CDC: Unpublished manuscripts mentioning certain topics must be pulled or revised

https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-news-cdc-orders-mass-retraction

by KittenInABox • 1 year ago

844 467 1 year ago

insidemedicine.substack.com

ggm3• 1 year ago

I'm assuming at this point refusing will be a badge of honour but one which is terminal for federal funding, in this 4 year term if not longer. You would need very high confidence in your future career trajectory to do that.

We had a mini storm over government censorship of CSIRO science in Australia and it got pretty ugly, but this is much uglier.

If they do the same for NSF, earth sciences, DoE and AGW it's going to be pretty nasty.

I don't even have to agree with the science. This kind of mass bad-topic-ban is really unhelpful. I wonder if the editorial boards are also going to put up a fight? I can imagine some kind of "retracted because of Trump policy, not because the peer review process asked for it" markers.

Genetics, and Lysenkoism comes to mind. A stain on soviet science which echoed down the years.

seanmcdirmid2• 1 year ago

If they do give in though, they might face consequences after Trump’s term. The Supreme Court should definitely chime in quickly here, although the court is stacked way too heavily with conservatives who open to Trump’s new interpretation of the constitution.

ggm3• 1 year ago

Holding back science publication for national security is pretty well understood. I'd be amazed if the funding T&C doesn't have weasel words back to the sixties about requiring permission from the feds to publish, even if it was implicitly assumed most of the time.

nradov2• 1 year ago

I think this move by the administration is a bad idea but it's not necessarily illegal. Which federal law or Constitution article do you think is being broken here?

jmount• 1 year ago

I, unfortunately, do not anticipate much if any opposition from those receiving funding. Hope I am wrong.

bagels• 1 year ago

Anything related to climate science or vaccines is next. Disgusting.

defrost11• 1 year ago

It's hard to keep up I know, deleting climate science was 24 hours ago:

Trump orders USDA to take down websites referencing climate crisis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42896378

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/31/trump-order-...

msie• 1 year ago

The right: "free speech for me but not for thee."

rhinoceraptor3• 1 year ago

Who controls the present controls the past

baxtr• 1 year ago

Luckily not always the future though.

pixelesque• 1 year ago

It's going to be NASA next isn't it, because of climate change and the need to remove any evidence of that and other environmental changes...

itishappy• 1 year ago

https://appliedsciences.nasa.gov/

NeckBeardPrince• 1 year ago

https://ntrs.nasa.gov. Get to downloading!

1270018080• 1 year ago

It'll be tough to silence the overwhelming consensus in essentially every single field of science.

duxup5• 1 year ago

I don’t disagree, although defunding them and threatening their jobs will go a long ways.

riffraff2• 1 year ago

USDA was told to take down websites mentioning climate change days ago

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/31/trump-order-...

bpye• 1 year ago

https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/ is still up, for now.

userbinator2• 1 year ago

biologically male, biologically female

The trans stuff has definitely been controversial, but those phrases are definitely not "woke"?

Qwertious2• 1 year ago

The implication of the term is that there are other contexts for "male" or "female" other than "biologically". If "non-woke" contexts assume that male/female are inherently biological terms, then "biologically [male/female" is obviously "woke".

technothrasher• 1 year ago

Your second sentence is tautological, and also begging the question.

pests• 1 year ago

I don't see the implication. How is it obviously woke?

kevingadd• 1 year ago

Just using the term "cis" on Twitter under Musk gets you a suspension, chemistry be damned.

CursedUrn2• 1 year ago

This isn't true. You can search Twitter for 'cis' and find endless unbanned accounts.

0xbadcafebee3• 1 year ago

The "right" is basically trying to assert (without saying it out loud) that science is wrong. They're also basically either intentionally or unintentionally confusing gender and sex.

Science has shown that there is more than two combinations of X and Y chromosomes. So if you went by chromosomes alone, there's more than two sexes. And if you go by phenotypic categorization (secondary sex characteristics, like tits, balls, dick, vagina, voice, height, etc), there's a multitude of sexes and male and female are just categories. Again this is well-documented in scientific literature, it's biology 101.

But then "the right" also mix in references to gender as banned. Gender, as every half-educated person knows by now, is different than sex: gender is social expression, sex is biological expression. Gender is your clothes and hair and voice and name, sex is the junk in your pants.

But the "right" is basically saying: "Hey, science is wrong! And these weird leftists are wrong! Sex determination doesn't matter, gender determination doesn't matter. There's only two things in the world, ever, and we call them male and female. Science and society and logic and reason and everything else can get fucked."

It's political psychosis. Hate-filled zealots who are so hell-bent on imagining the world in a more simplistic way that they literally want to re-define reality to fit their wishes. It's the book Nineteen-Eighty-Four, being enacted in real life. This isn't a joke or hyperbole, this is literally what's happening. They're creating a government of insanity.

Since they can't literally stop people from having all kinds of combinations of chromosomes and primary/secondary sex characteristics, the next step will be what the Nazis did, which is to round up anyone who doesn't fit a "normal body" and incarcerate them or force them into medical procedures to "fix them". (we actually did this in the past, too, not just the Nazis)

But before we get there, the first step is to force the government to perpetuate the psychosis so they can say it's official, and then people will swallow it easier. They are betting that we won't do anything. And we won't.

defrost11• 1 year ago

Hmm, rather than waste my response to the two deadheaded comments below the above and now my zombie peers; I wrote:

  > an explanation for the recently-invented concept of "gender".

  Perhaps recent to certain Europeans in central north america .. but hardly a recently invented concept.

  When I was a kid in the 1960s in the Austral Asian equatorial region the missionaries were going hard trying to stamp out Sistergirls, the bugis gender roles, and every other abomination under God that caught their eye.

  As I heard tell, indigenous north and south americans had expanded concepts of gender that got the same treatment.

  If there's a fallacy it likely lies with repressed WASP types brainwashed into a rigid moral prison of a worldview.

IshKebab6• 1 year ago

I don't think it's really about science. I mean if anything the science agrees with them. Sex is extremely bimodal (intersex is on the order of 1 in 1000):

https://isna.org/faq/frequency/

Also the use of gender as "it's like, how you feel, man" is very recent. When I was growing up (80s, 90s) it was just a synonym of "sex". If you look in old dictionaries that's what it says.

I looked it up and apparently the more recent definition came from feminists in the 70s (I guess it didn't catch on until later).

I think this is a massive over-correction (banning words is dumb) but they're not completely wrong.

I think the sane path lies in the middle: people shouldn't be forced to avoid "pregnant women" or "pregnant people". That includes being forced by social ostracism, which is the far left's method of choice.

cherryteastain• 1 year ago

Science has shown that there is more than two combinations of X and Y chromosomes. So if you went by chromosomes alone, there's more than two sexes

This undermines the point most "gender positive" people want to make. Yes, there are non XX or XY people, but they're rare compared to XX/XY transgender people. They also tend to have issues like learning disabilities and problems with speech. By conflating transgender people with people with chromosomal irregularities you're establishing a link suggesting XX/XY transgenderism is also a "disorder".

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 1 year ago

But those xyz combinations are not deceases, right? Why should we spend public money on that?

bloak• 1 year ago

Indeed, the terms "biologically male" and "biologically female" have been described by activists who are not at all aligned with Trump as "trans-phobic" and a "TERF dogwhistle" so it's strange to see these two groups suddenly agreeing with each other over something.

CSSer• 1 year ago

It's a rhetorical wrestling match, not an agreement. Moreover, the reality of the majority of the larger movement doesn't always align with the loudest voices in the room, especially when it comes down to semantics. Meanwhile any search for truth in the form of science suffers.

atoav3• 1 year ago

They got you all riled up about words and definitions while they ignore your constitution and turn the US into their own authoritarian regime.

Sometimes I wonder if that isn't a little bit deserved, since people are so removed from what really counts, they might need a reminder how unlikely having democracy actually is.

Divide et impera (or divide and conquer) is one of the old machiavellian imperatives. And language is enough to divide. Letting them divide you is a good way of making sure your own interest loses and theirs win.

tayo42• 1 year ago

"woke" seriously broke the minds of the conservatives in America. Crazy to watch their reaction to this. They can't take their own advice and just mind their own business? Leave people alone?

The cdc is political and gets involved in cultural wars? This is already happening with this administration?

jfengel5• 1 year ago

"Woke" is exactly the same thing as "politically correct" used to be, along with "social justice warrior" and "cultural Marxism" and a bunch of other euphemisms for "not us and therefore evil". It's been the same thing for decades. This is just the latest incarnation.

People often seem to say that this is the ultimate form of it. It's not. It continues unabated, and in a few years they'll have yet another term for the same thing.

threeseed• 1 year ago

Same thing with DEI and Affirmative Action.

Everything has to be based on merit except for nepotism, legacy admission, donations for favours etc.

rocqua• 1 year ago

It's not "not us and therefore evil". That's too simple. Instead it's "they are saying we're the problem which is evil, and others perhaps including my children, are starting to believe them, therefore a threat".

Conservatives really care about an order in things, to keep out chaos. Anything that reduces structure in society is suspicious, especially if it comes at you expense. Note that this holds for plenty of people who are way down on the power ladder.

ashoeafoot• 1 year ago

Because this is a direct attack on their societal model? You enslave a gay guy as priest and social contract upholder, the others get smithered upholding social machinery in companies and the state. If you do the moses "let-my-people-go"-thing, everyone is out partying, but the overall structure of society falls apart. Its horrifying ,a evolutionary created, biological state building instinct. But reality wont budge.

curt15• 1 year ago

They can't take their own advice and just mind their own business?

Not all conservatives are "small-government" conservatives. Ron Paul was really the last libertarian in the Republican party. The latest crop has an authoritarian streak.

amanaplanacanal• 1 year ago

Traditional conservative values are pretty much dead in the current Republican party. It has become a cult of personality instead.

SlightlyLeftPad3• 1 year ago

What a terrible blow to US Constitutional rights.

parineum2• 1 year ago

Which one?

scott_w• 1 year ago

According to Musk, the First Amendment.

peeters• 1 year ago

It's a shame most of that research is digital, I'm sure they would have preferred a public book burning like in die gut old days.

hansvm• 1 year ago

Maybe we'll get lucky https://xkcd.com/750/

fch42• 1 year ago

Elon Musk burning down an X Datacenter would have a real Roman Emperor Nero vibe to it.

isodev• 1 year ago

Remember how a few days ago, headlines were exploding how DeepSeek wouldn't answer questions about Tiananmen Square and other "sensitive topics"?

Well, welcome to the inside part of a great wall in the making. Thoughts and prayers y'all.

thedays• 1 year ago

I am not a lawyer but this CDC order seems contrary to Trump’s recent Executive Order “RESTORING FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND ENDING FEDERAL CENSORSHIP”.

This Executive Order states in part: “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.

… Sec. 2. Policy. It is the policy of the United States to: (a) secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech;

(b) ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen; …

Sec. 3. Ending Censorship of Protected Speech. (a) No Federal department, agency, entity, officer, employee, or agent may act or use any Federal resources in a manner contrary to section 2 of this order.”

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/rest...

userbinator2• 1 year ago

Someone should tell him about it then...

duxup5• 1 year ago

Generally when it comes to Trump it is rhetoric indicating the opposite.

He complains about a bias government, to install his own loyalists.

Same goes for science.

Rule of law…

ballooney2• 1 year ago

_biased_ is the adjective, bias is a noun.

vinni2• 1 year ago

If only millions of American's knew he would do that when they voted for him and supported him. They still do I don’t think they care.

eastbound2• 1 year ago

It seems like behavior matters.

jfengel5• 1 year ago

They care very much. They think it's great.

jcranmer• 1 year ago

In my experience, the more loudly someone shouts about being a crusader for free speech, the more likely they are to actively be attacking others' freedom of speech.

rhinoceraptor3• 1 year ago

[flagged]

pizza• 1 year ago

The more re-truths it gets, the truther it is..

sneak• 1 year ago

Retraction isn’t censorship, and bans on what you can publish at work as part of your job are not restraints on your individual right to free expression.

cyberax• 1 year ago

In the order, CDC researchers were instructed to remove references to or mentions of a list of forbidden terms: “Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female,” according to an email sent to CDC employees (see below).”

So yep, censorship. Any article that even _mentions_ LGBT (e.g. for epidemiological reasons) is now prohibited to be even referenced.

bigstrat2003• 1 year ago

This argument doesn't hold water when the left does it, and it doesn't hold water in this instance either. Censorship does not only mean government infringement upon freedom of individual expression.

baran1• 1 year ago

lookup the word censorship

freitasm• 1 year ago

No one (inside the government) probably considers that EO to be valid. It's just for "the others".

AnthonyMouse• 1 year ago

this CDC order seems contrary to Trump’s recent Executive Order

Freedom of speech and the First Amendment generally apply to the government imposing penalties on private citizens, e.g. through criminal law.

The CDC is the government. The government as an employer regularly imposes speech restrictions on government employees and always has, e.g. if you're a public school teacher and you want to teach students to believe that vaccines cause autism, they can tell you not to do that and fire you if you don't. You can imagine the trouble if that wasn't the case.

tsimionescu3• 1 year ago

You can imagine the trouble if that wasn't the case.

While you're absolutely right, just wanted to take this opportunity to point out that we may well not need to imagine this particular scenario, unfortunately, as it might happen very soon indeed.

atoav3• 1 year ago

You think laws still count with an immune president who has packed the supreme court and DOJ?

Laws don't count with Don, conventions don't count, rules don't count. The only thing that counts is power.

And he has it now.

immibis• 1 year ago

I believe this is called doublespeak due to George Orwell, and many fascist dictatorships do it.

e402• 1 year ago

If you understand the language wasn’t English bit Newspeak, then it makes perfect sense.

blotfaba• 1 year ago

It does feel like some straight "war is peace" kind of, uh.. shenanigangs and things

hyperbrainer• 1 year ago

Standard doublespeak.

jasonlotito2• 1 year ago

This is an administration that is actively ignoring other EOs such as anti-DEI initiatives. An administration that has come out and said that either all humans are neither male or female, or both male and female at once. This is an administration that either tried to send $50M in condoms to Gaza, or thought their followers were too stupid to believe the lie. This is also the administration that hates the military, police, and Americans in general. None of this is debatable. It's backed up by action. So, not surprised why we'd think they'd be burdened by the law.

KaiserPro• 1 year ago

This is my thought exactly. If you are requiring re-working of papers to exclude certain words, that sounds like censorship to me.

theptip2• 1 year ago

It seems fairly clear that free speech does not apply to government employees acting in their official duty.

The order is concerned with government censoring private individuals.

GeneralMayhem4• 1 year ago

When Trump (or Republicans, generally) say "free speech", they patently do not mean what the rest of us mean by free speech. They mean:

1. Everyone should be able to say horrible things about sexual and racial minorities.

2. Everyone should be able to deny scientific facts that are inconvenient to Republican ideology, the fossil fuel industry, or any of their friends.

3. There can be no consequences for (1) or (2), even when it obviously contradicts other laws (libel, incitement of violence, fraud, etc.) or oaths (to truth, to the constitution).

4. Stating a fact or opinion contrary to (1) or (2) is in fact trampling the free-speech rights of right-wingers, and is therefore forbidden.

They don't want free speech. They want free speech for themselves, and enforced consent, if not assent, from everyone else.

dinkumthinkum• 1 year ago

All right, then by this logic what does the left mean by "free speech". You talk about scientific facts, so does the left believe we cannot say scientific facts about biology? Furthermore, I'm not aware of any censorship regarding fossil fuels. My understanding is that the Sierra Club and Thunberg are able to say whatever they want in this country if this is what you are talking about.

liamwire• 1 year ago

Overtures of fascism. I expect we’ll see thinly-veiled euphemisms and rephrasings that just evade the banned list, if not outright refusal. Ultimately this falls short for the same reason that simple filters of all kinds fail in their (apparent) objective, to the extent that it doesn’t even feel like the point is to actually stop the discussion, but rather to send a message.

riffraff2• 1 year ago

There's a big difference between word filters and this: this one has a chilling effect. The intent is to send a message, but that message is a threat.

If you are a spammer and get past the filters you win, if you get past the word filter here the thought police can still decide to punish you.

The more successful you are the more likely you are to be punished instead of being rewarded. It will require self-sacrifice to actually work on "dangerous" topics.

adamiscool8• 1 year ago

This is a weird way to look at it. There's a shifting of incentives towards less "dangerous" topics. But "dangerous" just means citizens have decided research involving these terms is generally not the highest ROI for taxpayer funding. No one's going to face the wall over private research.

necovek3• 1 year ago

I wonder how will this affect private institutions and private publications?

I could imagine people moving away from CDC into private sector, and considering it's long been a "model" US view that things progress best when done in a free market, it might actually be a boon to medical research.

But, a couple of quick searches tells me 1/3rd of healthcare costs per person comes from the federal government (data from 2023), and NIH puts majority of it's $48B budget towards external (83%) and internal (11%) research.

Obviously, only some research would have (or need to have) the forbidden terminology, so perhaps nothing really happens.

Edit: and lest it remains unsaid, let's also take this with a grain of salt until it comes out from multiple sources or officially.

samus• 1 year ago

According to TA, this also affects lots of other papers even if they are not central to the topic. The intention is to combat "woke" research, but it creates pure chaos and uncertainty across the whole field. There is no official policy, and every bureaucrat is trying to guess what is going to be permissible in the future and what not. To be on the safe side (i.e., to not get fired), the ban is interpreted broadly.

roenxi4• 1 year ago

Hopefully not much. They'll invent some jargon if necessary and move on. The issue with banning "woke ideology" in principle is that it isn't formally defined and doesn't mean anything. And to ban a thing first it has to exist in a detectable way.

My guess is there'll be a bit of flailing then everyone will default back to status quo. It isn't possible to implement incoherent policies and it isn't going to do anyone any favours in terms of image to pursue this. Might take 4 months, might take 4 years to blow over.

lostlogin• 1 year ago

Might take 4 months, might take 4 years to blow over.

That’s a lot more optimistic than I fear.

JumpCrisscross4• 1 year ago

issue with banning "woke ideology"

It’s the illiberal right shaking hands with the illiberal left. The problem is this time the purges aren’t just ideological, but also financial: there are winners and losers in our healthcare industry likely to be defined by their polarity to Trump.

GeneralMayhem4• 1 year ago

It isn't possible to implement incoherent policies

If you assume that the goal is to implement a policy, no, it's not possible. But that's never the goal with such chaos. The goal is to make it unclear what's allowed or not, so that the real answer becomes: whatever the current ruler favors is allowed, and whatever he dislikes is disallowed. "Woke ideology", like "globalism" or "cultural Marxism" before it, means nothing, which means it can mean anything.

_heimdall12• 1 year ago

Governments implement incoherent policies all the time.

I'd argue that it isn't possible to write thousands of pages in a single bill or budget proposal and have it actually be coherent.

toss1• 1 year ago

It also might take four generations or four centuries to 'blow over'

Authoritarians do not stop until they are stopped by an external force.

The cost of stopping them only increases with every move they make to consolidate power (which of course is the intention).

wl• 1 year ago

They'll invent some jargon if necessary and move on.

The authors of this memo banning terms haven't realized this has already happened in part. Obstetrics avoids the use of gender with the term "parturient" instead of "mother." "Pregnant person" probably isn't showing up in many papers.

Neonlicht• 1 year ago

It's a lot easier to destroy something than rebuild it.

I've always joked that Trump was basically the Manchurian candidate.

throw0101a• 1 year ago

Hopefully not much. They'll invent some jargon if necessary and move on.

"Winnie-the-Pooh"?

noobermin4• 1 year ago

Healthcare costs don't neccessarily map to funding of research. It doesn't make sense to bring that up here.

throwoutway• 1 year ago

noobermin is rihgt. I've been reading a book about gastroenterology and it is surprising how many decades occur between research, findings, medical acceptance, and then eventually application to the public.

necovek3• 1 year ago

Sure, but there must be some relation as they cover the cost of drugs and any novel procedures, which are at least somewhat priced according to how much research to develop them cost.

I was just looking for how much research is funded by federal government, and that number came up as somewhat unrelated — it was harder to come up with a total medical research cost number, so this was the best I could do in a couple of minutes.

neycoda• 1 year ago

If corporations are going to argue for the current regime of health care costs to stay as high as possible in the "free market" using research & development costs as an argument, then yes it makes sense to bring it up.

tanewishly2• 1 year ago

I wonder how will this affect private institutions and private publications?

A government agency trying to enforce censorship in scientific publications outside its sphere of influence... I have to admit, that was not the first thing I wondered about.

_heimdall12• 1 year ago

I don't agree with how Trump and his administration are going about this, but it has been interesting to see how quickly it has pushed democrats back to a more federated approach.

After the election many started looked to state's rights type issues to make change locally before Trump took office.

Changes like this could very well push research back out of the centralized government back to more of a free market and federated or decentralized approach. That would at least be a silver lining in my opinion, though to a potentially very dark cloud.

goosedragons2• 1 year ago

The free market doesn't support most research. Research usually doesn't end in something that's marketable, and even if it does it's often on a too long time scale to do so for companies to justify. And even if there is, it might never get published lest competitors gain anything from it. This is bad for science. At best states might step in but I imagine many won't.

sandworm101• 1 year ago

States rights will be in the crosshairs soon enough. States that support public health, be that reproduction, vaccines, sex ed, weather, or simply just fact-based research, could see thier federal funds dry up. States still need to biuld infrastructure, something that almost always taps federal funds. Everyone who works in science or research is afraid at the moment, irrespective of where they think their funding comes from.

I know a guy measuring tree growth, with an eye to whether tree planting is effective post-fire. Much of the study is on federal lands. He has no idea whether the project will still exist come spring.

UncleMeat2• 1 year ago

It has never been the case that one party was for centralization and one was for decentralization. Neither of these are goals. Both are instead methods of achieving goals. Both parties will use claims of federalism when they want to oppose federal policy they don't like and have done so for decades and decades.

mbostleman6• 1 year ago

I wonder how much of the success pseudo gender “science” had in undermining the scientific and medical communities was attributed to the centralization of science authority in the federal government. It makes me wonder if there shouldn’t be a separation of science and state.

bmitc• 1 year ago

it might actually be a boon to medical research.

How? That seems like going out of your way to label this as not as bad as it actually is.

necovek3• 1 year ago

If you get really good researchers away from cash-strapped CDC into private sector — not sure if this will play out, and if private sector would be interested, or if their research even has earning potential — but it "might", right?

knodi• 1 year ago

A lot of research NIH funds because there is low outcome of a market product at the end of that research. This is because investors won't spend the money or only fund research that has no money incentive in its outcome. The way I see is it is progress is about to stop because investors will only fund thing that can have a direct money outcome for them in the future...

EasyMark• 1 year ago

I think that's the only option. We need the truth, we currently have a deranged President leading the blind who would rather believe in a sky daddy and the lies they tell themselves than reality. I could see an oligarch that actually might choose to do the right thing, along with a group of high end Universities to replace CDC and NIH at least for the next 2-4 years when we can reestablish some sanity. While I'm fine with rescending bad papers and false information, these blanket attempts to normalize thought crime from the new regime to destroy science and the truth and replace it with their own distorted world view needs to be met with resistance.

emchammer2• 1 year ago

Whether they believe in God doesn't have to be part of the equation though. You can believe in God and also in trans rights and science and everything.

Snowfield9571• 1 year ago

Interesting thought, but significant technologic “break throughs” almost never come from the private sector. A “break through” is just luck, and countless years working on a problem incrementally. That doesn’t typically return profits.

tenpies• 1 year ago

While the policy is only meant to apply to work that might be seen as conflicting with President Trump’s executive orders, CDC experts don’t know how to interpret that.

This seemed key to me. The managerial/editorial layer is acting in a way that any manager would when there is unclear interpretation: risk-adversity.

It's much easier to do than undo, so you stop until things are cleared up.

However, it seems the organizational layer whose work is being affected is assuming this risk-adverse interpretation is the new policy coming from the top. No doubt, legacy media will take the same interpretation.

If I were to approach this rationally, I would probably want to see clarification before running with the Hitlerian comparisons.

pjmlp• 1 year ago

This is what happens when people decide for dictorship, hard times ahead, unfortunately saying we have told you so isn't going to sort out things now.

ConspiracyFact• 1 year ago

I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve seen a politician make an absurd campaign promise and then follow through on it successfully. I’d find it terrifying if it weren’t about the most first-world of all first-world problems.

philipov• 1 year ago

First they came for the trade-unionists, but you said nothing because you are not a trade unionist.

mindslight2• 1 year ago

If by first world problems you mean that this destruction of our society is going to give us the traditional living standards of the third world, that seems like something worth worrying about.

coldpepper• 1 year ago

Xi Jinping and his colleagues must be opening a champagne bottle over the US being this stupid. They could have never imagined an enemy so retarded

SlightlyLeftPad3• 1 year ago

It’s like watching a combined plot of succession and space force.

aaomidi• 1 year ago

Everything people keep telling me about how bad China is keeps happening here.

colechristensen• 1 year ago

This was bin laden’s goal. Making Americans afraid was very successful because it turns out that stoking fear is very profitable and useful for gaining power. Now everyone is taking advantage of it.

guerrilla• 1 year ago

This isn't just this person's opion. bin Laden wrote about and spoke about it quite often, even before 9/11.

Philpax• 1 year ago

https://theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-...

jfengel5• 1 year ago

Note that that was published in 2014. Those days seem positively halcyon now.

e402• 1 year ago

If you sent all the headlines from the last week back in time to the editor of The Onion they would be summarily ignored as too dumb.

tempodox• 1 year ago

Talk about winning a war without firing one shot at the enemy. The admiration, envy and emulation of totalitarian Chinese despotism in the U.S. must feel like a victory.

tarkin22• 1 year ago

Make the US too busy fighting itself to focus on external threats.

Divide and conquer has always been the most effective strategy.

Dividing is much easier with portable propaganda devices, selling citizens' psychological profiles to anyone with cash.

rplnt2• 1 year ago

We know Russia invested a lot in this outcome. Hence, at some point, this government will be seen as treasonous. Didn't China as well, wouldn't they know it's a net win for them and their interests, despite the few hurdles ("tariffs") that were announced?

sebazzz• 1 year ago

I never understood why there hasn't been more investigation into Russian influence during the last four years. But maybe the ones to make a call about that didn't care.

tsimionescu3• 1 year ago

By all accounts, Russia invested next to nothing in this outcome compared to how much Musk alone invested, never mind the whole of Trump's campaign.

rwyinuse• 1 year ago

Definitely. At this point rest of the world might as well become friends with China. At least Xi Jinping the CCP aren't idiots, which makes them more predictable to deal with than Trump's regime.

duxup5• 1 year ago

If the US chooses to opt out of science research, China and others will not.

That doesn’t bode well for the US.

WorkerBee28474• 1 year ago

Wait, do you think China is more accepting of LGBT ideology than the USA, even after this directive?

dyauspitr• 1 year ago

The trans stuff doesn’t matter much to scientific progress but these regressives are going to kill research in EV, renewable energy, vaccines, public health, climate etc.

JauntyHatAngle2• 1 year ago

I think the idea is that this keyword list will be expanded to include climate change etc over time, or some similar uncontroversial topic scientifically, but controversial socially/religiously that will reduce USA's scientific output in areas that are a genuine competition globally. E.g. climate change research to plan locations for future farming enterprises etc.

We shall see if true.

wesselbindt• 1 year ago

LGBT ideology

You sound like you like this digital book burning.

bamboozled2• 1 year ago

Nothing I’ve seen happen in the last few weeks bodes well for the USA. It really looks like planned destruction to me.

If you’re reason for being is “owning the libs” it must be a glorious time, but outside of that…

gmueckl• 1 year ago

This is a rather well planned set of moves to gut the federal administration. There are smokescreens in the form of nonsense, distractions in the form of blatantly overreaching orders that exhaust opposition and then there are the rather well aimed, more subtle and actually destructive moves that get almost drowned out in the chaos. They stick because of all the other shit that is hurled around.

It's not a perfect plan by any means but it works well enough to scare me.

matwood2• 1 year ago

And it can take a long time to reverse. For example, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment

Would the US be in the same situation wrt to guns if that amendment had never gotten into the bill in the 90s? Hard to know.

bigfudge• 1 year ago

I think this is appalling, but I’m not sure what practical effect defunding trans and gender research would have on the US’s prospects in competition with China. The scary thing is a fascist, compliant US might still perform ok economically. Similarly there are UK politicians who hold up Singapore as a model for us. This is going to be a nasty few decades.

duxup5• 1 year ago

Why is this submission flagged?

SlightlyLeftPad3• 1 year ago

something something “overly political”

hipadev23• 1 year ago

[flagged]

viraptor3• 1 year ago

There's a contact email in the footer for queries like that and requests to restore.

jeroenhd• 1 year ago

Users with high enough karma can also vouch for flagged posts, though anything involving politics will usually get mass flagged as soon as anyone does that.

arresin• 1 year ago

[flagged]

_Algernon_• 1 year ago

I mean I sort of get it. HN isn't really the place for discussing this (ref. HN Guidelines[1]), and judging by the past two weeks, the Trump administration will do something as discussion-worthy as this at least every day for the next 4 years.

If each such instance gets a thread here, it will be pretty bad for Hacker News, an Eternal September-like event.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

sigotirandolas• 1 year ago

I don't find this kind of article interesting or novel (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), specially as someone outside the US.

Taniwha• 1 year ago

Why is this flagged? this is important news

garbagewoman2• 1 year ago

how does its importance compare to all the other similar garbage they are generating? the volume is designed to wear you down

garbagewoman2• 1 year ago

[flagged]

jnsaff2• 1 year ago

Yea, this is what Ezra Klein seems to think as well.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

tarkin22• 1 year ago

So the US government is cancelling federal research that uses terminology it doesn't like?

Isn't this sending an Unamerican view of freedom of thought and expression? And a very dictatorial view of the American government and institutions?

All future research must abide by whatever histrionic whim the president has? I could imagine this being news from Belarus

lazide• 1 year ago

Welcome to the party pal.

Insanity• 1 year ago

The entire “freedom” thing in the US has some pretty funky “terms and conditions apply”. I am not sure if anyone actually thinks they are more “free” than other first world countries.

sixothree• 1 year ago

I live in the Deep South. People here absolutely and unironocally believe they live in the freest country on earth. This view is widespread for a thousand miles.

jfengel5• 1 year ago

Ahem. It's only "canceling" when Democrats do it. When Republicans do it, it's free speech (somehow).

thomasfedb• 1 year ago

Can be spun as a "freedom from". Might sound the same superficially, but it's not a capital-F "freedom to".

belorn4• 1 year ago

Enthusiasm for censorship has had a broad popular support from both sides of the political spectrum. Censorship is never free speech, regardless if Democrats or Republicans do it.

Do anyone feel like arguments like "No one has a right to a platform" making this kind of censorship better? Should we view platforms as a megaphones, one that should be denied or given based on the whims of the owner?

No, it not only canceling when Democrats do it. Both sides enjoy censorship and it should always be viewed with suspicious.

roenxi4• 1 year ago

If not funding something counts as Unamerican then there is no escape from it, there are a huge number of thoughts and perspectives that the US government doesn't support financially.

aprilthird20212• 1 year ago

The US has always been hypocritical about freedom of thought and expression. We literally have an Office of Anti-Boycott compliance to ensure American companies (even privately held ones) don't boycott Israel.

https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/enforcement/oac

SpicyLemonZest2• 1 year ago

The world is complicated. This policy was established in response to a secondary boycott policy from the Arab League, where any company that agreed to do business in Israel would not be allowed to do business in a member country. Congress judged, I think correctly, that prohibiting companies from cooperating with this boycott was the only way to preserve their broader freedom to choose which countries they do or don’t want to do business in.

gmd63• 1 year ago

Which ten regulations did they cut to introduce this anti-free speech one?

debeloo2• 1 year ago

Judging by the last few days, I'd guess something to do with the aerospace industry.

jmward013• 1 year ago

We are now at the digital equivalent of book burning in the 1930's. The parallels are pretty clear. This is the moment in history class that someone raises their hand and asks 'but why didn't anyone stop them?'.

weinzierl• 1 year ago

There is truth to what you wrote but a major difference is that this is mainly about scientific results now and no matter how it plays out it will mean major damage to science and evidence based research that will take decades to fix. We will lose all the people on the brink of distrusting science.

jmward013• 1 year ago

This isn't mainly about scientific results. This is about hate and power. It didn't start here and it won't stop here. History is very clear that this will get even uglier very fast. We have a very small window left to do something to stop it, if we are lucky.

0xbadcafebee3• 1 year ago

If everyone at the CDC quit tomorrow, how hard would it be to create a non-profit and staff it entirely with CDC personnel and resume work? Assuming somehow funding could be acquired. What else would be a barrier? Research labs? Some kind of logistical, organizational, etc partnerships? Access to data? What else? I'm half serious.

tmpz22• 1 year ago

Where do the funds come from? Zuckerberg? Bezos? They’re not coming from the NIH.

Do we crowd fund it? Maybe we create a system where everyone gives a percentage of their income. And we scale it progressively so as not to cause undo hardship to low earners.

Eh people won’t go for that. Let’s tax neighboring countries, say 25% of the cost of their traded goods. They won’t retaliate right? Ok go.

btreecat• 1 year ago

Tax ourselves on goods from neighboring countries*

dinoqqq• 1 year ago

The annual budget is $ 11.5 billion.

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2023/s0309-budget.html

AnonymousPlanet• 1 year ago

They would be replaced by the incompetent who want to shine in the new limelight. That happened in Germany after the Machtergreifung. The new government got rid of the unwanted in science and mathematics and many others quit in protest. The gaps were quickly filled by science backbenchers and cranks who would get rid of all the theories they didn't understand (e.g. parts of number theory) and replaced them by what they called Aryan mathematics and Aryan this or that, towing the line of the people who got them into their new position.

atoav3• 1 year ago

You are assuming you are still living in a country where laws are upheld. You aren't anymore. So if you do a thing that your betters don't like, they will stop it, legal or not. You assume a democracy, but you are in an authoritarian society.

Your only chance is to have significant support by the population and good luck with that when all the popular social media platforms are on their side. The US is fucked if the population doesn't unite against that quickly.

And given the self-centered individualism that is so predominant nowadays I say that isn't going to happen.

neilv• 1 year ago

[flagged]

Perenti• 1 year ago

Freedom of Speech.

Democracy.

Equality.

Equity.

I used to know what these words meant, but it seems the old definitions are no longer fit for purpose.

jl6• 1 year ago

The search and replace they want researchers to do:

gender -> personality

transgender -> trans-identifying

pregnant person -> pregnant woman

pregnant people -> pregnant women

LGBT -> LGB (or LGB and T separately)

transsexual -> ??? presumably trans-identifying

non-binary -> ??? presumably something to do with personality

assigned male/female at birth -> male/female

biologically male/female -> male/female

gardenhedge• 1 year ago

That seems less extreme than this thread makes it out to be

apical_dendrite6• 1 year ago

Because as far as I can tell, he's pulled it straight out of his ass.

blueflow7• 1 year ago

You know what? These changes make good sense in my head. And I'm still a bit afraid to admit it.

derbOac4• 1 year ago

So...

1. If true, yes maybe not as bad as it seems at first, but...

2. Some of those terms are not equivalent at all, like the first. The last two are very different, and don't necessarily have anything to do with trans anything in the way this administration is concerned about.

3. This could have all been approached differently and more efficiently.

Viliam1234• 1 year ago

Some of them do, some of them don't.

WTF is "trans-identifying"? They are not literally identifying as "trans". They are identifying as men/women (although the opposite of their biology), not as "trans". "Trans" is a description for people who identify as other than their biological sex; it is not an identity, per se.

You can doubt whether a trans woman is "really" a woman. But you cannot doubt that a trans woman is "really" trans. Trying to be the opposite of your biological sex is what "trans" literally means.

It makes as much sense as replacing "tall people" with "tall-identifying people".

apical_dendrite6• 1 year ago

What is your source for this? As far as I can tell there is absolutely no guidance whatsoever on what is and is not acceptable language now. The executive orders use terms like "gender ideology" but make no effort to define those terms. So everything that could even remotely be construed as being "gender ideology" is being removed.

rich_sasha3• 1 year ago

If your thesis is that Trump is awful and will be ousted, and the general public, even the MAGA crowd, will recoil at the devastation he unleashed, I suppose at least it's all mercifully quick. At this rate the US might be in a major recession this year already, with healthcare in disarray and everything else too.

Not something to relish, but I suppose better than slogging it out for years. At least he's accelerating the timeline.

Of course the alternative is that he's here to stay, in which case the accelerated timeline means more damage.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

delfinom• 1 year ago

They will just blame Biden (and Obama).

rich_sasha3• 1 year ago

It works for a little bit. But it stops working very quickly once people is wallets get hit.

matwood2• 1 year ago

Being ousted is unlikely. It’s very hard to remove a sitting POTUS. Assuming there are midterms, that’s the first opportunity to see what the general public thinks.

dboreham• 1 year ago

Most people in the US don't travel and have no clue that they're living in a pretty bizarre environment. E.g. healthcare has been a s.show for decades but people just shake their heads and spin up another gofundme for their medical bills. So expecting the population to rise up may be over optimistic.

nitwit005• 1 year ago

Given the costs involved in all the back and forth that a typical retraction involves, I can't see the journals wanting to deal with it.

tim3332• 1 year ago

I see the forbidden terms include "gender" and google scholar returns 5.3 million results with that. It's all a bit silly. Next they'll ban European languages for being gendered.

sfeng• 1 year ago

They actually like male/female enforced gender. Maybe what they’ll do is add gender to English grammar!

cowsandmilk• 1 year ago

Half the point of the order is Trump’s admin wants gendered language. That is:

Pregnant person -> pregnant woman

Pregnant people -> pregnant women

scirob• 1 year ago

interesting link but too bad that Hacker News can't stay clean of politics. I always come here to chill out and read about peaceful computers

jheuel• 1 year ago

Maybe it’s time to implement content notes.

CN: Politics

CN: Rust reimplentation

maronato• 1 year ago

I’m sure CDC researchers are thinking the same thing about their work.

Unfortunately, totalitarianism is defined by its effects on science, education, and our private life. I expect apolitical topics to become rarer here simply because there will be no escaping it.

kennysoona2• 1 year ago

Politics now affects everything and you can no longer afford to ignore it IMO. Dangerous times.

blueflow7• 1 year ago

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/HM4JXK/planet-earth-with-only-unit...

lifeisstillgood• 1 year ago

I am truly utterly dismayed that any fool could attack the very foundations of science like this.

The only interesting thing is how a Supreme Court might react to a scientist challenging this blocks his right to free speech. The test would be which is greater - the ideology or the law …

noobermin4• 1 year ago

This is literal political correctness. I guess when it's your censors in power, big government is fine and dandy.

concerndc1tizen• 1 year ago

Does this mean that they also have unconstrained control over the weaponized diseases created and stored in laboratories?

Should I be concerned that they may break all treaties and engage in biological warfare with the EU?

microtonal• 1 year ago

Unlikely, France and the UK have nukes (yes, the UK is not in the EU). They will just attempt the same playbook in Europe. In fact, Elon is already at it in Germany and the UK.

tremon• 1 year ago

If you can be concerned without it affecting your daily mood, I would answer yes. If your disposition doesn't allow for that kind of detachment, I'd say there's still plenty of time for concern later.

locallost• 1 year ago

[flagged]

yawboakye• 1 year ago

with all due respect, some of these journals got themselves into untenable positions that require twisting one’s self into a pretzel to defend their practices and decisions. for example, i had to cancel my acm subscription because the communications deteriorated in quality, shifting focus from publishing more on the science and practice of computing to sociopolitical issues. there was more articles on social intervention, blacks/minorities in tech, etc that reduced the useful content to about 40% of the journal, imo. not what i signed up for even though the identity police will help me know that i’m a minority in computing—a fact i wasn’t aware of until recently.

i guess at some point in these last 8 years or so, one accrued extra points for publishing articles along those lines. who knows, it probably earned acm more subscriptions, donations, pats on the back, sensitivity points, etc. and so it reinforced itself and resulted in even more sociopolitical articles. but it was a letdown for someone who wanted to passively follow developments in computing. so i left.

apical_dendrite6• 1 year ago

Publishing no science at all, or only once it's been thoroughly scrubbed of all mentions of certain topics and the researchers threatened or punished is much, much worse than publishing too much on topics that you don't care about.

Take the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which is the most prominent public health publication in the US (the first reports of AIDS were published there for instance). It's not being published at all now. If/when they start publishing it again, it will be highly censored, particularly on topics that are extremely relevant to public health (if these rules were in place in the 80s, how would they have reported on AIDS?)

That's so much worse than having too high a percentage of content discussing gender or whatever.

gedy2• 1 year ago

Publishing no science at all, or only once it's been thoroughly scrubbed of all mentions of certain topics and the researchers threatened or punished is much, much worse

You know that much social science research, especially on hot button topics, has already been dealing with censorship and academic shunning for years.

I'm not equivocating with EO, etc but that is bad too.

ninalanyon• 1 year ago

[flagged]

TheOtherHobbes2• 1 year ago

This is true, but the biology of gender - including gender dysphoria - is established science. There is no ambiguity about it.

It's only "offensive" to people who don't like how reality works.

Which is clearly the real problem here.

Pretending otherwise is gaslighting, because they're doing the same thing to climate change research and pandemic research.

And there's a good chance vaccines and other public health measures will be next.

This is not a rational government for rational people planning a rational future. This is a government of angry anti-rational cranks with mental health issues working out those issues in public, to the detriment of everyone except a small cadre of multi-billionaires who share the same psychology, but whose wealth will (somewhat) protect them from consequences the rest of us will have to live with.

_heimdall12• 1 year ago

but the biology of gender - including gender dysphoria - is established science

Maybe my education is just getting out of date, but isn't the biological side of that topic sex while gender is generally referring to more of the social constructs like expected social roles and behaviors?

I though body or gender dysmorphia would in fact be tied to gender rather than sex because it is more of a psychology question than a biological one.

IX-103• 1 year ago

fMRI studies have found differences in the brain that are highly correlated with gender dysmorphia. So while we may treat it as a psychological condition, it, like many other psychological conditions, also has an underlying biological basis.

JPLeRouzic3• 1 year ago

If by "sex" you mean physical characteristics, it's not what we learn in school books but not all people have only two XX or XY chromosomes. There are other (rare) combinations.

XXY (Klinefelter syndrome), X (Turner syndrome), XXX (Triple X syndrome), XYY (Jacob’s syndrome),

If we think in terms of genes, the situation is further complicated, and hormones also influence the sexual phenotype during fetal development.

afpx4• 1 year ago

Calling it “established science” seems like an attempt to shut down scientific discourse and normalize gender dysphoria even though it is a complex topic that causes distress to many people and has ongoing ethical concerns. It becomes even more complex when considering the decades of funding of gender studies which has attempted to normalize and promote it rather than research solutions. Further complicating the issue are financial incentives that encourage treatments. And, there are social and legal incentives that encourage expanding the number of people with that diagnosis. For example, there currently seems to be a push to immediately affirm adolescents with histories of mental health conditions when a more cautious approach may be more helpful.

Edit: Anecdotally, I have a transgender nephew, and three of my good friends have transgender children. Both of my best friend's two children are transgender. My friend went through a bitter divorce a few years ago and was estranged from his 17 year old son for over a year. When he next saw him, his son had already started irreversable treatment even though he hadn’t had any symptoms a year prior. To me, someone who experimented with what they call 'gender fluidity' as a teenager in the 90s, this all seems unusual and should be handled more cautiously.

AlexandrB2• 1 year ago

One aspect that I find alarming about gender dysmorphia as a diagnosis is that it seems to pathologize gender non-conformity. For example, in some circles it's more acceptable to be a trans man than a "butch" woman. And the diagnostic criteria for gender dysmorphia might put a butch woman in the "trans" bucket if she were to talk to a doctor.

To me this is a betrayal of what feminism was after in the early 2000 - namely moving away from rigid gender stereotypes.

brookst5• 1 year ago

I don’t understand this point of view at all.

Gravity is established science and billions of dollars a year are spent studying it, including efforts to refute parts of our understanding.

How does acknowledging the reality of current scientific understanding in any way “shut down” further exploration? It sounds like the opposite — that peoples’ discomfort with the current state of understanding should be a reason to revert science to a much older state and never mention the subject again.

ocschwar2• 1 year ago

There are two problems at play here. One is that the science involved pertains to mental health care, which means psychiatrists. Meaning the same specialty that tried psychotherapy and blaming "cold" mothers for autism, and then had a lobotomies for everyone fad, and then got too enamored with electroconvulsive therapy.

I'm too young to have witnessed those, but I did personally see the effects when they launched the Drug of the Month Club in the 1990s. It's hard to look at how they treat gender dysphoria and not suspect it's yet another episode.

BUT....

At the same time what's going on with the Republicans is sheer malice. And it must be fought on those grounds.

naasking14• 1 year ago

This is true, but the biology of gender - including gender dysphoria - is established science. There is no ambiguity about it.

There is no biology of gender, biology is concerned only with sex. If you'd ever seen a mention of "gender" in biology prior to 10 years ago, it was a reference to sex because at the time they were not distinct.

So if you meant "sex" in your sentence then I agree with you, it is settled science, but if you really did mean to say "gender" then I have no idea what you're talking about because "gender" has no definition in biology.

SubiculumCode4• 1 year ago

Gender does have biological causes.

dang• 1 year ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907007.

ghostDancer2• 1 year ago

[flagged]

lelanthran• 1 year ago

Having seen the word list change, all it is doing is rolling back terms that were introduced and forced into use by the left.

You're just complaining that the newspeak is being undone.

ghostDancer2• 1 year ago

Yes exactly the same they are doing with global warming and climate change. words invented by the left.

casenmgreen5• 1 year ago

This is darkness. State mandated lists of forbidden words.

Trump's cat's paw proposing Constitutional amendment for a third term for Trump (but not previous Presidents). We can be sure at the end of such a third term, another amendment would be tabled.

The recent election, won by deception; enough people believed the lies that the election was taken. This is not democracy - it is something only which looks like democracy, because there is an election. An actual election requires voters to be well-informed.

The FBI staff involved in the investigation, fired. This is vindictive; they were doing their job.

vlan07• 1 year ago

It's quite alarming. And it seems departments are complicit. Which is further alarming. We need Governors, AGs, and mayors to refuse to comply with unlawful federal directives. If everyone just falls in line, what levers can we pull? Feels like at that point, civil war might be upon us.

casenmgreen5• 1 year ago

Government has accumulated enormous power over the centuries.

Now Government goes bad, this becomes very clear.

spencerflem3• 1 year ago

Sadly, I think you're being optimistic.

The Democrats are not fighters, the states will fall in line, and the people are not willing nor able to wage civil war.

arp2422• 1 year ago

One of the problems of outright refusal is that you'll end up being fired, and likely replaced by a Trumpdroid. Staying in your position and cooperating the "least amount" you can get away with is better. Very thin rope to walk though, and seems like a nigh-impossible position to be in.

nvarsj• 1 year ago

Reminds me a lot of what’s happened in countries like Hungary. I never thought this would happen in the US but here we are.

casenmgreen5• 1 year ago

Very much so. Same failure mode. Win by deceiving voters, keep the deceptions going (external enemies - Soros, the EU, etc, take your pick, "we're under threat") enough to keep winning. No need to rig vote counting - it's all rigged before the election. Mess up the economy through corruption, incompetence and favourism. Become more and more authoritarian, suppress dissent and checks and balances. Country goes to hell.

I'm hoping it doesn't happen, that the culture of the USA will be the basic mechanism to prevent this, but if enough people are living in fantasy land, they're going to cheering along for all this.

room4• 1 year ago

I agree that this is bad, but we've already had state mandated lists of forbidden words for years, and this is a reaction to those less explicitly defined rules.

The shift is just which layer of the establishment is making and enforcing the rules. For the past half century, that's been committees at various government agencies, academic counsels and quasi-governmental groups like the AMA, etc.

Those various entities collectively mandated forbidden words that would for instance, prevent a grant from being approved, prevent a person from getting a job or tenure or a promotion or a political appointment, or prevent a paper from being published.

There is a huge range of language policing and forbidden words, phrases and ideas. From the relatively uncontroversial things like using "person with X" as opposed to "an X person" for various conditions to the clearly controversial replacement of "mother" and "woman" with "birthgiving parent" and "assigned female at birth".

I suspect this will get challenged in court and overturned and not really matter in the long term, but maybe it's an opportunity to consider all the power structures we interface with and how they control what we write, say and think.

casenmgreen5• 1 year ago

I agree that this is bad, but we've already had state mandated lists of forbidden words for years, and this is a reaction to those less explicitly defined rules.

One issue is that this power exists.

Another then is what it is used for.

If you have a gun and you use it to and only to prevent, oh, bank robbery say, that's fine. If you use it to rob someone, not fine.

Government has enormous power, and now that power is being used for evil and for darkness, and that's the problem.

CursedUrn2• 1 year ago

This is a good point. It's rather ludicrous to see the people who have been acting as thought police for years with a list of banned words and mandatory terms suddenly now caring about free speech just because someone else is making the list. I'd like to think they've learned their lesson, but I think they just want to be in control of the words again.

debeloo2• 1 year ago

"Of the 4,700 newspapers published in Germany when the Nazis took power in 1933, no more that 1,100 remained. Approximately half were still in the hands of private or institutional owners, but these newspapers operated in strict compliance with government press laws and published material only in accordance with directives issued by the Ministry of Propaganda."

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-press-...

derbOac4• 1 year ago

"Efficiency".

monetus2• 1 year ago

I'm surprised they haven't started saying phrases like 'useless eaters'

apexalpha• 1 year ago

I'm looking forward to the first ChatGPT response saying it can't talk about certain topics.

jasonlotito2• 1 year ago

This is part of the administration as defining all humans are neither male nor female — or, due to the presence of both Müllerian ducts and Wolffian ducts in early embryos, that all humans are both sexes at once.

More importantly, they've made it clear you shouldn't trust the government, so they are going out of their way to prove that is the case.

chasd002• 1 year ago

The only proof I see in the article is a picture of part of an email taken by a cellphone camera. Can anyone link to the official policy/order?

apical_dendrite6• 1 year ago

You can just go to the CDC website. The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which is the most prominent US public health publication, hasn't been published since the inauguration. That has not happened in over 60 years. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html

chasd002• 1 year ago

Sorry, I mean the order described in the article requiring a list of words to be removed.

theptip2• 1 year ago

So, a historical question - did these terms such as “pregnant person” get introduced by administrative diktat or by gradual evolution? I’m curious about the provenance of such terminology.

Administrators have elsewhere made changes like renaming manholes “maintenance holes”, is this mostly rolling back such decisions (in a characteristic bulldozer/chaotic style of course)?

rsingel• 1 year ago

Language changes. There's been lots of inclusive changes that people have adopted without even knowing.

Police officer and firefighter are pretty ingrained now, but those weren't the dominant terms just 30 years ago

zzrzzr7• 1 year ago

The difference is that police officer and firefighter are roles that can be occupied by people of either sex, so the change of language from policeman and fireman made sense in that context.

By contrast, pregnancy is a state of being that is by its very nature female-only. Males cannot become pregnant, as by definition they lack a female reproductive system.

The "pregnant people" terminology implies that pregnancy is something that affects all people, male and female alike. But this is of course not true at all.

It's also not inclusive - consider that much of the sex-based oppression women experience goes back to the ability to conceive children. "Pregnant people" discards and downplays all of that.

account42• 1 year ago

Language changes ... when you get to call anyone not going along with your desired changes a "bigot" or worse.

nec4b• 1 year ago

Both expressions "pregnant person" and "maintenance hole" came from DEI directives and have not organically evolved through time. To borrow your analogy, they bulldozed over existing expressions because of ideological reasons, hence generating great resistance from the population which didn't agree to such forced changes.

Fomite2• 1 year ago

In my experience, it's never been an administrative push, but a desire to be more precise, more inclusive, or both, or to reflect the stated preferences of the populations we work with.

The only time I've had to fight with a scientific publisher about a term was when they errantly applied a ban on causal language to a study I was part of.

SebFender• 1 year ago

While the intention behind “woke” research may have been to promote inclusivity and address historical injustices, its execution sometimes led to unintended consequences.

By prioritizing ideological alignment over rigorous methodology, some studies may have compromised objectivity, breadth, or practical applicability. The goal of creating space for marginalized voices was important, but in some cases, this approach limited open discourse, dismissed alternative perspectives, or failed to produce the most balanced conclusions.

That said, the push for inclusivity did bring valuable insights and necessary corrections to many fields. However, for research to serve everyone effectively, it must remain grounded in evidence, open debate, and methodological rigor—ensuring that progress is both fair and sustainable.

Friedduck• 1 year ago

Having talked to a couple of people in the CDC I fear the worst. They’re not allowed to participate with the WHO outside of the agency (even on their own time). The employees are largely censored from expressing their opinion on any topic, anywhere.

They were talking about getting work outside of the States. These are smart, dedicated people who are boots-on-the-ground for crises like Ebola, and I wonder about the purpose of the agency and our ability to respond to the next event (with bird flu looming on the horizon).

So research aside, our incident response has already been compromised, and we’re just seeing the beginning.

CDC: Unpublished manuscripts mentioning certain topics must be pulled or revised

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