A new obscurantist storm threatens the world of knowledge

In the political life of a country, there is no more reactionary attitude than repressing knowledge.

This is the obscurantist offensive being carried out by Donald Trump against the "rebel universities" in the United States, Javier Milei in Argentina, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and Xi Jinping in China, but also by Brazil during the Jair Bolsonaro administration, Great Britain in the post-Brexit period, and Poland while the PiS regime lasted until 2023.

This repression of knowledge is not limited only to the budget cuts practiced by autocratic governments to suppress academic, intellectual, and political rebellion in universities, but also includes ideological censorship, threats of dismissal, or outright dismissal of researchers and scientists. The method used by the White House was a widespread purge promoted by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, since he launched the Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE), but which he never personally directed. In total, it is estimated that between 3,500 and 8,000 scientists or teachers have been dismissed at the federal level since Trump came to power in seven university cathedrals of knowledge (Stanford, Columbia, MIT, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, UW, and Brown), which have also had to freeze contracts and implement staff cuts.

“It’s an attack on ideas rather than an offensive on innovation or science,” said astrophysicist Nicholas Flagey, who oversees the James Webb Space Telescope program.

The 2025 edition of the Academic Freedom Index (AFI) lists 34 countries that have seen a significant deterioration in the freedoms of university researchers or professors over the past decade. "These types of restrictions affect both academic restrictions and the autonomy of teaching or scientific research institutions," explains sociologist Joan Stavo-Debauge, who has studied Poland and other countries governed by illiberal or autocratic leaders.

The government's motivations also included accusations of anti-Semitism sparked by pro-Palestinian or campus protests, the desire to promote cultural or religious nationalism, fostering "patriotic" education, ideological control, and the neglect of social sciences deemed "radical or politically engaged."

The crusade against knowledge , which has intensified over the past 35 to 40 years, is not an isolated phenomenon. This new wave of obscurantism in the United States actually began in 2023—before Trump's return to power—under pressure from the most fundamentalist evangelical churches, which declassified 22,500 children's books from community and state libraries that addressed topics of history, science, racism, sexuality, or gender that violated the narrative of a white, Christian, and heterosexual America.

The history of humanity is rich in examples of obscurantism , as occurred in the five centuries of the High Middle Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Inquisition (1478–1834), the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Italian fascism, Nazism in Germany or the Stalinist period in the USSR, during which science remained subordinate to ideology.

The most serious cases occurred in Germany with the rise of the Nazis to power. The purges against "Jewish science," launched for racial and religious reasons beginning in 1939, were the most eloquent example of the persecution of intellectuals and scientists. The United States was the main beneficiary of the exodus of German and other European scientists, who played a decisive role in the Manhattan Project to manufacture the A-bomb, such as Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller. In other disciplines, the United States welcomed the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud; the most brilliant physicist of the modern era, Albert Einstein; and the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann, a pioneer of computing and game theory.

Trump's ideological persecution seems to have triggered the same phenomenon, but this time in reverse. At least 75% of scientists or researchers at major American universities "are tempted to work in Europe," according to a survey by Nature magazine. Due to the political climate prevailing in some universities, the renowned historian Timothy Snyder and researchers Marci Shore (an Eastern European specialist) and Jason Stanley (an expert on fascism) resigned from Yale to teach in Toronto, Canada. European universities are also in high demand, thanks to the attraction exerted by the Choose Europe program launched by the European Union (EU).

The main risk posed by the cultural war promoted by the triple alliance of conservative Republicans, the MAGA ( Make America Great Again ) electorate and fundamentalist evangelical churches is that, in the short term, it threatens to put an end to the golden age of technological supremacy in the United States and lose the innovation race to China, a crucial condition for maintaining global leadership.

The key to American success in technological innovation was the joint venture program launched at the end of World War II by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Only the federal government had the patience and means to fund the first major basic research projects. Private industry was incapable of doing it alone. “Silicon Valley became what it is today thanks to the colossal fortunes that the government contributed, particularly in the military electronics industry,” explains historian Margaret O'Mara in her book, *The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America*. Not coincidentally, the model conceived by Roosevelt was adopted by China in the last 20 years when it set the goal of becoming the world's leading power by 2050.

Until Trump launched his demolition plan, no American government had dared to question the foundations of knowledge that forged America's greatness. It's not difficult to understand the geopolitical impact that abandoning this policy could have.

In 2022, €673 billion of R&D investment came from the private sector and €164 billion from public funds, according to the latest report from the National Center for Scientific and Technical Statistics (NCSES) published in February. In its view, a reduction in public support of just 25% would translate into a 3.8% decline in GDP, comparable to the impact of the 2008 crisis.

The biggest beneficiary of this situation will be China, which has redoubled its efforts in technological innovation: its R&D investments, which until 2000 represented 4% of the global total, now total 26%, just two percentage points less than the United States, according to the OECD. The Australian think tank Strategic Policy Institute recognizes that, thanks to this enormous effort, China now masters 37 of the 44 critical technologies a country needs to become a dominant power.

In this context, the war on knowledge always entails serious political risks . History shows what happens when power fears the truth, when dogmas persist in denying scientific evidence, and when despots feel threatened by complexity.

According to