be one of the main drivers of economic growth. Trump is already set on closing off one path to prosperity – the development of the green economy. With Musk and Kennedy he is now blocking the other one.
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