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Quinn: Living In A Potemkin World

Quinn: Living In A Potemkin World

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed,

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Quinn: Living In A Potemkin World

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ― George Orwell, 1984

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” ― George Orwell, 1984

I never thought I would experience the dystopian “fictional” nightmare Orwell laid out in his 1949 novel. Seventy-two years later and his warning about a totalitarian society, where mass surveillance, repressive measures against dissenters, mind control through government indoctrination and propaganda designed to convince the masses lies are truth, fake is real and the narrative can be manipulated to achieve the desired outcome of those in power, have come to fruition.

Everything is fake. I don’t believe anything I’m told by the government, the media, medical “experts”, politicians, military leadership, bankers, corporate executives, religious leaders, financial professionals, and anyone selling themselves as an authority on any subject matter. We are truly living in times of mass deception, mass delusion, and mass willful ignorance.

The term Potemkin Village comes from stories of a phony movable village built by Grigory Potemkin in the late 1700’s to impress his former lover, Catherine II, during her journey to Crimea in 1787. He supposedly erected fake villages along the banks of the Dnieper River, as her vessel sailed by, to impress her with the progress he was making on her behalf. After she passed, he would have the village disassembled and then reassembled further along downstream.

I guess this was an early version of fake news, though I am sure there were also plenty of falsities and propaganda in the newspapers of the time. But, in our current day, oppressors have taken lies, falsities, miss-truths, and propaganda to heights never conceived by Edward Bernays, George Orwell or Joseph Stalin.

Any semblance of a Constitutional Republic given to us by Franklin and his courageous fellow revolutionaries has dissipated, as decades of delusion, debt, decadence, and degeneracy have sapped any trace of revolutionary spirit, desire for freedom, love of liberty, or aspirations of self-reliance and self-responsibility among the masses. When you step back and observe how we got to this point in history, you realize it wasn’t a mistake, but a plan by those who control the levers of power, with a goal of accumulating immense riches and total dominion over those they consider nothing more than disposable chess pieces in their game of building a new world order.

We are nothing more than parasites to these tyrannical power-hungry satanical fiends. They have proven they will use any means necessary to achieve their evil ends. The last two years have pulled back the curtain to reveal the oligarch globalist bloodsuckers who have been draining the lifeblood from our nation. The enemies have been exposed by their lies and misdeeds.

For most of the past century the ruling class has been able to implement their methodical pillaging operation utilizing Huxley’s “soft” dystopian methods versus Orwell’s “hard” dystopian techniques. Huxley, who at one time was Orwell’s French teacher in high school, wrote a letter to Orwell shortly after the publication of 1984 where he put forth his vision of the future:

“Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”

As contemporaries, Huxley (Brave New World – 1931), Bernays (Propaganda – 1928), and Orwell (1984 – 1949) all agreed those wielding the power of government, whether seen or unseen, use propaganda techniques to mold the minds of the masses in ways conducive to keeping them in power. Huxley and Bernays believed people could be controlled through mind manipulation, materialism, entertainment, and pharmaceuticals. Orwell, in the wake of 65 million deaths in the space of seven years, and the Soviet totalitarianism in Russia, foresaw a future with a boot stomping on a human face forever.

From 1950 until 2000, Huxley and Bernays’ view held sway, as Americans were enthralled by consumption, sports, movies, technology, and the miracle of living far above their means through plentiful debt provided by Wall Street bankers and their Federal Reserve lackeys. We were so distracted by amusing ourselves, we allowed oligarchs and their highly compensated apparatchiks in government, the media, the military, and the corporate world to hijack and ransack our country for their enrichment.

Neil Postman in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death compares and contrasts Orwell and Huxley’s views of dystopian tyranny:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”

Since 9/11 the tables have turned. The implementation of the pre-written Patriot Act and initiation of the surveillance state, as revealed by Snowden and Greenwald, has ushered in a new Orwellian era where a truncheon to the skull and boot on the face supplements the endless technological distractions and incessant propaganda spewed by the legacy media networks and rising social media censorship cabal.

There has clearly been a coalescing of the government, Surveillance state, media, military, Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Business to seize the power, control and wealth of the planet and put it in the hands of the few. The Build Back Better marketing campaign, with the goal of a new world order, controlled by oligarchs like Gates, Soros, Bezos, Schwab, Zuckerberg, and Bloomberg, is not a wild-eyed conspiracy theory. It is a work in progress.

The level of brazen dishonesty and blatant criminality among those who portray themselves as leaders and experts in our debauched society has reached astronomical levels over the last two years. There are no trustworthy politicians. No trustworthy corporate executives. No trustworthy military leaders. No trustworthy scientists or academics. They have all been captured and are financially beholden to those controlling the purse strings.

It’s always about the money and power that comes from having money. If you are paid handsomely to lie, you will lie. The truth is meaningless to those who seek power and control. Suppression of the truth is more financially rewarding to those seeking world domination. This entire engineered pandemic scheme has exposed this fact.

A virus, released accidentally or purposely from a Chinese bio-weapon lab, funded by Anthony Fauci, was weaponized and marketed as the greatest threat to mankind in world history, as a means to cover-up a financial system ready to implode, unseat a president through fraudulent mail-in ballots, enrich the wealthiest men on the planet, test how far totalitarian measures could be pushed, and roll out of an experimental gene altering therapy that may or may not be part of a bigger population culling operation promoted by Gates, Schwab and the rest of the Davos crowd. What we do know is this virus only kills very old, very sick, and very obese people. It’s a virus with the largest marketing campaign in world history, paid for with your tax dollars.

With a 99.7% survival rate, there should have never been lockdowns, school closures, mandatory masking, vaccine mandates, or elevating criminal mass murderers like Fauci to sainthood status. The elderly in nursing homes and hospitals should have been protected. Instead, they were slaughtered by Democrat governors putting infected patients into their midst.

Safe and effective early treatment with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, but the corrupt medical “experts” were bribed by Big Pharma to push these untested, ineffective, dangerous vaccines on a fearful public with promises of a cure. More lies. The “vaccines” do not keep you from catching covid, spreading covid, being hospitalized with covid, or dying from covid. In other words, it is a complete and utter failure.

When you then see Fauci, Biden, Walensky and their Hollywood marketing machine demanding vaccine mandates and vaccine passports to entitle you to basic human rights, you realize this has never been about your health or the good of society. This dementia ridden joke, play acting as president, is doing the bidding of the invisible government, as documented by Bernays, in implementing a social credit system styled after the communist China totalitarians they admire.

The un-vaxxed will soon be treated like the Uyghurs in China, placed in internment camps until we see the light, unless we start to fight back NOW. The WEF cadre of captured politicians positioned in countries across the planet have been activated to implement the Build Back Better plot to achieve their goal of a new world order controlled by tyrannical oligarchs and their highly compensated bureaucrat servants.

They have been testing their totalitarian methods in countries with smaller populations (New Zealand, Australia) to see how far they can push their citizens before they push back. When the protests begin to get violent, they back off and pretend to reduce restrictions, then re-institute the lockdowns and restraints on freedom after hyping some new variant. As Bernays claimed, those in control of society know how to psychologically manipulate and mold the minds of the masses through the use of fear, greed, rewards, pain, threats and lies.

We have entered one of the most dangerous periods in world history, as this engineered crisis is being commandeered by sociopathic totalitarians to implement their warped demented plans to destroy the existing societal structures and economic systems in order to build back better under a centralized communistic authoritarian techno-gulag configuration designed to benefit the few at the top, while keeping a boot on the face of humanity forever. When you understand their end goal, much of the seemingly incomprehensible decisions being made by Biden and his handlers come into clearer focus.

It is difficult to step back and try to observe the current state of affairs in an impartial manner when those manipulating the narrative are intent on creating conflict, emotional reactions, anger, and outrage. Pitting us against each other and distracted by daily concocted outrage porn spewed by the completely captured corporate media outlets, allows the oligarchy (billionaires, bankers, politicians, mega-corps, Deep State) to continue their plunder and pillage crusade unhindered and undetected.

They are counting on their decades long social indoctrination program, known as the public school system, to keep the masses from thinking, questioning, or recognizing they are being screwed over the people they believe are looking out for their best interests.

Not only are the dark forces currently ruling the earth not telling the truth, but they have a far greater power in keeping silent about the truth and suppressing it when it rears its ugly head. The truth would set us free, so it is vital for the totalitarian propagandists to keep it from being heard or seen by the masses. Huxley realized during the last Fourth Turning that if you controlled the narrative and suppressed the truth, you could influence opinion much more effectively.

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.” – Aldous Huxley

The current batch of autocratic techno-propagandists have tools which make this truth suppression far easier than it was in the 1930’s and 1940’s. With six mega-corporations dominating the mainstream media outlets, they easily coordinate their messaging and can jointly ignore anything which undermines their predetermined narrative. The examples of ignoring, silencing, or censoring the truth over the last two years could fill hundreds of pages, but a few examples will suffice to make the point.

In September 2019, the financial system began to shudder and quake, with overnight repo rates of 10% indicating tremendous strain. The MSM kept silent as the Fed reversed their tightening and resumed QE to infinity. The press has never questioned the trillions created out of thin air by the Fed to prop up this debt bloated carcass, even as the economy surpassed the GDP before this engineered scamdemic. Why doesn’t 60 Minutes do an expose on why the Fed continues to keep interest rates at 0% when inflation is raging in excess of 10%? Complete silence on issues which hurt the average person the most.

The entire Russiagate Deep State coup against Trump was built on lies, misinformation and suppression of facts by the compliant co-conspirators in the media. Obama, Hillary, Comey, Biden, Brennan, Clapper and a myriad of other traitorous filth conspired against a sitting president and the media kept silent about the facts. The most blatant example of a complete cover-up of the truth by the MSM and the Silicon Valley social media censorship police was, and still is, crackhead Hunter Biden’s laptop during the final days of the presidential campaign.

There is unequivocal proof Hunter Biden and the Big Guy were shaking down foreign governments for cash, influence peddling, and threatening foreign leaders who dared to look into their slimy traitorous dealings. All of the left-wing media outlets either ignored the story or called it Russian disinformation, because they had to get Biden elected. Twitter and Facebook censored and banned anyone putting forth the facts of this story. Then issued fake apologies afterward.

But that was just the beginning. The halt to vote tabulations in the middle of the night in all the swing states, with Trump significantly ahead, was not reported by the press. Fake stories about burst pipes were promulgated. Vote counting irregularities and truckloads of missing ballots didn’t happen if the media didn’t say they happened. Video surveillance of fake ballots being added to the counts was not shown by the media outlets.

The Washington Post and NY Times just applied the same language about conspiracy theories and the most secure election ever to override the substantial factual evidence showing massive voter fraud in the key swing states. Whenever evidence was presented on social media platforms, the person was banned, and their evidence disappeared. Zuckerberg needed to make sure the $420,000 he spent to swing the election to Biden was not wasted. By not reporting on the Arizona audit results, the huge irregularities found never happened. Right?

Since the installation of Trojan Horse Joe, the level of silence, suppression and censorship of the truth has reached new heights. Of course, the worst attack on democracy since Pearl Harbor, and far worse than 9/11, was the armed selfie insurrection of January 6, during which no one was armed except the black cop who murdered an unarmed white woman. The media, who gleefully exposes every detail of a cop’s life when they immobilize a drug addled black criminal resisting arrest who died of an overdose, seemed completely uninterested in even trying to identify the cop who murdered Ashli Babbitt.

Silence benefited Biden as they spun the false narrative about the Capitol being attacked and Capitol police being murdered. Pelosi and her sidekicks “Shit My Pants” Nadler, “Crying” Chuck Schumer, “Fartman” “Fang Fang Banging” Swallwell, and “Bug Eyes” Schiff tried their darndest to elevate this milling about by idiots dressed in buffalo regale, FBI plants, and ANTIFA CNN correspondents to an insurrection, but were laughed at and ridiculed by anyone with eyes. Only the couple thousand people in the country, who still watch MSNBC and CNN, believed them.

These boobs, along with their FBI “undercover” domestic terrorists, were further discredited and ridiculed when they attempted to lure normal Americans into another trap at the J6 rally but failed miserably. These are the same people trying to make you believe the border is secure, and hundreds of thousands of third world parasites are not being shipped into swing states across the country. Just pretend it isn’t happening, don’t report on the invasion, and in the minds of the ignorant masses, it isn’t happening.

In Part Two of this article, I will document the never-ending blizzard of lies used to create enough fear and panic in the world from this pandemic of ignorance to initiate the globalist Great Reset agenda and how we need to fight back now before it is too late.

*  *  *

The corrupt establishment will do anything to suppress sites like the Burning Platform from revealing the truth. The corporate media does this by demonetizing sites like mine by blackballing the site from advertising revenue. If you get value from this site, please keep it running with a donation.

Tyler Durden Mon, 10/18/2021 - 16:30

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Spread & Containment

Health Officials: Man Dies From Bubonic Plague In New Mexico

Health Officials: Man Dies From Bubonic Plague In New Mexico

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Officials in…

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Health Officials: Man Dies From Bubonic Plague In New Mexico

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Officials in New Mexico confirmed that a resident died from the plague in the United States’ first fatal case in several years.

A bubonic plague smear, prepared from a lymph removed from an adenopathic lymph node, or bubo, of a plague patient, demonstrates the presence of the Yersinia pestis bacteria that causes the plague in this undated photo. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/Getty Images)

The New Mexico Department of Health, in a statement, said that a man in Lincoln County “succumbed to the plague.” The man, who was not identified, was hospitalized before his death, officials said.

They further noted that it is the first human case of plague in New Mexico since 2021 and also the first death since 2020, according to the statement. No other details were provided, including how the disease spread to the man.

The agency is now doing outreach in Lincoln County, while “an environmental assessment will also be conducted in the community to look for ongoing risk,” the statement continued.

This tragic incident serves as a clear reminder of the threat posed by this ancient disease and emphasizes the need for heightened community awareness and proactive measures to prevent its spread,” the agency said.

A bacterial disease that spreads via rodents, it is generally spread to people through the bites of infected fleas. The plague, known as the black death or the bubonic plague, can spread by contact with infected animals such as rodents, pets, or wildlife.

The New Mexico Health Department statement said that pets such as dogs and cats that roam and hunt can bring infected fleas back into homes and put residents at risk.

Officials warned people in the area to “avoid sick or dead rodents and rabbits, and their nests and burrows” and to “prevent pets from roaming and hunting.”

“Talk to your veterinarian about using an appropriate flea control product on your pets as not all products are safe for cats, dogs or your children” and “have sick pets examined promptly by a veterinarian,” it added.

“See your doctor about any unexplained illness involving a sudden and severe fever, the statement continued, adding that locals should clean areas around their home that could house rodents like wood piles, junk piles, old vehicles, and brush piles.

The plague, which is spread by the bacteria Yersinia pestis, famously caused the deaths of an estimated hundreds of millions of Europeans in the 14th and 15th centuries following the Mongol invasions. In that pandemic, the bacteria spread via fleas on black rats, which historians say was not known by the people at the time.

Other outbreaks of the plague, such as the Plague of Justinian in the 6th century, are also believed to have killed about one-fifth of the population of the Byzantine Empire, according to historical records and accounts. In 2013, researchers said the Justinian plague was also caused by the Yersinia pestis bacteria.

But in the United States, it is considered a rare disease and usually occurs only in several countries worldwide. Generally, according to the Mayo Clinic, the bacteria affects only a few people in U.S. rural areas in Western states.

Recent cases have occurred mainly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Countries with frequent plague cases include Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Peru, the clinic says. There were multiple cases of plague reported in Inner Mongolia, China, in recent years, too.

Symptoms

Symptoms of a bubonic plague infection include headache, chills, fever, and weakness. Health officials say it can usually cause a painful swelling of lymph nodes in the groin, armpit, or neck areas. The swelling usually occurs within about two to eight days.

The disease can generally be treated with antibiotics, but it is usually deadly when not treated, the Mayo Clinic website says.

“Plague is considered a potential bioweapon. The U.S. government has plans and treatments in place if the disease is used as a weapon,” the website also says.

According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the last time that plague deaths were reported in the United States was in 2020 when two people died.

Tyler Durden Wed, 03/13/2024 - 21:40

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Riley Gaines Explains How Women’s Sports Are Rigged To Promote The Trans Agenda

Riley Gaines Explains How Women’s Sports Are Rigged To Promote The Trans Agenda

Is there a light forming when it comes to the long, dark and…

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Riley Gaines Explains How Women's Sports Are Rigged To Promote The Trans Agenda

Is there a light forming when it comes to the long, dark and bewildering tunnel of social justice cultism?  Global events have been so frenetic that many people might not remember, but only a couple years ago Big Tech companies and numerous governments were openly aligned in favor of mass censorship.  Not just to prevent the public from investigating the facts surrounding the pandemic farce, but to silence anyone questioning the validity of woke concepts like trans ideology. 

From 2020-2022 was the closest the west has come in a long time to a complete erasure of freedom of speech.  Even today there are still countries and Europe and places like Canada or Australia that are charging forward with draconian speech laws.  The phrase "radical speech" is starting to circulate within pro-censorship circles in reference to any platform where people are allowed to talk critically.  What is radical speech?  Basically, it's any discussion that runs contrary to the beliefs of the political left.

Open hatred of moderate or conservative ideals is perfectly acceptable, but don't ever shine a negative light on woke activism, or you might be a terrorist.

Riley Gaines has experienced this double standard first hand.  She was even assaulted and taken hostage at an event in 2023 at San Francisco State University when leftists protester tried to trap her in a room and demanded she "pay them to let her go."  Campus police allegedly witnessed the incident but charges were never filed and surveillance footage from the college was never released.  

It's probably the last thing a champion female swimmer ever expects, but her head-on collision with the trans movement and the institutional conspiracy to push it on the public forced her to become a counter-culture voice of reason rather than just an athlete.

For years the independent media argued that no matter how much we expose the insanity of men posing as women to compete and dominate women's sports, nothing will really change until the real female athletes speak up and fight back.  Riley Gaines and those like her represent that necessary rebellion and a desperately needed return to common sense and reason.

In a recent interview on the Joe Rogan Podcast, Gaines related some interesting information on the inner workings of the NCAA and the subversive schemes surrounding trans athletes.  Not only were women participants essentially strong-armed by colleges and officials into quietly going along with the program, there was also a concerted propaganda effort.  Competition ceremonies were rigged as vehicles for promoting trans athletes over everyone else. 

The bottom line?  The competitions didn't matter.  The real women and their achievements didn't matter.  The only thing that mattered to officials were the photo ops; dudes pretending to be chicks posing with awards for the gushing corporate media.  The agenda took precedence.

Lia Thomas, formerly known as William Thomas, was more than an activist invading female sports, he was also apparently a science project fostered and protected by the athletic establishment.  It's important to understand that the political left does not care about female athletes.  They do not care about women's sports.  They don't care about the integrity of the environments they co-opt.  Their only goal is to identify viable platforms with social impact and take control of them.  Women's sports are seen as a vehicle for public indoctrination, nothing more.

The reasons why they covet women's sports are varied, but a primary motive is the desire to assert the fallacy that men and women are "the same" psychologically as well as physically.  They want the deconstruction of biological sex and identity as nothing more than "social constructs" subject to personal preference.  If they can destroy what it means to be a man or a woman, they can destroy the very foundations of relationships, families and even procreation.  

For now it seems as though the trans agenda is hitting a wall with much of the public aware of it and less afraid to criticize it.  Social media companies might be able to silence some people, but they can't silence everyone.  However, there is still a significant threat as the movement continues to target children through the public education system and women's sports are not out of the woods yet.   

The ultimate solution is for women athletes around the world to organize and widely refuse to participate in any competitions in which biological men are allowed.  The only way to save women's sports is for women to be willing to end them, at least until institutions that put doctrine ahead of logic are made irrelevant.          

Tyler Durden Wed, 03/13/2024 - 17:20

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Congress’ failure so far to deliver on promise of tens of billions in new research spending threatens America’s long-term economic competitiveness

A deal that avoided a shutdown also slashed spending for the National Science Foundation, putting it billions below a congressional target intended to…

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Science is again on the chopping block on Capitol Hill. AP Photo/Sait Serkan Gurbuz

Federal spending on fundamental scientific research is pivotal to America’s long-term economic competitiveness and growth. But less than two years after agreeing the U.S. needed to invest tens of billions of dollars more in basic research than it had been, Congress is already seriously scaling back its plans.

A package of funding bills recently passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden on March 9, 2024, cuts the current fiscal year budget for the National Science Foundation, America’s premier basic science research agency, by over 8% relative to last year. That puts the NSF’s current allocation US$6.6 billion below targets Congress set in 2022.

And the president’s budget blueprint for the next fiscal year, released on March 11, doesn’t look much better. Even assuming his request for the NSF is fully funded, it would still, based on my calculations, leave the agency a total of $15 billion behind the plan Congress laid out to help the U.S. keep up with countries such as China that are rapidly increasing their science budgets.

I am a sociologist who studies how research universities contribute to the public good. I’m also the executive director of the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science, a national university consortium whose members share data that helps us understand, explain and work to amplify those benefits.

Our data shows how underfunding basic research, especially in high-priority areas, poses a real threat to the United States’ role as a leader in critical technology areas, forestalls innovation and makes it harder to recruit the skilled workers that high-tech companies need to succeed.

A promised investment

Less than two years ago, in August 2022, university researchers like me had reason to celebrate.

Congress had just passed the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act. The science part of the law promised one of the biggest federal investments in the National Science Foundation in its 74-year history.

The CHIPS act authorized US$81 billion for the agency, promised to double its budget by 2027 and directed it to “address societal, national, and geostrategic challenges for the benefit of all Americans” by investing in research.

But there was one very big snag. The money still has to be appropriated by Congress every year. Lawmakers haven’t been good at doing that recently. As lawmakers struggle to keep the lights on, fundamental research is quickly becoming a casualty of political dysfunction.

Research’s critical impact

That’s bad because fundamental research matters in more ways than you might expect.

For instance, the basic discoveries that made the COVID-19 vaccine possible stretch back to the early 1960s. Such research investments contribute to the health, wealth and well-being of society, support jobs and regional economies and are vital to the U.S. economy and national security.

Lagging research investment will hurt U.S. leadership in critical technologies such as artificial intelligence, advanced communications, clean energy and biotechnology. Less support means less new research work gets done, fewer new researchers are trained and important new discoveries are made elsewhere.

But disrupting federal research funding also directly affects people’s jobs, lives and the economy.

Businesses nationwide thrive by selling the goods and services – everything from pipettes and biological specimens to notebooks and plane tickets – that are necessary for research. Those vendors include high-tech startups, manufacturers, contractors and even Main Street businesses like your local hardware store. They employ your neighbors and friends and contribute to the economic health of your hometown and the nation.

Nearly a third of the $10 billion in federal research funds that 26 of the universities in our consortium used in 2022 directly supported U.S. employers, including:

  • A Detroit welding shop that sells gases many labs use in experiments funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Defense and Department of Energy.

  • A Dallas-based construction company that is building an advanced vaccine and drug development facility paid for by the Department of Health and Human Services.

  • More than a dozen Utah businesses, including surveyors, engineers and construction and trucking companies, working on a Department of Energy project to develop breakthroughs in geothermal energy.

When Congress shortchanges basic research, it also damages businesses like these and people you might not usually associate with academic science and engineering. Construction and manufacturing companies earn more than $2 billion each year from federally funded research done by our consortium’s members.

A lag or cut in federal research funding would harm U.S. competitiveness in critical advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics. Hispanolistic/E+ via Getty Images

Jobs and innovation

Disrupting or decreasing research funding also slows the flow of STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – talent from universities to American businesses. Highly trained people are essential to corporate innovation and to U.S. leadership in key fields, such as AI, where companies depend on hiring to secure research expertise.

In 2022, federal research grants paid wages for about 122,500 people at universities that shared data with my institute. More than half of them were students or trainees. Our data shows that they go on to many types of jobs but are particularly important for leading tech companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Intel.

That same data lets me estimate that over 300,000 people who worked at U.S. universities in 2022 were paid by federal research funds. Threats to federal research investments put academic jobs at risk. They also hurt private sector innovation because even the most successful companies need to hire people with expert research skills. Most people learn those skills by working on university research projects, and most of those projects are federally funded.

High stakes

If Congress doesn’t move to fund fundamental science research to meet CHIPS and Science Act targets – and make up for the $11.6 billion it’s already behind schedule – the long-term consequences for American competitiveness could be serious.

Over time, companies would see fewer skilled job candidates, and academic and corporate researchers would produce fewer discoveries. Fewer high-tech startups would mean slower economic growth. America would become less competitive in the age of AI. This would turn one of the fears that led lawmakers to pass the CHIPS and Science Act into a reality.

Ultimately, it’s up to lawmakers to decide whether to fulfill their promise to invest more in the research that supports jobs across the economy and in American innovation, competitiveness and economic growth. So far, that promise is looking pretty fragile.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Jan. 16, 2024.

Jason Owen-Smith receives research support from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Wellcome Leap.

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