In May 1933, Nazis burned some tens of thousands of books across Germany in the Aktion wider den undeutschen Geist, or “action against the un-German spirit.” This not only included books from universities that were considered “un-German,” particularly those written by Jews, leftists, and foreigners, but also attacks against research institutes like the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the Institute for Sexual Science. The institute’s founder, Magnus Hisrchfeld, a gay Jewish man born in Germany, had his citizenship revoked.
After a week of astonishing political arson at the United States’ National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and other grant-giving bodies of the federal government, the Trump administration on Friday began the real work. Online public databases at the Centers for Disease Control and other scientific bureaus began vanishing, one by one. The casualties so far include the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which tracks teen social and health outcomes, the NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health, and the CDC’s HIV Surveillance System. According to reporter Ryan Broderick, the entire CDC website will be taken down soon. All instructions at the CDC are being delivered verbally. Nothing in writing.
I hope I don’t offend anyone by saying that this is a book burning.
How else to describe any of this? A generation of knowledge is being trashed at lightning speed. Every grant coming out of the National Science Foundation is now being reviewed for alignment with federal priorities. The NIH has been thrown in a ditch, and the NSF is so fundamentally broken that scientists are in danger of getting evicted from their homes. Any mention of pronouns, gender, inclusivity, trans people, or diversity is being extirpated from the diction of the federal government at a galloping pace. On Saturday, the CDC ordered its own papers in submission be retracted so the regime can make sure they do not use “forbidden terms” like “gender” or “non-binary.”
The Trump administration’s actions, taken with the kind of swiftness normally reserved for putting out a fire, is not just indefensible but a kind of moral gravitational inversion, where good and evil have changed places and trans and queer people, groups who make up a fraction of a fraction of the population and whose top desire is to be left alone, bear the full force and fury of the most powerful nation on Earth.

It is extremely difficult for me to see the difference between wild, unrepentant Nazi students, professors, soldiers, and politicians burning books in Berlin’s Opernplatz and the almost gleeful spree that the Trump administration cut through the world’s best instruments of research at the NIH, NSF, and CDC.
One of the dictates of political discourse in my lifetime has been to avoid comparisons to Nazi Germany, because that level of evil was so cold and so thorough that it could not be replicated. While we have not progressed to concentration camps (yet), the destruction of knowledge that doesn’t align with party goals, the backing of the wealthy elite to facilitate political corruption, and the scapegoating and persecution of peaceful minority populations—once Jews, Romani, communists, queer people, now immigrants and queer and trans people—is nothing if not directly out of the Nazi playbook.
If you prefer to still avoid the word “Nazi,” that’s fine. This is the road map of autocrats and dictators everywhere, regardless of their specific type of bellicosity. It is playing out the same way in Hungary under Viktor Orban. The same way in Erdogan’s Turkey, and in China’s handling of epidemiological data.
If we must live in a time when Nazis are unrepentantly back in the public eye and a vocal white supremacist can fearlessly sieg hiel in front of God and everybody, I think it is best to resurrect the language of the 1940s. We are hearing new phrases every day to help cope with this world, like “cooperation in advance,” which is great, but the old language still works. If they feel free to flaunt their open evil, their corruption, their naked contempt for their neighbors, it’s the bare minimum to identify the Trump administration as fascists. 1940s-style eugenics is on the rise. The regime will likely attempt atrocities. The time will likely soon come of snitches and collaborators.
This, above all else, is a time of fear. Doctors are loath to practice medicine in states with abortion restrictions for fear of prosecution, even if abortions remain technically legal. The same tactics are at play in the nation's institutes of science. Trump is an attempted autocrat erasing progress unimpeded. And while the federal government can only directly attack the agencies they control—not only the CDC, NIH, and NSF and the outside scientists they fund, but the Departments of Agriculture, Labor, Education, Energy, and Defense that all do scientific research—the intended effect is to terrify by extension every scientist, immigrant, and the country’s trans, non-binary, and queer people—now all but branded Untermenschen.