When Superstition Defeats Science... The Stupid Party Doesn’t Care If We Get Sick And Die

Trump, RFK Jr & The Sabotage Of Survival— MAGA’s War On Cancer Research

Today, voting for a Republican is akin to being suicidal— and not just on a societal level. As we watch Trump and his lackeys destroy the country’s democracy, we can also watch RFK Jr. destroy the country’s health care system. I’m being treated for cancer— cancers— at one of the world’s best cancer hospitals. It’s a sprawling campus with over a dozen buildings, mostly primarily for research, although one is a traditional hospital where I have been a resident several times and will be again soon. The research they do is, literally, life-saving… for millions of people— and for me.

Yesterday Noah Smith described a scenario people experience when they first find out they have been diagnosed with cancer: “Cancer. The word is like the fall of an axe, cutting off the future you had imagined for yourself. Now instead, the days ahead are filled with surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation, CT scans, MRIs. You will never again entirely be free of the eternal gnawing fear of discovering that the cancer has spread. Your hair is going to fall out, you’re going to go under the knife, you’re going to be weak and sick. You’re going to read everything there is to read about cancer, and it still won’t help. It may go into remission, or you may die, but your life will never read the same… Cancer is the second most common cause of death, just barely behind heart disease, killing over 600,000 every year. And every year, almost 2 million Americans are diagnosed with new cases of cancer. Some kinds, like prostate cancer, are usually manageable; others, like pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma, are practically death sentences.”

Exactly 10 years ago, I wrote a post about first being diagnosed with a then-rare form of lymphoma, one that ordinary doctors— general practitioners— were mostly unaware of. When my doctor called me and told me what we had been trying to figure out what was wrong with me, I said, “I never heard of that.” So did he. And it was a death sentence. It was just a matter of how long you could get— one year, two, maybe three; no more. But I made a lucky choice— to go to a research hospital for treatment rather than to “the best” hospital in town. My doctor was on the team who figured out how to extend that short lifespan to a normal one. Her research has saved the lives of tens of thousands of people around the world and her treatment is now standard for this kind of lymphoma. That was a long way to say: research is worthwhile. Someone needs to tell the clowns running to U.S. government, starting with Trump… who has been busy defunding it.

Smith wrote that “an explosion of new therapies has promised to accelerate our progress in treating the disease, changing the very nature of what it means to have cancer. The most promising of these are immunotherapies— medical techniques that use the body’s own immune system to attack cancer cells. And of those therapies, one of the most promising is mRNA vaccines… [which] in combination with other therapies, promise to contain many cancers, turning them from a death sentence into a manageable, non-fatal disease. These vaccines are currently in development to fight all of the biggest killers: lung cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer and melanoma… There are even some tantalizing results suggesting that mRNA could soon be used to create a universal cancer therapy.”

Vote for a Republican and you are voting against that research— literally. “Instead of being sentenced to years of gut-wrenching fear, possibly followed by an agonizing death,” wrote Smith, “someone diagnosed with cancer would simply sigh and realize that they would have to spend a bunch of money on treatments for the foreseeable future. That is the world toward which science is taking us. And yet now all of this is in danger. The MAGA movement, which now holds near-absolute political power in America, has gone to war against mRNA technology. RFK Jr., Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services and a prominent vaccine skeptics, just canceled a large amount of federal funding… [which] includes terminating awards and contracts with pharmaceutical companies and universities and canceling 22 investment projects worth nearly $500 million. While some final-stage contracts will be allowed to be completed, no new mRNA-based projects will be initiated, the HHS said.”

So it’s very possible that thanks to RFK Jr., the Trump administration, and the MAGA movement writ large, cancer vaccines will not be available nearly as soon as it looked like they would just a few months ago. Eventually, the technology will be developed, with some combination of funding from Europe, China, private companies, and so on. But in the meantime, many people— including many Americans— will experience the nightmare of a traditional cancer diagnosis, like what I described at the top of this post.

Why is this happening? Why is the U.S. government attacking the technology that offers us the greatest chance to defeat one of humanity’s oldest and most terrible scourges?

Why is this happening? Because movements rooted in grievance, resentment and conspiracy— movements like MAGA and, increasingly, the Republican Party itself— are fundamentally incompatible with progress. They are anti-enlightenment at their core. They thrive not on truth, but on fear; not on expertise, but on demagoguery. They need scapegoats, not solutions. Whether it’s Dr. Fauci, the NIH or the nameless, faceless heroic researchers in labs who are quietly saving lives, anyone standing between their followers and the fantasy of omnipotent populist rage becomes an enemy.

These are not merely policy disagreements. This is a philosophical and moral rupture. A society that vilifies scientists and medical researchers— which treats knowledge as suspect and ignorance as a virtue— is a society preparing to abandon its people to disease, disaster and death. RFK Jr.’s sabotage of cancer research isn’t just an eccentric detour. It’s a grotesque expression of a larger movement’s contempt for facts and its preference for medieval thinking dressed up in modern paranoia.

And let’s be brutally honest: when Republicans rail against mRNA vaccines or demonize public health officials, they’re not just doing it to stir up the base or score points on Fox News. They’re actively undermining the infrastructure of survival. This is no longer about ideology. It’s about whether or not you want a future where someone you love— or you yourself— can benefit from the most promising medical breakthroughs in a generation.

When they defund science, they are not “owning the libs.” They are lengthening hospital stays, canceling clinical trials and signing death warrants. I recently had dinner with a distraught administrator from the hospital I’m being treated at. Thanks to DOGE, Musk, Trump, well over 100 million dollars in research grants have disappeared. Over a hundred people involved in on-going research have already been laid off. People in clinical trials have lost hope for surviving the Trump regime. And this is happening across the country, Trump trying to dry up people's hope. For example, the Republicans are literally destroying UCLA, not just the medical center, but the entire university!

Look, you can't be pro-life and anti-research. You can't wave a flag and simultaneously kneecap the very institutions that allow your country to fight disease. You can't pray cancer away, or legislate it away, or ignore it until it goes away. The only thing that works is science— real science, backed by money, manpower and time.

If the Republicans win next year, Trump, with RFK Jr. at his side, will guarantee that this war on science won’t be a phase; it’ll be further entrenched as national policy for Brand America— permanent and lethal. For many of us, how you vote— who you support— literally means life or death. Does that sound too dramatic? Sorry if it does.