KEEP UP: Is Musk pro-Mars — or from Mars?

The attack on science, brainworm confirmed, citizenship for me and not for thee, and more

The Trump-Musk administration’s assault on the Constitution and the American people has been hard to keep up with — even for us! So we’re digging into the biggest stories of the day, surfacing some important ones that have flown under the radar, and looking at what they mean, beyond the headlines. And, since it’s never too soon in our book, we’re going to get snarky when it’s called for. We hope you’ll follow along with us.

Today we take on:

• Why is the new regime dismantling American science — and are they in league with…alien invaders?

• With Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. confirmed as Health and Human Services secretary, have we handed public health policy to the brain worm?

• Texas Congressman Brandon Gill tries his hand at crowdfunding white nationalism as he looks to revoke Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s citizenship by petition.

• Everyone’s getting fired — but it’s a great time for private prison owners!

And on a more positive note:

• Speaking up is something everyone can — and should — do. Editor Rob Spillman shows us the way to hold on to the truth.

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In Cixin Liu’s massively popular sci-fi epic The Three-Body Problem, an advanced society abandons their collapsing planet and sets out to take over the Earth. But to pave the way and make sure they don’t meet effective resistance, they monkey wrench human progress by distributing viral propaganda, recruiting allies in the gaming community, cutting sweetheart deals with oligarchs, and interfering with scientific research. Ummmmm. Think about it:

“Musk has access to all the data on federal research grantees and contractors: social security numbers, tax returns, tax payments, tax rebates, grant disbursements and more,” wrote physicist Michael Lubell from City College of New York. “Anyone who depends on the federal government and doesn’t toe the line might become a target. This is right out of (Hungarian prime minister) Viktor Orbán’s playbook.”

As for the long-term impact of these changes, James Gates — a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland and a past president of the US National Society of Black Physicists — is blunt. “My country is in for a 50-year period of a new dark ages,” he told an audience at the Royal College of Art in London, UK, on 7 February.

The Three-Body Problem was received (and possibly intended) in China as a critique of the forced transformation of Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution, but here in the U.S., it hits different.

It’s as if the tech oligarchs who’ve journeyed from South Africa to remake America — the guys who, as therapist Daniel Shaw remarked, “read Orwell's 1984 and decided the hero was Big Brother” — read Liu’s trilogy and decided the San-Ti (the alien invaders) were the heroes.

In the books and TV series, humanity pushes back. And it’s time to get moving, before future generations lose sight of the future.

Republicans in the state, fresh off of introducing a resolution that would “acknowledge the Kingship of Jesus Christ over all the world,” have proposed Senate Bill 2355, a straightforward bill that would require the state’s superintendent of public instruction to “include intelligent design in the state science content standards”—in other words, make teachers tell kids some unnamed Higher Power may have poofed them into existence—by the start of the 2027-2028 school year.

Makes you wish Elon Musk would get to work on occupying Mars.

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Triumph of the brain worm