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adolf hitler
Totalitarian Science in the White House
By promoting pseudoscience, purging government scientists, and censoring their work and speech, U.S. President Donald Trump is following Stalin, Hitler, and Putin’s playbook.
Mar 12, 2025
As he sat in his Kremlin office in autumn 1948, Joseph Stalin faced hard decisions about the dangers facing Soviet science. Spies threatened to steal state secrets. Agents of capitalist ideology promoted false research paradigms. With the stroke of a pen, Stalin dictated real Soviet science. He endorsed the bogus theory of “Lysenkoism” with its rejection of genetics. He oversaw the firing, arrests, and imprisonment of biologists. He next identified so-called materialist state physics that repudiated relativity theory—Albert Einstein was a Jewish theorist, after all. And Stalin shut down cybernetics, which waylaid the development of computers into the 1990s.
Under Hitler, too, the Nazi state imposed restrictions on science owing to prevailing racist, antisemitic ideas. What had once been the world’s greatest scientific establishment was destroyed by ideological interference even before its physical devastation in World War II. Nonpareil U.S. science arose in the postwar years on the foundations of scientific freedom and extensive funding.
Shockingly, U.S. President Donald Trump also pursues pseudoscience through false proclamations. He hopes, with the stroke of a pen, to abolish transgender people, vaccinations, and climate change. To manage research and development, Trump has turned science portfolios over to singularly unqualified ideological agents. And he has adopted authoritarian tactics to control science in two major ways.
Trump once said he wanted the generals that Hitler had. He’s certainly working on getting the science that Hitler and Stalin had.
First, Trump has purged thousands of scientists. Firings have been promoted as a way to cut waste in the federal government, but reflect the desire of the White House to halt research that Trump and his minions reject ranging from sickle cell medicine to obstetrics and gynecology; from ecology to climate change; and from vaccinations to Alzheimer’s investigations. Trump, still bruised from his failed attempt to force Hurricane Dorian to follow the path of his Sharpie, not scientific forecasts, fired 880 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists.
Like under Stalin, no bureaucracy is free from interference: the Food and Drug Administration (to prevent a range of medicines from being used), National Institutes of Health (to cut research on gender, health equity, and environmental justice), U.S. Fish and Wildlife (to limit the enforcement of the Endangered Species Act), the Department of Agriculture (to close down the battle with avian flu), and the National Nuclear Security Administration (to weaken the nation’s nuclear arsenal). The wanton firings include researchers, physicians, nurses, clinicians, and even park rangers and foresters, putting the nation’s natural heritage at risk.
Second, the Trump administration is censoring scientific speech and publication. Such world-leading publications as Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reportwere temporarily shut down. Federal scientists whose work uses “gender” and other suspect words are being required to withdraw in-press articles, and are being prevented from submitting future work using these terms. Zealous Trump acolytes have cleansed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) websites of information about immunization, contraception, racism, and health. Others have removed data on climate on which farmers and others rely. A French university in Marseilles is offering a research haven to U.S. scientists who worry about censorship of their work.
Federal scientific agencies have been told in recent weeks to remove such words as nonbinary, woman, disabled, and elderly from their purview. Only in the 1990s did U.S. scientific administrators and researchers began to redress the heavily skewed underparticipation of women in clinical studies, and the inattention to women’s health issues in the national research agenda. Trump administration policies will return women and minorities to being outsiders in R, D, and employment. Indeed, as in Nazi Germany there are natalist, racial, and homophobic overtones to current Trump scientific protocols, not the least in implicit prohibitions against research involving LGBTQ individuals. Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Bobby Kennedy asserts that Black people should follow a different vaccine schedule than whites on the basis of his false claims that Blacks need fewer antigens.
The Stalinists, similarly, slowed scientific publication through a censorship bureau called Glavlit. As a result of this censorship, Soviet science failed to perform well by many measures: scientific citation indices, Nobel, and other major international prizes.
To achieve censorship, Trump is pursuing scientific isolation. The Communist Party prevented scientists from attending international conferences from the 1930s until the 1980s, stultifying the development of Soviet science. In the U.S., the White House has embargoed travel funds. The president has closed down conferences and prohibited such groups as an independent expert vaccine panel from meeting which at the very least delays the funding of cutting edge research in all fields. Not content with the natural sciences, like the Stalinists in the 1940s, the administration has turned on the social sciences as well, for example, closing the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee.
The impacts are already being felt. Trump has long accepted baseless anti-vaccination propaganda. As a result, the CDC ended a successful flu vaccination campaign, while Trump signed a dictate to prohibit federal funding for Covid-19 vaccine mandates in schools. Yet, according to the World Health Organization, over the past 50 years, vaccination against 14 major diseases has directly contributed to reducing infant deaths by 40% globally and saved over 150 million lives. Meanwhile, the worst measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico in the last 30 years has sickened 125 people, most of them children; measles can lead to pneumonia, encephalitis, and death. In a throwback to the medical nonsense suggested by the president to downing bleach to cure Covid-19, Bobby Kennedy is proposing drinking cod liver oil to combat the outbreak.
Engineering is similarly being hit with a funding cudgel, with programs in wind and solar power and high-speed trains cancelled. This can only lead to the end of U.S. scientific priority in a variety of fields, the closing down of promising research directions, and damage to strategic national interests. Personal whims play a role here. Embarrassed by the success of the Chips Act (2022) that rejuvenated the U.S. semiconductor industry, Trump plans to destroy the “horrible, horrible” program.
If Trump seeks contemporary examples of authoritarian interference in modern science, he can look to Russia again. Under President Vladimir Putin, the security police have arrested scientists on accusations of espionage; several have died in custody. In May 2001 the Russian Academy of Sciences ordered specialists to report all their foreign contacts to the authorities for monitoring. Universities followed suit. Next the FSB closed down NGOs. And Russian scientists are again isolated.
Stalin purged his officer corps on the eve of World War II, severely handicapping the Red Army against Nazi Germany. Stalin published a book in 1948 called Marxism and Linguistics to establish himself as the leader in the field. Trump, apparently hoping to be recognized as a scientific expert, recently pontificated on “transgender” mice; of course, he does not understand the value of transgenic research with applications for human health from asthma to chronic wounds to heart disease any more than Stalin fathomed linguistics. But this utterance is in keeping with his firing of military personnel from leadership positions based on pseudoscientific notions of lower intelligence for soldiers of color. Trump once said he wanted the generals that Hitler had. He’s certainly working on getting the science that Hitler and Stalin had.
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Is It Happening Here?
Two generations of family history has convinced me that a deeply divided Weimer-like democracy can be destroyed from the inside out, even one that has been expanding its franchise of freedom for more than two centuries.
Mar 08, 2025
My mother was interrogated by the Gestapo when she was nine years old. She thought the initials for the Nazi Labor Front (Deutesche Arbeitsfront) stood for German Monkey Front (Deutsche Affefront) and, because she was dyslexic, she sounded it out. Her mother Emmy was not allowed to be with Eva while she was questioned about who had told her to say what she had. Afterwards Emmy was told if the child was not out of the country in 24 hours the entire family would be arrested.
Eva was put on a train and spent the next three years in a boarding school on an Italian mountaintop until finally reuniting with her family in Holland in 1939. There the American Quakers helped get the family, including her father Fritz (who had survived detention and torture at Buchenwald concentration camp), onto the last ship to America before the Nazis invaded.
My mother was a difficult, emotionally fractured person throughout her life in part, I came to believe, because of her childhood trauma and family separation that she unconsciously blamed on herself. I thought of her during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term when his migrant family separation policy left children locked away from their parents, some separated for more than three years.
The threat in our country seems to be a uniquely American brand of celebrity fascism mixed with a tech-bro junta of uber-rich rocket-owning oligarchs.
I grew up a middle-class American but, given my parents’ backgrounds, believing that history can knock the struts out from under you at any time. While my mother had escaped the Nazis, my father, his sister, and mother had escaped a massacre in their village in Ukraine, 3 of 20 hiding in an attic while hundreds more were slain in the streets and in their homes. Ukraine still bleeds as Donald Trump cozies up to its latest invaders, attacks its leader, and demands its rare minerals.
My mother died in 1974, my father a few years later. In 2016, right after Trump was elected for the first time, my Aunt Renate, 89, was one of those people who actually made plans to move to Canada, to a small town in the province of Saskatchewan. She wasn’t ready to live with the fear she’d experienced as a child. Leukemia caught up with her before she could make the move. She died at 90.
Before the 2016 election I’d convinced Renate to write an article on her childhood memories of the election in which Adolf Hitler came to power, even after his attempt to stage a coup. It read in part:
In 1932, the German people went to the polls to choose between Hitler and President Paul von Hindenburg, the incumbent. My parents were afraid to vote in their small home community where the citizens all knew each other by name. They feared reprisal because they could easily have been identified as anti-Nazi voters. As a family, we drove to a distant, larger town where my mother and father voted.
My two sisters and I waited in the car. We did not speak. We were terrified without knowing why. An atmosphere of danger and secrecy held us in its grip as we watched the Nazi guards in their brown uniforms and swastika armbands march up and down in front of the voting booth. As Jews, this was the last time they voted—to make their voices heard as German citizens.
I vividly remember the first time I voted as an American citizen in 1948—Thomas Dewey versus Harry Truman…After I closed the black curtain of the booth and punched the buttons, I had to pull a lever to record my vote. I was awed by what this simple gesture implied: I was responsible to my country, to the world, for influencing the outcome of the election. In the privacy of the curtained space I burst into tears, grateful that I was permitted to record my opinion without fear of retribution and that my vote would be counted among millions to determine the political future which American citizens would accept.
Until 2020 that is, when many U.S. citizens were convinced not to accept the outcome of a free and fair election. Four years later a slim majority put Donald Trump back in power despite his attempted coup. Today the Quisling-like compliance of a Republican Congress unwilling to assert its constitutional role and the potential remolding of the FBI, CIA, and the military (starting with the unjustified firing of the Coast Guard commandant on Trump’s second day back in power and now a wider purge at the Pentagon) bodes poorly for the so-called “guardrails” of democracy.
In addition, the total amnesty of the rioters who took over the Capitol on January 6, 2021, demonstrating their willingness to use violence on his behalf, gives another clear indication of how things could rapidly devolve under Trump 2.0. Two generations of family history has convinced me that a deeply divided Weimer-like democracy can be destroyed from the inside out, even one that has been expanding its franchise of freedom for more than two centuries.
In 1968 I was in the streets of New York protesting a Madison Square Garden rally for former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who was running for president as an openly racist third-party candidate. It was a wild riot scene that as a 17-year-old had me enthralled. When I confronted my mother’s worried fury later that night, I spoke thoughtlessly. In the 1930s, I said, if young people had gone into the streets of Germany, maybe Hitler wouldn’t have come to power.
Seven years later, when my mother was in the hospital after surgery for lung cancer and knew she was dying, she reminded me of that night, and how I’d hurt her to the bone. “I was only nine. There was nothing I could do,” she said through her tears.
My mother was too young to resist fascism when it enveloped and ultimately destroyed her country and many others. The threat in our country seems to be a uniquely American brand of celebrity fascism mixed with a tech-bro junta of uber-rich rocket-owning oligarchs.
But America’s last best generation of antifascists—including my parents who both joined the U.S. Army in World War II—defeated a similar though more advanced threat on the beaches of Normandy and beyond. Even if my mom was too young at nine, I’m not too old, even in my 70s, to join with my fellow citizens in mobilizing to again stop the dark threat, if not once-and-for-all, at least this time in America.
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People Get Ready: Trump's Reichstag Fire Is Coming
An attack on America—real, orchestrated, enabled, or imagined—that would enable him to play the role Bush did after 9/11 would be very politically useful.
Feb 24, 2025
Get ready.
The resistance to billionaires running our government is growing. Bernie Sanders is touring the Red State Midwest and drawing massive crowds. Federal workers are pissed. Republican politicians are in hiding, refusing to do town halls even when their constituents demand them or try to set them up.
Comrade Krasnov’s…er, Trump’s polling numbers are collapsing as fast as his embrace of Comrade Putin is growing. Fascism expert and On Tyranny author Professor Timothy Snyder notes over at BlueSky:
“Nervous Musk, Trump, Vance have all been outclassed in public arguments these last few days. Government failure, stock market crash, and dictatorial alliances are not popular. People are starting to realize that there is no truth here beyond the desire for personal wealth and power.”
James Carville told Dan Abrams:
“This whole thing is collapsing. … I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days, is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse in public opinion.”
At the same time, four Republicans have now thrown Nazi salutes, three over this past weekend at CPAC. They think they can overcome their fear of the people by intimidating us.
These fascists are getting panicky, and panicky would-be tyrants are dangerous.
This is a moment of maximum peril for our nation and our freedoms because if, as Rachel Bitecofer documents, Trump and his followers really are following Hitler’s script to seize total power and turn America into an authoritarian dictatorship, the next step may well be to exploit an attack on America.
There’s a long history of leaders using national emergencies to raise their popularity, expand their own power, overwhelm opposition politicians, scapegoat minorities, suspend constitutions and elections, and provide a legal façade for ending or weakening democracy.
Germans remember well that fateful day ninety-two years ago this week: February 27, 1933. It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack.
A Dutch communist named Marius van der Lubbe had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The German intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians still argue whether rogue elements in Hitler’s intelligence service helped him; the most recent research implies they did not, but simply watched him proceed.)
And then van der Lubbe took down the prize of Germany, the Parliament building (the Reichstagsgebäude), setting it ablaze on that February day.
Hitler knew the strike was coming (although he apparently didn’t know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation’s most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was van der Lubbe who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.
“You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history,” he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. “This fire,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion, “is the beginning.” He used the occasion — “a sign from God,” he called it — to declare an all-out “war on terrorism” and the groups he said were its ideological sponsors, the socialists and Jews.
Two weeks later, the first detention center for “terrorists” was built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected “allies” of the infamous terrorist. Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, Hitler had pushed through legislation — in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the “liberal” philosophy he said spawned it — that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus.
His Decree on the Protection of People and State allowed police to intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; and police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.
It was the beginning of the end of a democratic Germany.
Similarly, in 2002, the new Russian President Putin was engaged in a war with Chechnya, trying to subdue and subsume a nation that has been both under Russian rule and independent over the past several centuries, very much like Ukraine.
A theater in Moscow was seized that year by “Chechen rebels” who began executing theater-goers: Putin ordered poisonous gas apparently made of something like fentanyl poured into the theater, and it let his police take back the theater (although many of the hostages, along with their tormentors, died from the gas).
Putin used the attack as an excuse to escalate his years-long conflict with the parts of Chechnya that still were fighting for their independence from Russia; he launched a major WWII-style land invasion and bombing campaign. Tens of thousands died, entire cities were destroyed, and Chechnya was largely subdued within the year.
In the aftermath of that 2002 theater attack and subsequent war there was speculation from multiple sources and countries that Putin knew the attack was coming and welcomed it, believing he could use it as an excuse to escalate his low-level conflict with Chechnya to elevate his own profile while finally seizing full control of the region.
It was an echo of the Moscow apartment bombings in 1999 that then-Prime Minister Putin used to leverage himself into the presidency the following year. He’d used those terror attacks to consolidate his power, and repeated the trick in 2003 beginning with the 2003 arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of Yukos Oil. By the following year most serious voices of dissent or opposition in Russia were either dead, in prison, or fleeing for their lives.
There’s a long history of leaders using national emergencies to raise their popularity, expand their own power, overwhelm opposition politicians, scapegoat minorities, suspend constitutions and elections, and provide a legal façade for ending or weakening democracy.
Both George W. Bush and Benjamin Netanyahu — at a time when their popularity was in the toilet and charges of impropriety were swirling (in Netanyahu’s case, actual criminal charges) — ignored multiple warnings of attacks coming.
The 9/11 and October 7 attacks — predicted by agencies and nations warning American and Israeli intelligence services respectively — were then successfully used by both to consolidate their own popularity and power.
Which is why this is such a dangerous moment that requires vigilance and preparation.
Trump’s popularity is now collapsing as his largest campaign donor takes a chainsaw to the American government, threatening virtually every aspect of federal and state functions from Social Security to Medicaid to medical research and foreign aid. An attack on America that would enable him to play the role Bush did after 9/11 would be very politically useful.
In an extreme case, which he has publicly mused about, an attack could justify his declaring a national state of emergency, suspending elections, and putting the Constitution on ice. He could then shut down media he doesn’t like, imprison people who speak out, and suspend the 2026 and 2028 elections.
All legally.
At the same time he’s contemplating this, the FBI — America’s premiere counterterrorism organization — is being scattered with as many as 1500 agents leaving Washington, DC. An open apologist for Putin has been put in charge of our intelligence services. And the senior leadership of our military was just purged, replaced with toadies who’ll praise Trump as if this were North Korea at every opportunity.
And the JAG officers of each branch of the military along with their senior commanders — the people who would determine the legality of presidential orders to, say, shoot at protestors or open detention camps for journalists and dissidents — have been fired and replaced by loyalists who’ll do whatever Trump demands.
Brett Holmgren was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center until a few weeks ago; he recently warned that the threat levels right now are at unprecedented highs.
Muslims around the world are incensed by Israel’s slaughter in Gaza; Ukrainian expats and refugees are furious about Trump’s embrace of Putin; and the Afghanistan-based Islamic State-Khorasan has already carried out attacks killing 13 Americans along with a recent slaughter in Moscow.
And, pointing to the deadly New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans last month, Holmgren added:
“I think it illustrates that while we have been quite effective as a government and across administrations at disrupting plotting overseas and going after terrorist leaders, we have a lot more work to do when it comes to countering violent extremism at home…”
Anybody remember the bombs left at the RNC and DNC on January 6th? The bomber is still at large, not to mention groups across the political spectrum — and recently fired federal workers — who may have grievances against our government. And people from nations around the world where USAID was keeping friends and relatives alive but isn’t any longer.
I sincerely hope I’m wrong in my concern that we’re facing the very real possibility of an imminent attack that will be exploited by Trump to put a final nail in the coffin of American democracy, but we all — and Democrats, in particular — need to be ready. The Reichstag Fire scenario could be closer than any of us expect.
As the saying goes: “Stand back and stand by.”
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