Mowing Down Everything That Stands In The Way Of Unreason

Republicans and their corporate overlords have a pretty clear agenda: to mow down everything that stands in the way of their unreasonable claims and policies.

Scientist overwhelmingly agree that humans influence the climate? Defund science.

Public schools teach curricula that include evolution but not creationism and it's younger sibling, intelligent design? Defund public schools.

Research shows that the risk of unwanted pregnancy in sexually active young women is to make cheap contraceptives available? Defund Planned Parenthood and sex education.

The list of such examples is endless.

The goal of the Republican Party and of its funders is to remove all obstacles to unfettered corporate domination of our lives, to create an endless reservoir of easily replaceable and uneducated laborers (hence the drive to push the cost of tuition up and to eliminate public education as we know it), to destroy critical thinking, to establish a social climate which makes it easier to control individuals by making them live in fear of real and imaginary threats, and to control people's sexuality, which--as Orwell understood--is the primitive seed and the last bastion of individual freedom.

It does not come as a surprise, then, that the great Republican minds that control the House of Representatives--in particular those that inhabit the House Appropriation Committee--have devised yet another scheme to demolish science that stands in the way of their goal. As the Huffington Post reports

The House Appropriations Committee is set to put the final touches on a funding bill Wednesday that proposes to slash the government's data collection arm by 25 percent -- a cut that economists and statistics experts say could end up costing taxpayers and businesses billions.

"It's essentially turning out the lights as economic policymakers are trying to do their work," said Andrew Reamer, a George Washington University professor who focuses on economics and U.S. competitiveness.

[...] the cuts in question target the Commerce Department's Census Bureau -- recently one of the bogeyman of the right. The cuts would take effect in October, leaving the bureau little time even to plan to mitigate the impacts.

[...]

"[The cuts] would have major, permanent impacts on the nation's economic and demographic statistics," the bureau said, according to Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), a member and past chair of the House Joint Economic Committee.

If numbers, real numbers, stand in the way of your plan, just stop collecting them, or weaken our ability to collect them and analyze them meaningfully. Then your opponents will have nothing on which they can base their criticism of your policies, because it will no longer be a case of what you say versus facts; it will be a case of he says, she says. Absent hard data, factual findings and scientific analysis truth will cease to have any meaning. That is what Republicans understand and what they have been working to achieve since at least the Reagan presidency. It's just a fact, and if they have their way, they'll make it disappear, too.