The United States, a nation that once prided itself on out-thinking the rest of the planet simply to prove it could, has apparently decided that its new national identity should be built on the foundation of intellectual suicide. According to Joel Mokyr—an American-Israeli economist who recently collected a Nobel Prize for having the audacity to notice how things actually work—the current administration is overseeing a 'wholesale onslaught' on scientific research. It’s a fascinating pivot. While the rest of the world is racing toward the future, the U.S. has decided to drop its anchor in a puddle of its own making and declare victory over the concept of progress.

Mokyr’s warning is as clear as it is futile: the U.S. is losing ground to China because it has fundamentally soured on the idea of discovery. Under the current administration, the scientific community is being treated with the kind of suspicion usually reserved for a process server or a low-carb diet. This isn't just a budget cut; it’s a cultural lobotomy performed with the blunt instrument of political expediency. We are witnessing the intentional dismantling of the very apparatus that allowed this country to pretend it was exceptional for the better part of a century. The 'onslaught' Mokyr describes is the sound of a superpower deciding that facts are a liberal conspiracy and that innovation is something that only happens to people who don't have enough faith in quarterly dividends.

The Right’s approach to this decline is predictably moronic. To the MAGA-adjacent brain trust, 'science' is just a fancy word for 'people who tell us we can't smoke in a hospital.' They view federal research grants not as investments in the future, but as slush funds for 'elites' who spend their time counting the legs on obscure beetles or, worse, suggesting that the climate might not be entirely fine. For the modern American conservative, the only research worth funding is the kind that proves oil is a health food and that the 1950s were a magical utopia where everyone knew their place. They are currently burning the library of Alexandria because they heard a rumor that some of the books were written in a language they didn't like.

But let’s not pretend the Left is some bastion of rational enlightenment. Their defense of 'Science' is as performative as a celebrity apology video. They love the *aesthetic* of science—the lab coats, the 'I Believe in Science' yard signs, the worship of technocratic bureaucrats—right up until the science suggests something that doesn't fit their pre-approved social narrative. While the Right tries to defund the lab, the Left tries to ensure the lab results are sufficiently diverse and equitable, even if the laws of thermodynamics couldn't care less about social justice. They have turned the pursuit of truth into a brand identity, a way to signal their intellectual superiority while achieving absolutely nothing of substance. It’s a tug-of-war where both sides are pulling the rope toward a cliff.

China, meanwhile, is watching this circus with the patient hunger of a predator that doesn't need to hunt because its prey is currently stabbing itself in the neck. While Washington debates whether basic research is a 'waste of taxpayer money,' Beijing is pouring trillions into artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and biotechnology. They don't have to deal with the inconveniences of a public that thinks Wi-Fi causes gout or a political class that views 'expert' as a slur. They are playing the long game with a cold, mechanical efficiency that should terrify anyone with a brain, which, unfortunately, excludes about 90% of the American electorate. Mokyr notes that all areas at the 'cutting edge' are suffering; we are effectively handing the keys to the 21st century to an autocracy because we’re too busy arguing about which bathroom a scientist should use.

The tragedy here isn't just the loss of technological dominance; it’s the profound boredom of watching an empire fail in the most predictable way possible. Empires don’t usually collapse because of some grand, external catastrophe; they rot from the inside because they lose the ability to distinguish between reality and their own propaganda. We have become a nation of grifters and the grifted, where the acquisition of knowledge is seen as a liability and the loud assertion of ignorance is celebrated as 'authenticity.' Mokyr’s 'onslaught' is merely the final stage of a long-term divorce from the Enlightenment.

So, as the U.S. continues to slash and burn its intellectual infrastructure to save a few pennies for the next billionaire tax cut, we can look forward to a future where we are a third-rate amusement park for Chinese tourists. We will have the best slogans, the loudest rallies, and the most fervent beliefs, and we will be living in a digital dark age powered by technology we no longer understand how to build. But hey, at least we’ll be 'free' from the tyranny of knowing things. That’s the American dream, isn't it? Dying in the dark, but doing it with a smile and a flag.