Welcome to the Era of Big Stupid in America

Here in America, we do things big and lethal. Big Tobacco could have arisen only from North Carolina soil, the U. S. government’s generous price-support programs, and Americans’ mile-wide self-destructive streak. The development of the interstate highway system in the 1950s surely helped the Big Three automotive companies—GM, Ford, and Chrysler, which is now Stellantis—and our aversion to high-speed rail continues to work to their advantage. Massive government grants have allowed Big Pharma to become a trillion-dollar industry, though not a nimble enough one to have called dibs on “Stellantis” for the name of an erectile-dysfunction medication.

But these are times of austerity in the wealthiest country the world has ever known, and we’re cutting back. Not on defense contracts or presidential golf outings, of course; those are vital to national security. Instead, we’re canceling scientific studies, research grants, university financial-aid programs, health care for the neediest, foreign aid, and more. At the same time, we’re handing our institutions to people who have no idea what to do with them besides starve them to death. And we’re taking a defensive posture against the world’s smartest and most ambitious international students. The immediate result is that America’s greatness is missing in action.

But we are still smart enough to know that nature abhors a vacuum, and something has already moved into the void left behind by our loftiest goals, highest standards, and long-standing dominance in education and entrepreneurship.

It’s Big Stupid. And it’s going to be the death of us.

Here’s the skinny: Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have, by their estimate, slashed federal budgets to the tune of $150 billion. That’s far short of the $2 trillion that was initially promised, but it’s still a lot. (And honestly, adjusting for ketamine grandiosity, 7.5 percent of the initial promise feels just about right.) A great deal of these cuts have come from the science sector: research programs, grants, and scholarships. Trials of cures for cancer and AIDS have been frozen, just as those cures seem tantalizingly within reach.

Harvard University sued to unfreeze the federal funding for its research, and for its insolence it is being punished. The Trump administration is attempting to revoke the university’s ability to enroll international students. It’s going back and forth in the courts, but it is a test run for what this administration will try at other academic institutions. For now, among other things, it results in your having to hear the name “Harvard” almost as often as if you were talking to someone who went to Harvard.

The students and scientists we aren’t firing, we’re intimidating. While the purge plays out, an overzealous U. S. Customs and Border Protection department is chilling international students’ and workers’ freedom of speech. In modern-day America, “free speech” has come to mean “the ability to say the r-word on a podcast without anyone reprimanding you for it on social media,” but it turns out to be a broader concept than that. It is the right to express opinions without the threat of retaliation from the government. And that foundational right is being revoked.

For example, students seeking educational visas in the United States will be required to make their social-media profiles public to allow immigration officials to review their posts for signs of criticism of the United States. This does make sense: People who have been loudly and viciously critical of America are a potential threat to our freedom and do need to be kept out. They could turn out to be violent terrorists, or Donald Trump on the campaign trail. It’s just too risky.

To penalize mockery of America’s leaders, at a time when accurately describing America’s leaders is indistinguishable from mocking them, is simply unfair. We put a JD Vance before the world and we ask its smartest young people to refrain from making fun of him? This feels like entrapment.

And then there’s the case of Kseniia Petrova, the Harvard medical researcher who was arrested on charges of trafficking the frog embryos she’d brought to the United States from France for research into treatments for aging because she did not declare them on her customs forms. Petrova was detained for four months in Louisiana. For frog embryos. She’s out now and awaiting trial, but she’s not sure she wants to stay and continue her research in the United States, and nobody with a brain bigger than a frog embryo could blame her.

When you make smart and ambitious young people feel unwelcome in America and give them no indication that they’ll have a job in this country at all—much less one that can’t be eliminated with a keystroke, much less one that would be free from the input of Eric Trump—they may eventually decide not to come here. The innovation and brainpower have to go somewhere, and the rest of the world is making our brain drain their gain. Australia has introduced a new Skills in Demand visa to streamline the process of repatriating skilled migrants. It is dangerous to allow Australia to get an edge on the United States in scientific research when they are already so much better at flirting than we are. They cannot be allowed to poach our talent and have a cooler version of football. We cannot afford to allow Australia to become a rival, because then they may become our enemy, and that would make them even sexier.

A young scientist is faced with a choice: You could live in fear of being sent to the gulag for your frog embryos not having their citizenship papers in order, or you could go live in a place like Australia, where you’re valued and well compensated, where your lifesaving work is free of political manipulation, and where Chris Hemsworth is a 6. Who wouldn’t take that deal?

The innovation is going away, and so is the money. Whatever start-ups these rejected students and researchers start up will be started up in another country. Whatever international university welcomes them will get those big donations once these people get rich. This will take a generation to fix, at least. We won’t be able to reverse the exodus on a dime, because when we prove that we can go back to the Dark Ages just as fast, we lose people’s trust. This is not like Cheers, where you can lose a Shelley Long, gain a Kirstie Alley, and keep on moving. This is like taking over Friends, firing all six friends, and replacing each of them with Aaron Rodgers.

American stupidity is nothing new. We are the country that gave the world trickle-down economics, Operation Enduring Freedom, and the thing where you put a visor on your head backward. But we’ve really stepped it up a couple notches this year. We are no longer anti--intellectual. We are actively anti-intellect. Close your eyes and imagine what would happen if the idea of seat-belt laws had been introduced into the country now. You know exactly which of your high school friends would performatively launch himself through a windshield on Instagram to show he was an alpha, and you’re lucky if you can think of only one.

Maybe it’s that our information ecosystem has been pulverized by algorithmically driven social media, maybe the endumbifying effects of defunding NPR and PBS have been instantaneous and retroactive, or maybe the fact that Love Island started as a British television format rather than an American one has us worried we’re losing our edge. But man are we bringing it on the stupid tip this year.

You have to wonder whether it’s not just a random series of careless choices. You have to wonder whether the cost of lost American innovation is lower than the benefit of a dumber, more confused, and more easily led population. You also have to wonder what you would do differently if that’s exactly what you wanted.

Like Big Tobacco, Big Stupid has its fingers on just about every lever of power in the United States. It’s massive, and it’s focused, and it’s terrifyingly effective. And like Big Tobacco, Big Stupid works in service of a product that can only kill us.

At least a cigarette looks cool.