The following is very important news about the Trump White House’s unfolding war against biomedical/disease-cure research in the United States. But the set up is a bit complicated. So I want to note both the complexity and the importance in advance, because I want to really encourage you to read the set up and the details. It’s important stuff and most of it remains unknown to the public, though a few threads of the story have been published.

Back in late March and early April, the Trump administration announced grant freezes against a series of elite private universities, all notionally tied to charges of lax vigilance against antisemitism. The targeted universities eventually included Brown, Columbia, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Cornell and Northwestern. Harvard eventually sued the administration. Princeton has decided to fight the cuts but hasn’t sued. But most of the universities have generally kept quiet about what they’re doing. And in most cases what that means is that they’re negotiating with the administration and trying to keep their faculties quiet to avoid antagonizing anyone during those notional negotiations.

Two days ago, I wrote about a pattern operating largely under the radar in the President’s war against higher education. We know about the general grant freezes on about half a dozen elite universities. Then there are countless other grant terminations across a much larger group of universities. One of the complexities of this story is that there are so many different versions of cancellations and terminations going on, it’s hard to figure out which is which. It’s just as hard deciphering to what extent the differences even matter. There are ones tied to prohibited words and concepts (DEI, transgender); there are ones tied to targeted universities; others are terminated on generic efficiency grounds; others are canceled for no clear reason. Are these categories even meaningful or is that all just more smoke and mirrors and distraction?

I want to start this week with a comment about the meta-news environment. It’s a point that may not surprise you. But it shapes everything we’re seeing today and does so with an uncanny silence. Quite simply, lots and lots of things are not being said or reported because people are afraid to say them. “Afraid” may be too strong a word in some cases, though the fuzzy, murky spectrum separating “fear” from something more like calculation is a key feature of what is happening. I’m far from the first to note this. But when people do note it it doesn’t get a lot of attention because there’s not a clear empirical basis for it. What’s your basis for noting, at a society-wide level, what people aren’t saying? How do you prove — or, perhaps better to say, illustrate — that reality? And yet it is happening and it’s not difficult to see it observationally if you look closely in any one place.