The New Dark Ages: The Right-Wing’s All-Out Blitz on Reality

By Rob C.

Art by Drew Sheneman

TL;DR: Welcome to the 14th century, but with worse fashion and high-speed internet. Dr. Jesus Trump and his budget-slashing henchman Russ Vought, are officially turning out the lights on American intellect.

They put education on the chopping block to reward billionaires with tax cuts. Linda McMahon (former fake wrestling executive) pledged to close the Education Department she was sworn in to lead. Trump signed an executive order to body-slam the Department of Education into non-existence.

They’ve cut cancer research by 31%. Slashing NIH budget 18% ($31.8B→$26B), including $1B cut to National Cancer Institute, $575M from National Heart/Lung/Blood Institute, $838M from Infectious Diseases. Over 7,800 grants cancelled or suspended.

Trump waged an all-out blitz on universities: with lawsuits, funding cuts, and so-called “antisemitic” investigations that are disrupting campuses. I guess “stupid” is the desired outcome.

Good morning. Grab your torches and pitchforks, folks. The “Stable Genius” has decided that the only way to make America “Great” is to make it as scientifically illiterate and historically confused as a medieval peasant.

📚 A Brief History of Being Proudly Ignorant

The current attack on science and education isn’t a glitch; it’s a feature. American conservatism has a long, storied history of treating “thinking” like a suspicious foreign import. In 1963, Richard Hofstadter wrote Anti-intellectualism in American Life, tracing this rot back to the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925—when teaching evolution was literally illegal—to Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts against “intellectual elites” in the 1950s, to Reagan’s defunding of mental health research and climate science in the 1980s, to the George W. Bush stem cell ban in 2001, Republicans have spent a century waging war on facts.

From the 1920s fundamentalists to the 1950s red-scare paranoiacs, the Right has always feared smart people. Today, that fear has evolved into a full-blown crusade. We went from questioning evolution to Sharpie-ing hurricane maps and calling climate change a “Chinese hoax.” Now, with Russ Vought—the high priest of budget-cutting—holding the scalpel, they aren’t just questioning facts; they’re defunding them.

The Slaughter of American Science

Under the direction of Vought, the administration is decimating one of the only things the U.S. actually leads the world in: science.

Under Trump’s proposed budget, the National Institutes of Health would see its budget shrink 18%—from $31.8 billion to $26 billion. This includes: $1 billion cut from the National Cancer Institute, $575 million from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, and $838 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The Centers for Disease Control would lose 17% of its budget—a $1.2 billion cut that would give the CDC its lowest budget in 20 years. Former CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden called it an “assault on science” that will “devastate programs that protect Americans” from deadly conditions including diabetes, heart attacks, and strokes.

And that’s just the proposed cuts. What Trump has already done is worse.

In an unprecedented move, officials began terminating already-funded grants at the NIH in February 2025, and later at the National Science Foundation. A total of 5,844 NIH grants and 1,996 NSF grants were cancelled or suspended.

Over the course of 2025, more than 7,800 grants were cancelled or suspended. The Trump administration disproportionately cancelled projects on topics it disfavors: misinformation, vaccine hesitancy, infectious diseases, and research on people from under-represented ethnic and gender groups—which it has called “discriminatory and unscientific.” Translation: Facts we don’t like = cancelled.

These cuts aren’t just “efficiencies.” They are death warrants for people waiting on breakthroughs for Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and pediatric cancers. Apparently, curing a child is “wasteful spending,” but a new luxury bunker for the Epstein Class is “infrastructure.”

🤼 The WWE Guide to Education

Trump’s pick to run the Education Department? Linda McMahon, a woman whose primary qualification for running the Education Department is that she used to watch people hit each other with folding chairs for a living.

On March 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.” The order erodes the department’s ability to carry out responsibilities Congress has mandated by law.

McMahon told staff it was “our opportunity to perform one final, unforgettable public service to future generations of students.” Translation: We’re destroying your kids’ education, and we’re proud of it.

Read that again. Trump appointed someone to run the Department of Education whose stated goal is to destroy it.

The Education Department had 4,133 employees when Trump took office. Cuts brought it down to roughly 2,183—nearly half the workforce gone.

Here’s what they’re eliminating:

IDEA on the Chopping Block: They are moving to eliminate the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). If your child has a disability, the “Techno-Fascist” regime thinks they should just pull themselves up by their own tiny bootstraps.

The Civil Rights Purge: The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has been gutted. Seven of the 12 regional offices—including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and Dallas—have been shuttered. They’ve fired nearly 90% of the OCR staff in some areas. Say goodbye to equal protection for minorities and LGBTQ students. There are 30,000 pending discrimination complaints with almost no one left to handle them.

Gutted – Title I funding for schools with large populations of low-income students. Teacher-preparation programs. Services for English learners. The Institute of Education Sciences, which oversees data collection, research grants, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

And Trump is on an all-out blitz on universities. Lawsuits, funding cuts, and “antisemitic” investigations have disrupted campuses across the country. If they can’t control the universities, they’ll bankrupt them.

The Motive: This isn’t about protecting students; it’s about silencing dissent. By threatening the funding that fuels medical research and scientific advancement, they are forcing universities to choose between academic freedom and financial survival.

I guess an ignorant population is easier to control.

While the DOGE “efficiency” circus creates more debt than it solves, billions are being funneled into an illegal war while your kid’s school budget gets fed into a woodchipper.

Dumbing Down: From “Alternative Facts” to PragerU

We should have seen this coming when the “Spokes-barbie,” Kellyanne Conway, introduced us to “alternative facts” in 2017. That was the moment truth became optional. Since then, the dumbing down has accelerated into a terminal velocity:

Florida’s “Skills Training”: Rewriting history to suggest that slavery provided “useful skills” to the enslaved.

The Climate Scrub: Federal agencies are once again being ordered to remove any mention of “climate change” from public-facing websites. Despite 97% of climate scientists agreeing it’s real and human-caused.

Ban books in schools: Over 10,000 book bans across the U.S. in 2023-2024, targeting books about race, LGBTQ issues, and history.

Pass laws allowing teachers to “teach both sides” of the Holocaust and slavery.

Attack Critical Race Theory—a graduate-level legal framework that isn’t even taught in K-12 schools—as an excuse to ban teaching about racism.

PragerU in Public Schools: Replacing actual history and science with cartoon propaganda funded by fracking billionaires.

Defund libraries for carrying books Republicans don’t like.

Eliminate tenure for university professors to punish those who teach inconvenient truths.

Require loyalty oaths from teachers in states like Florida and Texas.

This is the playbook. Make facts optional. Make science political. Make ignorance patriotic.

💸 The Price of “Efficiency”

Here’s the punchline: All these cuts aren’t saving a dime. As the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) failure showed us, Elon and Vivek’s “wall of receipts” was mostly accounting gimmicks and clerical errors.

DOGE claimed it would slash federal spending. Federal spending in FY 2025 hit an ominous $6.66 trillion, up from $6.29 trillion the year before. The deficit stands at $1.8 trillion.

Meanwhile, the Iran war is estimated to cost more than $1 trillion above and beyond the current $900 billion Pentagon budget going into 2027.

Trump has no problem spending billions of dollars every day on an illegal war in the Middle East to satisfy his military-industrial handlers, but he’ll slash your kid’s school budget and cancer research without losing a wink of sleep. This isn’t fiscal conservatism; it’s a liquidation sale of the American mind.

Stay informed, stay angry.

F*CK ICE, RELEASE ALL THE FILES!

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— Robert Cain, author of Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet. - Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and booksellers everywhere.