Absolutely Right!
Looking at it from outside the US, nothing makes sense except for two possibilities;
1) A vested group (local+foreign engineered) in the US is bent on destroying everything that made the US a scientific/technological powerhouse. The effects will only be known many years in the future when it will be too late to do anything about it.
2) A complete buy-in into AI/AGI possibilities and hence a belief that you don't need human collaborations across the globe. This is a very iffy premise with a low probability.
Science has many other challenges and if you put everything together, the future does look uncertain. Some links;
Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34248858
MIT president: Why so many optimistic scientists are losing heart - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48304379
New research shows scientific innovation narrows as scientists age - https://datascience.uchicago.edu/insights/new-research-shows...
It’s a pity he can’t be as measured and scientific in his communication as the current US administration, but we can’t all aspire to that level of technocratic excellence.
At some point people need to call a spade a spade. I wish we weren’t here but we are and the anger is justified, the names factual.
A partisan take would be "other team bad because my team good"
War against science never ends well.
The ideology of "dont tell truth about conservatives, because it makes them look bad" is how they got empowered.
What's actually happening is that you do know what's going on, but you've adopted a strong identity as an apolitical "outsider". So when you notice that the Trump regime hates scientific research and wants to destroy it, that's deeply uncomfortable; you'd be forced to adopt political opinions if you focused on that and paid attention to it. You're left with no choice but to blame the messenger for pointing towards it.
I think you're taking an extremely basic, high-level narrative of history - something like "During what westerners call the middle ages, European powers were backwards and the Islamic powers at the same time were flourishing and did a lot of scientific discovery" - and then immediately using your basic understanding of that narrative to argue for a policy position today, without thinking at all about any deeper historical complexity of what was happening across an entire civilizational sphere centuries before our time when the entire world was different - what would an ancient Islamic caliph have actually understood about the value of basic scientific research funding by the state, for instance.
And this bugs me mostly because it's such an unscientific worldview.
Ostriches with their heads in the sand not wanting to state at the doom. Upset at someone that made them look up, not at the doom itself.