Richmond Today

It started with a loud ultrasound machine, a bag of pig hearts, and a scientist nobody believed. Two decades and millions in federal grants later, that accident became a $4 billion company and an FDA-approved cancer treatment—proof of what patient, unglamorous government funding can build when private investors won't take the risk. But that story is becoming the exception, not the rule. Since President Trump returned to office, nearly $200 billion in federal research funding has been cut, delayed, or redirected across 17 policy sectors and 21 agencies. Grant approvals at the NSF have hit forty-year lows. The NIH has quietly used an AI tool to flag and reject proposals containing words like "racism" or "sexual minority," killing Alzheimer's research simply because it studied why Black Americans face double the risk of dementia. Meanwhile, money is pouring into AI and quantum computing—fields already flush with private capital—while basic science, the unpredictable kind that doesn't promise returns for twenty years, withers. The consequences aren't abstract: an 8-year-old boy with a rare brain tumor lost access to a clinical trial when DOGE cut funding for the consortium running it. He died this month. This piece traces the quiet dismantling of a research system that gave the world GLP-1 drugs, GPS, and stealth technology—and asks what breakthroughs, cures, and companies are being quietly erased from America's future before anyone notices they're gone.

You might assume the internet has shattered the university's monopoly on shaping minds. With endless podcasts, newsletters, and YouTube channels now competing for attention, surely the ideological tilt of college campuses matters less than it used to? A provocative new argument says otherwise—and the reason comes down to how persuasion actually works. The case rests on a distinction between two kinds of influence. Most of what we consume online operates as a "marketplace of rationalizations": we seek out commentators who confirm beliefs we already hold, making the audience, not the content creator, the real driver of influence. Classrooms work the opposite way. Readings are assigned, not chosen. Tests force students to recall and retain material whether they agree with it or not. Repetition breeds plausibility, independent of whether an argument is actually sound. And because so many general-education requirements fall within politically homogeneous fields, students are often exposed to only one side of contested debates—with thinkers like Hayek, Sowell, or Scruton largely absent from syllabi, even as their ideological counterparts dominate. The implications reach well beyond campus. Today's students become tomorrow's journalists, judges, and policymakers—carrying the imprint of that one-sided education into newsrooms and institutions that shape public life. Even family dinner-table debates, long assumed to be a counterweight, increasingly lose out to what was absorbed in the lecture hall. The result, the argument goes, is a quiet but significant challenge to democratic self-governance itself—one no amount of podcast diversity can fully correct.