Bonjour et aurevoir Raphaël Glucksmann: A French scientist is now a victim of Trumpzism

Echo opinion published in the Houston Chronicle by Robert Zaretsky:

A funny thing happened to a French researcher apparently on his way to the Woodlands, the site of last week’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Upon arriving at George Bush Intercontinental Airport, the scientist was stopped at immigration and customs where officials went through not just his toiletries but his work computer and personal phone. 

Mais oui, their suspicions were founded: there were messages on the sudden plight of the American scientific community “that express hatred towards Trump and can be qualified as terrorism,” according to a source quoted by the French news source Le Monde.

The suspected, though now disarmed, terrorist was swept onto the next flight back to Paris. We can breathe more easily…or can we?

The Lunar and Planetary Science Conference website announced this meeting as the “defining event in planetary research, bringing together a diverse group of international experts in a truly collaborative environment.” But to paraphrase Nayib Bukele, the Salvadoran president, “Oopsie…it’s too late to edit that line.” Somehow, the conference organizers had not gotten the message that it is politically toxic to use the word “diverse.” Moreover, their claim was factually wrong: diversity for scientists in the next four years will exclude scientists mad enough to criticize the Trump administration’s catastrophic attack on their fields of research.

Ironically, this incident explains why this conference is a “defining event.” Many observers have compared the fear and dread now stirred by the dogs of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) to the fear and dread spurred 75 years ago by the determined red-hunters of HUAC e Un-American Activities Committee). Whereas Senator Joseph McCarthy terrifi(Housed scientists and academics with the phrase “I have here in my hand a list,” so too does Elon Musk with either lists of 360-year-old Americans still receiving Social Security checks or lists of agencies he has happily shuttered (and sometimes reopens when he learns — oopsie! — they are tasked with preventing diseases like Ebola).

In other ways, this moment in our history more closely resembles the 1930s, and 1940s, in Stalinist Russia, when a cartoonish version of Marxism replaced hard-nosed empiricism, forcing scientists to acquiesce to utterly bogus theories like Lysenkoism (denying the existance of genetics), which trashed the science of genetics, or the pseudo-science of Lamarckism (a debunked theory of evolution proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, suggesting that organisms can pass on traits acquired during their lifetime to their offspring, which is now largely considered incorrect). 

The consequences of this willed obscurantism were baleful not just for the lives of Russian scientists, but also for the future of scientific research in Russia.

But, we need not look as far as Russia for insights into what the Trump Administration’s actions will mean, not just for the pursuit of knowledge, but for liberty and equality. Leave it to a citizen of our sister republic, France, to remind us about the significance of our Statue of Liberty. A few days ago, the young and influential French politician, Raphaël Glucksmann, addressed recent events in America. In his speech, he declared “We say to those Americans who now side with tyrants and to those Americans who fire researchers who insist on the freedom of scientific study (my italics), give us back the Statue of Liberty. We gave her to you as a gift, but it seems you now scorn her. And so, let her find a home, chez nous.”

A clip of Glucksmann’s speech caught fire 🔥 on social platforms, with plumes of smoke reaching as far as the White House. A Fox News reporter asked the press secretary, ex-Fox intern Karoline Leavitt, if the administration plans to return the statue. Expecting this softball, Leavitt swung mightily: “Absolutely not, and my advice to that unnamed, low-level French politician would be to remind them that it’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now.”

(Maine Writer note:  Check out my Substack blog in response to the stupidity in Leavitt's idiotic statement link here.)

A few hours later, Glucksmann tweeted a reply. He fully and gratefully acknowledged that thousands of Americans had given their lives to help the French defeat Nazi Germany. 

But, he added a crucial proviso — namely, that they had done so on behalf of a certain idea of freedom, one that was launched by the French Revolution, which was inspired in part by our own revolution little more than a decade earlier.

Et, le voilà, here we are. While our new government will not return the Statue of Liberty, they have just returned a French scientist to France. It is, of course, impossible not to think of Glucksmann’s astonishment that the Trump administration is firing men and women engaged in scientific research. But it is also impossible not to be astonished that the beacon’s light held aloft by the “Mother of Exiles” rather than “glowing world-wide welcome,” may well soon be extinguished.

Robert Zaretsky teaches courses in modern French and European history at the University of Houston.

Editor's note: A statement from the Department of Homeland Security, published Friday by the New York Times, claims that the researcher "was in possession of confidential information on his electronic device from Los Alamos National Laboratory — in violation of a nondisclosure agreement — something he admitted to taking without permission and attempted to conceal." However, the French minister for higher education repeated that the researcher was targeted for his opinions about Trump.