That nationalism is the new state doctrin? Foreigners are inferior by definition, so they cannot really help with research anyway, all they want to do is steal secrets. If you think like that, then it makes sense.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Educatio...
The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy. [0]
I use "reasoning" in the broadest possible sense.
Is that really something in need of explaining on a hacker site?
(Or were you ironic? I cannot tell anymore)
The US is definitely undergoing authoritarian tendencies, but it remains structurally constrained by separation of powers, federalism, and independent courts and media, features that fascist regimes systematically dismantle.
If you start calling everything fascism you are essentially helping those you call fascists because they can easily refute your thesis and gaslight you on the very realities of the authoritarian descent the country is going through.
Democracy is not an on/off light bulb, it's a material under constant stress that can bend a lot before breaking.
But if you start calling it broken, while it's bending your thesis is easily refutable and you get called out for being a radical whatever.
Okay, but that's beating around the bush and a very milquetoast way to describe it.
> easily refutable and you get called out for being a radical whatever.
This is equivalent to being punched repeatedly by a bully and being scared that he'll cry "assault!" when you punch him back. At some point, you cease to exist if you don't act.
I agree that US is not fascist yet, the hierarchy isn't set, and the economy isn't close to an extractive autarky, but philosophically, it's close, don't you think? I mean, ranting against traitors all the time is to me a very, very big point in favor of this being fascism.
It's their neighbors, not the "deep state". Renee Good and Alex Pretti were the enemy within. People in inflatable costumes or pussy hats are the enemy within. Uppity kids in high school who get thrown to the drown and put in a choke hold. People filming ice on public streets. They are the enemy within to MAGA. It isn't distant and abstract. It's personal.
And the "enemy of the people", rhetoric, and the vermin that corrupts the nation’s blood. I mean, these people are not exactly subtle.
But the Trump administration (a.k.a. the executive branch) is trying to systematically dismantle these things. When people refer to fascism in the U.S. government, they don’t mean the entire government. They mean the Trump administration, which is the face of the U.S. government, has a great deal of the share of power, and is seeking more. The brand of far right nationalism, that the nation is in decline and violence must be used to restore it, along with the economic policies and deference to corporations and the wealthy, are things that make them more fascist than just authoritarian.
Saying that we cannot call it fascism until the transformation is complete doesn’t make sense - if a group of people have beliefs and goals that align with fascism, and are taking steps to impose them, you can call them fascist, even if they have not yet realized the full set of conditions that make the government fully fascist.
I'm European, and from my point of view:
- despite the current executive and its lackeys clearly stating they were going to do exactly what's happening (the dismantling of institutions, the violent, word-wise, targeting of any criticism, the tariffs, etc).
- despite the open attack to US democracy on January 6th 2021
Americans voted for all of this to happen.
What's happening isn't exposing a fault in a particular individual, that's way too convenient.
Not only they voted all of this, but keep believing this paranormal constitutional nonsense where winner-takes-all elections where you rule under no oversight, you have no opposition, and don't even depend on your own party support is actually a sane democratic system.
Of all the countries that slid in authoritarianism during the last 4 decades (from the Philippines to Russia, from Nicaragua to Belarus, etc) not one was a parliamentary republic.
All of them, literally all, where presidential republics.
Honestly I’ve been filled schadenfreude with as the American civic religion collapse. Even the right is giving it up as they view it as too obstructionist.
The silver lining in all this is that the American people might come out a bit less retarded. It’s been fascinating to see the explosion of political thought amongst Americans in the last few years.
The hypocrisy doesn't matter to them because it isn't (and never was) about the "ideals" of the Constitution, it is about punishing enemies.
I don't buy it, after January 6th and Trump getting re-elected, despite everything it will have to get much much worse before there's a conscious change.
We did. And if anyone would stop to actually analyze it, instead of just insinuating that we're all yucky poopooheads for doing so (in the futile attempt to shame us into stopping), they might come to understand why. Whatever the alternative is to how we're voting, as exemplified by Europe, we don't want it. Maybe there are more options besides those two, but no one's offered those or even described what they could be. Europe certainly hasn't.
>not one was a parliamentary republic.
And thank god that we're not one then. We'd truly be hopeless.
So, rhetorical question: was Hitler a fascist during the failed Munich coup? Or did he suddenly became one when he was appointed chancellor? Are we not allowed to see what’s in front of our eyes until they build gas chambers?
On a different level I've been unsure whether it'sgood to call it facsism. But it's effectively at least a stepchild.
Ok, but who is calling everything fascism? He's talking about one particular country at a particular time.
Fascism cannot exist without internal enemies, nationalist authoritarianism can. If your president/dictator is whining about internal enemies that infiltrated the government and capitalist society to bring it down, congratulation, it's not simple nationalist authoritarian tendencies, it's fascist tendencies.
Basically: if you add an "interior enemy" narrative to a right-wing authoritarism, you have fascism.
The thing is, fascism has always been a bit of a loose term. It doesn't have a strict meaning. It was invented by one guy to name his government, not describe it analytically.
Mussolini invented the word "fascismo" to describe his movement, Fasci Italiani di Combattimeto.
So any use of "fascism" outside this one instance is by loose comparison to his government (because tight comparison would inevitably be unproductive: no government is exact the same as another).
The best we can do in a literalist manner is identify that the etymology is related to fasces, a bundle of rods tied together in Roman times (tying rods together make them far more difficult to snap in half), and recognize that the implication here is that a fascist government is focused on strength through unity.
It was then broadly adopted by Mussolini's adherents.
So, unless we only want to restrict "fascist" to an identifier for Mussolini's party and government, we have motivation to come up with elements of similar politics/government/partisanship by looking at the elements that made up Mussolini's movement:
- nationalism
- right-wing
- totalitarian
- violence as a means of control
etc.
Personally, I like Umberto Eco's delineation of what makes fascism (because he was an intellectual and grew up in Mussolini's Italy): https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...
He elucidates fourteen elements that make up fascism:
1. cult of tradition
2. rejection of modernism
3. cult of action for its own sake (i.e., intellectual reflection doesn't contribute value)
4. disagreement is treason
5. fear of difference
6. appeal to frustrated middle class
7. obsession with a plot (e.g., "there is a plot by foreigners to destroy us from within)
8. cast their enemies as both too weak and too strong
9. life is permanent warfare (i.e., there is always an enemy to fight)
10. contempt for the weak
11. everyone is educated to become a hero
12. machismo
13. selective populism
14. newspeak
I honestly feel like #11 is the only one we don't definitely have in the US right now. I wold prefer not to waste my time giving examples of the other thirteen, but if someone doesn't think it's obvious, I will respond at some point.
At its essence, if you take these fourteen points holistically, the vibe is "the 'right kind of' citizenry is in a constant state of hatred toward some other, and they should be pressured to take action without thought"
I think you misunderstand fascism. Fascism is not gassing certain minority group of people in concentration camps, that's called crimes against humanity. It might be an endgame to fascism if you are government that is allowed to commit those crimes without consequences, but the road to it is still fascism regardless whether you historically know how it ends. Calling press "the enemy of the people" as Trump did (also known as "Lügenpresse") IS a form of fascism. You don't need to push Democrats and immigrants into gas chambers to be full blown fascist. Overwhelming amount of actions taken by this democratic government ARE what most historians call fascism.
I think you're projecting.
Fascism, in political science, has some clear requirements: a government that controls all branches of power, lack of elections and effective ban of free speech and other political parties.
It also requires ideological aspects such as nationalism and far right politics, otherwise fascism would apply to far left dictatorships which didn't have these traits.
You really going to say that Trump and his Administration does not control all branches of power?
During Third Reich neither press was banned nor elections. Look it up, Google is still free to research. Unless of course you want to endup at conclusion that Nazism and Third Reich wasn't fascism.
There are a lot of reactionaries in today's political landscape.
I don't think it really fits, but the US is sliding towards illiberal democracy.
Ur-Fascism describes the ideology of MAGA exactly. Clearly there's some apprehension admitting this, it's a strong-man political ideology that has evolved many times organically throughout history. It doesn't necessarily imply that the regime is bad or evil or anything but the problem ends up being that the term exists because governments that adopt this ideology end up converging on the same unsavory behaviors despite any initial differences. That convergence is I think what a lot of Americans are afraid of because we're already doing most of them.
EDIT: Illiberalism is a tenet of fascism as well.
So yes, the US has enough of the hallmarks to be considered a fascist state. It doesn't need to tick every single box for that title.
Edit from Wikipedia: Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement that rose to prominence in early-20th-century Europe.[1][2][3] Fascism is characterized by support for a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.[3][4] Opposed to communism, democracy, liberalism, pluralism, and socialism,[5][6] fascism is at the far-right of the traditional left–right spectrum.[1][6][7] What constitutes a precise definition of fascism has been a longrunning and complex debate among scholars.
You can still speak against him, as far as I can tell. Compare this to, say, Mao Zedong. If you spoke against him, your life was forfeit, and even that's not fascism.
If this is one of those fuzzy definitions, it definitely isn't on the strong side. Where is the rampant militarism, the worship of death, and of the military?
ICE budget increases.
NG deployed domestically several times.
Renaming DoD to DoW.
Invasion of ~2 sovereign nations
See: the recent events in Minneapolis and the massive increase in funding for ICE. You don't have to look very hard to see what the new brownshirts are doing in blue cities and the MAGAs covering for them.
Oh also the federalization of the National Guard and US Marine deployment to Los Angeles. Things move quickly and people forget but that's exactly their playbook: flooding the zone with so much shit that it's hard to keep track.
Why do you think political ideology is an inborn trait? People don't like you because you actively choose to vote for things that bring about pain and suffering. Not because of your innate attributes.
If you forewarn about a developing Fascist movement, you're simply taking away the meaning from the word until it's too late and the Fascists take power.
You cannot call anything Fascist, for there may be something more Fascist that may need the power of the word.
But ah! We couldn't call out their fledgling movement full of dog whistles and double speak so no one was aware enough to stop them as a fledgling movement!
How's it working out for you, spending a third of your income on rent but not actually having any rights to stay in the property you rent, and a further third on "health insurance" that'll take your money and run, leaving you to choose between a lifetime of debt or just plain dying if you ever get ill?
No, that's called 'governance'. Literally the whole job of government is interfering in people's lives.
Take COVID for example. We were fine with minor breakouts prior to Trump administration. They came in and Trump saw we are spending $3.7 million on safety measures in Wuhan Lab, fund designated by Obama (here comes first red flag right?) By his standard you could not SEE the protection so he wanted to look like Champion and save tax payers 3.7 million by removing that protection. We all know what came next and boy was damage more financially painful than mere 3.7 mil?
Its like a person who doesn't wear a seat belt because they never been in a car accident so they don't see the point. If given power they would remove mandates to wear seatbelts and have insurance companies deal with the outcome.
Well, let's talk in some years how this worked out for you. If you don't want to anymore, we in europe are mostly happy to welcome smart talents.
I’m not against brining in talent that can teach us where we don’t have local talent. We can use them to jump start our own talent. I’m also not against extraordinarily talented business people who can add to the economy.
How about to serve the people it represents and governs over, rather than the small, loud, fascist minority that voted for them?
Only a minority are for this, according to polls.
Not sure what you're on about with voter ID, that sounds like a totally different topic you might have meant to post in a totally different thread, so I'll focus on this one.
But me as someone who dislikes all kinds of nationalism, I obviously would do both. Develope smart domestic scientists in collaboration with smart international students/scientists. Networking, collaboration, strengthening ties, connecting cultures despite of differences, you know all those humanistic ideals you actually find a lot in real science. Focus on the common goal, progress for all of humanity through new knowledge.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03657-6
But there are people who get nervous if their people stay too long in China
I can tell you're not in the business of training / employing people.
The best ROI is getting someone who is already trained (read you didn't pay for their K-12, their parents' teaching/maternity/healthcare) and just deriving value from their labor.
Please don't pretend like hiring scientists for a national lab has any effect on the colossal waste of human talent our nation is perpetrating—the problems begin so much earlier, and holding out for another American scientist at a national lab is doing nothing to address the ridiculous state of our human capital development.
(later notable entry: Andy Grove, Intel CEO, was born Andreas Grov:
"By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis' "Final Solution," the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint... [where] many young people were killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them")
Speaking of unutilized talents, other than Hollywood, I'd also add a whole bunch of folks in tech who could be useful for defending their own homeland (hence, their own & their kids' future) but are busy doing the generic commercial stuff.
I've tried reviewing online archives of German books/newspapers but it's obviously very time consuming. The large LLM:s don't seem to index this area sufficiently.
I don't think that's entirely valid. Nonetheless, there is enough overlap that the question keeps getting raised.
So... perhaps that's what you're missing?
The age of counter productive selfishness which escalates to national and international politics.
It mades all the sense in the world. It is terrible, but it makes sense.
They have brought incalculable shame and future suffering on the US.
More problematic than my own ridicule is what this will portend for US science and the US for leading science research. We must fight to keep the US a destination for cutting edge science and research and one way to do that is to attract the best and brightest from all parts of the globe.
A full scholarship to somebody that decides to move back to their country because of racism and xenophobia still directly benefits the US if that research was done here. The smartest students in the world passing on the US does not help the US. With more policies like this the smartest students in the US might move to other countries so they can work with a larger pool.
It's called brain drain, and doing the rest of the world the favor of putting on the brakes is something that would be quite far out on the spectrum you'd call "woke" if it was done for the reasons one would arrive at when really thinking it through (which clearly has not happened)
So now all the world’s best and brightest scientists will move to China where they’ll be welcomed in open arms, enjoy living in a modern society with affordable electric cars, the world’s premier high speed train network, glimmering new subway systems, and ample affordable housing.
They’ll work on cutting-edge research projects that receive ample funding and support while American scientists wrestle with a federal government torn apart by anti-intellectual strongmen.
You ever see a Tesla robot demo like this? https://youtu.be/mUmlv814aJo
Are we tired of winning yet? It sounds like we are beyond tired of winning, we’d rather lose from here on out.
Seems like Russia and the USA are hell-bent on destroying themselves fighting forever wars to allow China and the EU to take the reins as the beacons of global stability and strength.
Large scale movements are much easier.
That said, China is sponsoring lots of foreign students from belt and road countries to come there and learn Chinese, so its a work in progress.
They'll also get to experience as much or more racism than they would have in America, but likely far more racism. In America you find racism in some (usually rural) areas, and people who are very accepting in other areas (big cities where most science research is typically done). I'm not sure China is going to be the easiest place to build a life for foreigners.
By this measure, America is now greater than ever.
Of course, it's convenient to pretend that Trump is building a racist dictatorship with a Gestapo, and that's why no one wants to move to the US. But the true is that the number of people around the world who would like to move to the US is higher than ever. Especially when the current administration is trying to purge society of foreign criminals.
> So now all the world’s best and brightest scientists will move to China
Yes, of course. It's practically the same thing. The only reason scientists go to China is because they are not allowed into the US.
What you're effectively proposing is to prefer Americans with mediocre academic performance over top-tier international talent.
Now that they have these restrictions in place, the USA will go from worst to best with the help of highschool-dropout equivalents who fudge their way through the interview and then complain about more than 2-3 hours of hard work per day (and demand 2-3 times the pay for the privilege). #winning !!!
By the way, would you mind linking to some of your research scientist job postings, so such folks can apply to work for you? I'm sure you can't wait to hire them, just like everyone else, right?
Sure. It's cheaper - now. Might not continue being that cheap. What prevents Anthropic from jacking up prices once the field is consolidated.
Plus, you're forgetting that anyone on an H1B visa still has to buy their food in the USA. While in the US, they contribute for good and for bad to the economy.
I see so many people complaining about H1Bs at tech jobs. At least the H1Bs pass the interviews!
Disclaimer: born and raised in the US myself.
The leetcode nature of the whole process doesn’t lend itself to be motivating for people who aren’t really hungry for a job. As a US citizen you can say fuck it, I don’t need to deal with this shit. As an H1B you’re forced to deal with it otherwise you need to leave the country.
I’ve hired plenty of sharp and talented folks who were born here.
I am saying that our culture generally has resulted in fewer talented folks than the H1B population because we have a cultural focus on education.
For example, it is culturally acceptable in the US to get poor grades throughout K-12.
I will answer this question honestly. I used to be friends with a group of PhD students work worked in labs. Every week I heard their complaints. One relayed a story in which a Chinese lab mate / co-worker was refusing to following their boss (PI) directions or request, and shared secret results with another Chinese student in a competing lab.
- Their boss (the PI) had asked the Chinese student to train other labmates on some specific testing methods, they refused.
- The Chinese PhD student would simply ignore the PI emails.
- Then magically their study results end up leaked to another Chinese PhD candidate.
Chinese PhD types can 'buy' their way into labs. They have so much money no one wants to turn them away. Only the government can force it.
Most people have no idea what day-to-day life is actually like in PhD life / labs. It's a lot less "science" and way more "human drama" than you could imagine.
> Chinese PhD types can 'buy' their way into labs. They have so much money no one wants to turn them away.
The way it works in the US is that labs pay the PhD students, not the other way around. I have never heard of a student paying the lab, ever.
I think this makes sense from a national security perspective (although I doubt there is any scientist coming from these countries who are working on sensitive projects, maybe except China). Since there is too much trouble to figure out who is a spy, might as well ban all of them for the moment.
I do feel a strong nostalgia about the globalization era between the 90s and the 2010s, when I spent most of my life. But I understand it comes to an end, and I'm going to spend my second half of life in a much more splintered world.
I can understand a clearly communicated need for additional security requirements. But NIST operates almost totally in open science mode, with the main exceptions of being industry cooperative agreements. I don’t think this move to shed international researchers by reneging on commitments from the lab has been at all justified from a security standpoint.
> Researchers from lower risk countries have been told they could lose access beginning in either September or December if at that point they have been at the lab more than 2 years or, under a waiver, 3 years.
In other words: they're also looking to bar foreign nationals outside of that quoted list, which to my mind is less understandable.
A better plan would be to encourage skilled immigration and offer compelling benefits and stability like family visas, free movement, and so on. That way, the best people would make their contributions to science and society here. It’s actually a masterstroke because it deprives other countries of their best people.
The current administration is filled with weak men and therefore chose policies that look “strong” but are actually rooted in personal insecurity
As a side note (tangentailly related) I wonder if the US would have gained nuclear capabilities if it wasn't for foreign scientists.
> The changes are part of proposed rules aimed at increasing security that would limit, to 3 years, the maximum length of time visiting international researchers can work at NIST.
If researchers know that they cannot stay in the US permanently and will be forced to return to their home country in a few years, it guarantees that they must maintain ties to that home country and dramatically increases their incentive to spy. What would you do if your government asked you to spy during a temporary stay abroad, and threatened you with arrest upon your return if you refuse?
Does it? AFAIK NIST doesn't work on national security relevant research.
> Keep in mind though that the internment was based on 'race' and 'ethnicity'. This action is based on citizenship a
You say this like it's a meaningful distinction?
I mean it is unfair for sure but it's not your given right. If for example Chinese are literally breaking their law when they refuse to spy what else can you do?
The CPC political are the old centre-right PC party that combined with more right secessionist and (evangelical) Christian political parties.
Harper is still lurking in the shadows and pulling strings decade after being ousted as Prime Minister.
Do you mean he still has an impact or he is actively impacting things now?
This is the sort of "high agency", not waiting for permission mentality that works great for a startup thats making tinder for cats, but is really bad for foundational institutions that provide a critical service to not just the nation but humanity in general. I feel like musk and his DOGE initiative infected the government with this move fast and break things bullshit. Or they were at least correlational with it
This was first reported at least a week or two ago and only now are they getting aroun dto thinking about making it an actual rule (which takes time and process). The rules that aren't really rules for plausible deniability serve several purposes including normalizing compliance in advance.
I'll set aside opinions of the rule because people can really feel differently about the long and short term balance of security and soft power...but not rule rules is an approach to government I really struggle to see both sides of.
That's my guess anyway.
And as a bonus upreme court practically ruled president can be lawless as he pleases.
SCOTUS: Nothing Trump does is illegal.
Trump: "does illegal things"
Courts: You can't do this, it is illegal.
Trump: "ignores courts"
Courts: "shocked pikachu face"
ICE came into Maine with almost 2000 "targets". They arrested about 200 people. They ended up bragging about 17 "bad guys", and even that list is possibly filled with lies.
Some of the 200 arrested that weren't actually immigrants include a brown man who passed a background check and flew to Texas recently to fulfill immigration requirements to work for our local Law Enforcement. It includes tons of people who are legal residents and had papers on their person to that effect. Those papers are often left behind when the person gets kidnapped, which includes an unmarked van filled with ICE nuts screeching in front of someone's SUV in city traffic, jumping out, breaking the window to the SUV, dragging the man out, and speeding off, leaving a still running SUV sitting in the middle of the street, with papers. A literal kidnapping scene from a movie, but sure, totally normal and upstanding law enforcement activity. Our own cops, not exactly liberals, are finding it hard not to publicly call them stupid assholes. These cops are mostly Trump voters.
Don't stick your head in the sand and cry when people point out how uninformed you are. Their entire operation is almost entirely false positives. They've sent people who live here legally to other countries without authority.
If the DNC has chosen this hill to die on, I don't think they're going to do anywhere as near good as they should do in November given Trump is engaging in some extremely unpopular and foolish behavior that people, again going beyond partisan lines, could easily rally together against.
Exactly that is happening in places ICE focuses on. Kawanaugh stops with, like, beating or multi day/week/months imprisonment are a thing.
With legal immigrants, strategy seems to be to hold them in as bad conditions as possible until they sign off own deportation.
A quick search [1] on this topic showed 50 people have been wrongfully detained. Even if we increase that figure substantially, it implies an extremely high success rate, which isn't really possible if you're just engaging in widespread fishing expeditions.
[1] - https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
Why are we assuming either/both good faith and competence here? Is there anything about the policymaking of this administration that lends credence to that hypothesis? Are there pre-existing policy proposals you're imagining that have weighed pros and cons about this? Existing abuses you're imagining that this curtails?
No, let's be real here: this is yet another impulsive idea that some crank sold the president/cabinet on.
There is obviously a breakdown in either communication or understanding here. I have assumed neither good faith nor competence. On the contrary, the strategy I supposed above would be in bad faith and a symptom of incompetence.
Deporting researchers from every country to make it look like they aren't ethnically targetting people is in bad faith, and resorting to such measures instead of simply identifying and deporting the problematic individuals demonstrates their incompetence.
So even if the goal was to prevent chinese from spying on US companies, it's too little, decades too late, because China is now at the very top too.
I know a handful of folks who worked at them, and then found a more permanent position in the US.
If you mean internationally, there are some, mostly from Africa.
China spends a lot of money on international Chinese education. According to some , the top schools are now Chinese.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/06/18/...
Honestly the best thing about America, historically has been diversity. Mei can come here and become American within a few years. That’s only possible in America( and probably Canada too).
But now we don’t want international students. The world’s smartest will go elsewhere.
People were sold on that and many bought it. And now here we are living in the aftermath of us propping up systems incongruous to our own and living it down. It comes down to jockeying politicians like J Kerry and company who pretend they work for the people but in all honesty only work for themselves (remember Kerry never threw out his own war medals but rather reproductions he bought in the PX). Jane Fonda, her vanity sunk the nuclear energy industry for fifty years.
The first extreme begins with a true premise, but arrives at a false conclusion. The premise: as with manufacturing, the US should be minting more of its own scientists.
This is true. The US should have a more robust manufacturing base of its own. It should be educating more scientists.
However, the conclusion does not follow, namely, that the US should ban collaboration with, invitation, or employment of foreign scientists.
You don't build such things by going cold turkey. You cannot rebuild American manufacturing overnight, and you can't increase the number of home-grown scientists overnight either. This takes time and requires deeper shifts in the culture.
The second extreme is one that denies the premise above, or at least seems to deny its importance.
Collaboration with foreign scientists is good. That is unquestionable. There's also nothing wrong with attracting scientists. The problem is not collaboration or attracting talent, but rather a kind of parasitism that tries to make up for a country's own deficiencies in this manner as a permanent policy.
> Researchers from lower risk countries have been told they could lose access beginning in either September or December if at that point they have been at the lab more than 2 years or, under a waiver, 3 years.
There are enough "enemies of the people" in the US at the moment that the MAGA leadership doesn't have to go after American citizens.
There's been rhetoric about how some Americans are not "real americans" but America seems a way off 1934 yet, and they're going about it in a different order. History never repeats, but it usually rhymes
Tell that to any trans person that is an American citizen. They are literally trying to make "trans" into a terrorist designation.
Tell that to the many Latino American citizens who have been arrested by masked armed ICE agents, thrown into unmarked cars and taken away simply because of the color of their skin.
They have shown you who they are, over and over and over... Makes it much easier to avoid them.
I think I've now reached the point where it doesn't matter. Capitalism itself has made maintaining any kind of technological or scientific edge impossible. You don't need to break into some lab or plant sleeper agents or even coerce someone who has family back in the home country. No, it's far simpler than that.
When the US developed the atomic bomb some in American policy and military circles thought the Soviets would never get the bomb or it would take 20 years. It took 4. The Soviet hydrogen bomb was detonated th eyear after the US detonated ours.
In that case, the Soviets did run a sophisticated operations but also a bunch of people just gave them stuff for ideological reasons.
Let's compare that to EUV. The US restricted both the export of EUV lithography machines from ASML to China as well as the most advanced chips. The second was a mistake (IMHO) because it created a captive market for Chinese alternatives and it became clear to China that it was in their national security interest not to be dependent upon the US for chipmaking or chipsd.
Now China doesn't need to do anything sophisticated. It just needs to throw a bunch of money at some key reserarchers and engineers from ASML and elsewhere and say "hey, come work for us". What are you going to do?
Also, the US likes to paint this picture that China engaged in industrial espionage. And maybe they did. But they did so with the full knowledge and cooperation of US businesses who outsourced to China knowing this was going to happen but hey, it increased short-term profits, so who cares?
At the same time as the US cuts science funding so Jeff Bezos can be slightly wealthier, Chinese universities are surging in global rankings for research [1].
There's no getting this genie back in the bottle. It's too late.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/us/harvard-global-ranking...
Which was rather infamously not used in the actual research but was gatekept and used to verify the work of the domestic scientists.
At the same time as the US cuts science funding so Jeff Bezos can be slightly wealthier, Chinese universities are surging in global rankings for research [1].
This is the crux of the issue.
We've allowed extremely short term capitalistic interests of the wealthiest of the wealthiest to dictate our national policy in a great many areas, including taxation, academics, immigration, etc.
I liken the situation to a game of chess - on one hand, you have a team of Grandmasters and a supercomputer taking the time to evaluate each move and understand the positives and negatives of any possible move. On the other hand, you have a pigeon, who is there because someone who has already been the beneficiary of tremendous luck has convinced their side that putting a pigeon on the board is good for everyone involved.
Guess you don't pay much attention. The administration has been stripping citizenship from naturalized citizens left and right.
They simply don't give a fuck.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/chinese-billionaires-surrogacy-p...
We really need to wake up. China, India, etc. are walking all over us and we're still acting like it's the 1950s.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2024-03-01/pdf/2024-0...
EO 14117 resulted in 6+ months of work for my team
I know the administration was already doing that and largely xenophobic, it just also makes sense now that the same administration went to war
I think there are of course valid security concerns and this could be logical solution free of way more problematic issues of dealing on case by case basis.
On the other hand this will play more to people choosing some other country to advance their science aspiration and slowly but surely erode pool of talent for the US to help it stay dominant.
Practically the US have used people like Wernher von Braun on good scale and very sensitive areas and it worked just fine for the country. Qian Xuesen might of course have couple of words on the subject of course
Here to save our country from a communistic plot
Join the John Birch Society, help us fill the ranks
To get this movement started we need lots of tools and cranks