The Enemy You Declared - by Mark Atwood

Mark Atwood

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The Enemy You Declared<br>On scientists discovering that enemy-making is a two-way transaction<br>Jul 03, 2026

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The tell is in the phrase "as scientists." That's the whole mistake compressed into two words.<br>When your professional reference class votes one way at 90-plus percent, partisanship stops registering as partisanship. It feels like stating a fact. Scientific American breaking 175 years of precedent to endorse in 2020 and again in 2024 read internally as "defending reason against an obvious lunatic," not "enrolling an institution in a faction." Monoculture launders advocacy into neutrality. So they experienced the act as non-political while doing the most political thing an institution can do: telling half the country which team it plays for.<br>Then the reset assumption. This one carries the whole argument. It comes from treating the postwar funding settlement (Vannevar Bush's Science: The Endless Frontier, the whole outsource-research-to-universities bargain) as physics rather than as a renewable political contract. Tenure, decade-long grant horizons, agencies that outlast administrations: the entire structure trains scientists to think in geological time and to regard politicians as weather. Under that model, picking a fight is free. You fight, the election resolves, and the money keeps flowing because "everyone needs science" and "science is bipartisan."<br>They thought they had the immunity of infrastructure. You don't defund the enemy's roads. But science funding isn't roads. It's discretionary, appropriated annually, and they forgot the discretionary part because it had been reliably exercised in their favor for seventy years.<br>Here's the part that makes the surprise indefensible rather than merely naive: they were told, in their own journal, what this would cost, and they did it again.<br>Zhang's 2023 study in Nature Human Behaviour ran a preregistered experiment on 4,260 people and found the 2020 endorsement caused large reductions in trust in Nature among Trump supporters, reduced their willingness to consume Nature's COVID information, and lowered their trust in scientists generally. It changed essentially no votes. Pure downside. And Nature's editors responded to their own publication with an editorial titled, in effect, yes, we should endorse when the occasion demands it. Holden Thorp at Science went harder, arguing that telling scientists to stick to science "infantilizes" them and that they "must fight back."<br>That's the incentive gradient in the open. The reward for the endorsement was internal (status among peers, the moral self-image of having spoken out), and the cost was external (trust among people they don't know and whose esteem doesn't pay their salary or sit on their tenure committee). Handed the receipt showing the trade was a net loss for the institution, they optimized for the internal reward anyway.<br>That's not stupidity. It's a rational response to the incentives they actually face. Nobody's career in that world has ever been hurt by being too anti-Trump.<br>So when the target took them at their word (because that's the only rational reading), they spent their one real asset (the presumption of disinterest) to buy in-group applause, converted their credibility into a partisan weapon, fired it, and then expected to be treated as civilians when return fire came.<br>You don't get to do both.<br>And the return fire isn't a tantrum, which is what the "shock" framing obscures. Look at what got cut. The terminations didn't fall randomly. They concentrated on grants mentioning DEI, misinformation, vaccine hesitancy, health equity, and gender. Those are the research programs that functioned as the intellectual infrastructure of the bloc that declared war on him. That's not blind slashing. That's counter-battery fire, aimed at the enemy's supply lines.<br>The structural read is this: they thought they were in an epistemic contest (we hold the truth, we persuade, everyone returns to normal afterward) when they were in an adversarial one (control of money and legitimacy, with a scorekeeper on the other side). The civility-and-persuasion frame is unilateral disarmament when your opponent keeps a ledger and acts on it.<br>They modeled Trump as a norm-violator who would eventually be embarrassed back into line. He was a player reading the scoreboard, and the scoreboard said a coalition of institutions sitting on tens of billions in discretionary federal money had named him the enemy.<br>Defunding them is the boringly rational move.<br>The only people surprised are the ones who never updated their model from "we are neutral arbiters above the fray" to "we are a faction with a budget the other faction now controls."<br>Derek Lowe is the "In the Pipeline" guy, a working medicinal chemist with decades in drug discovery, famously sharp. He recently wrote a piece asking why biopharma CEOs haven't spoken up against the administration's science-funding...