Please preserve and increase the NSF’s budget, after you’ve cleansed it of “woke communism” as you see fit. For all I care, add a line item to the budget for studying how to build rockets that are even bigger, louder, and more phallic.

But if you won’t save the NSF and the other basic research agencies—well hey, you’re the ones who now control the world’s nuclear-armed superpower, not me. But don’t you dare bullshit me about how you did all this so that merit-based science could once again flourish, like in the days of Newton and Gauss, finally free from meddling bureaucrats and woke diversity hires. You’d then just be another in history’s endless litany of conquering bullies, destroying what they can’t understand, no more interesting than all the previous bullies.