Adolf Hitler was really a pretty good guy, according to the American Prospect. At least he knew that funding universities was a good investment and that scientific research was a national good. Donald Trump should be more like Hitler, don’tcha know?
No, I am not kidding. They really think America should follow the Hitler model when it comes to funding science.
I can’t believe this is a real thing someone published. https://t.co/nEmPW3tYvQ
— Andrew Kerr (@AndrewKerrNC) February 10, 2025
See, when I compare the leftists to Josef Mengele, you thought I was exaggerating.
Now, don’t get me wrong: American Prospect is not calling for a systematic purge of Jews from the scientific community, although no doubt many of their readers are on board with that idea since it would be a good way to “decolonize” academia. They just think Hitler had the right idea about pouring money into universities.
At least I don’t THINK that is what Robert Kuttner is arguing.
But it’s something else to destroy the world-class institutions that make America great, to coin a phrase. Even Hitler did not trash German science.
Hitler did seek to turn science to his own ends, to promote research on eugenics, new technologies for blitzkrieg war, sick medical experiments, and more efficient ways for the mass killing of Jews. Yet civilian German science, long a mark of German pride, also thrived. During the Nazi era, German scientists and engineers invented the first electron microscope, industrial-scale production of artificial fiber, pharmaceuticals such as advanced sulfa drugs, artificial rubber, and much more.
Trump, in short, is even more nihilist than Hitler.
To paraphrase Homer Simpson, this isn’t the stupidest thing said by a leftist, but the stupidest thing said so far. There is much more stupidity to come.
Looking to Nazi Germany for advice on how to fund science is like asking Iran to run the UN Human Rights Commission. Which, come to think about it, is actually a thing.
Hitler, you may be aware, purged not just science but all academia of anything that he didn’t consider Aryan enough. His academic policies ensured that many of the people who helped develop the atomic bomb were German exiles.
So I am not sure that Robert Kuttner wants to use Germany as a model to Make American Science Great Again.
German “science” during the Hitler era was not a model to be followed if you want good science, but it does represent the kind of politicized science that the left seems to think is the only good kind. So much of what we fund today is done so to push an ideological agenda either within the research or to subsidize insanity in other parts of academia.
I wrote earlier today about the NIH’s policy change to limit university slush funds attached to grants to 15%, and while I don’t pretend to know that 15% is the precise right number–it is the one that granting institutions outside the federal government use and therefore is not absurd–I do know that Harvard does not need 69% administrative fees to keep the lights on.
It is appropriate that the same people who get up in arms if you oppose sterilizing and mutilating children or euthanizing the disabled and mentally ill are looking to Hitler as their model for funding scientific research.
Throw in gain-of-function research, torturing beagles, and turning Anthony Fauci into a secular saint and the picture is clear: these people are ghouls who think that bureaucrats and academics are the seed for the Master Race who should rule over the rest of us.
There really is no sense of irony with the left. They really do look to unelected bureaucracies as the custodians of democracy and the rightful rulers who should overrule elected officials, and really do see Hitler as preferable to Bad Orange Man.
In Robert Kuttner’s world, Hitler may not have been the ideal leader, but he did have some good ideas. Look to the Nazis, he tells us.
Geez.
