Day 331: Trump Censors Science

In yet another ass-backward, eye-rolling maneuver, Donald Trump’s team has directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s top public health agency, to stop using a list of seven specific words and phrases in the preparation for next year’s budget.

The curse words and phrases:

• fetus
• evidence-based
• science-based
• vulnerable
• entitlement
• diversity
• transgender

The CDC is a non-partisan agency employing over 10,000 individuals. The Trump administration has decided to be decidedly partisan when there’s no need to be.

For instance, for budgetary purposes, the CDC will now have to find a new way to describe their research into the effects of the Zika virus on fetuses. “Fetus” is merely the scientific term describing a prenatal human during a specific time period of development. Now, scientists and budget-makers will have to entirely avoid that word. For what purpose? To further the idea that a prenatal thing is already a human being instead of a fetus?

“Science-based” and “evidence-based” are out, too. Does the Trump administration not believe in science or evidence? Actually, probably better they don’t answer that.

Like a bizarro state, the administration has already returned for “correction” materials that use the words “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” and “diversity.”

There’s no reason for any of this, other than hack partisan attacks for the sole purpose of trying to push a right-wing agenda into something —public health and safety — that is decidedly apolitical.

It’s not exactly new information that Trump’s grasp on science is tenuous at best.

Still, if Putin or Erdogan or Kim or Assad directed one of their most important public safety agencies to whitewash certain words for political points, Americans would chuckle at the stupidity and mock the anti-science orthodoxy. When it happens at home, Republicans will find a way to defend it.

331 days in, 1131 to go

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