The professor at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard isn’t mincing words about the threat to America:

“To me, slashing funding and people from science in the United States is like burning your seed corn. It’s not even eating your seed corn. It’s just destroying it,” he says. “What can be more human than wanting to use all of our knowledge, all of our effort, all of our resources, to try to make the lives of our kids safer and better than our own lives? A huge part of that aspiration requires, and is indeed driven by, science.”

In related news, air quality experts warned Iowa families during the 2024 winter against burning cheap seed corn because it would emit mustard gas and kill them.

Brian Button, an air quality specialist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources …says the concern is the chemicals used to treat seed corn, when burned, emit powerful toxins like mustard gas [and because safer options exist] there’s no reason to burn seed corn. Button says unfortunately, folks with expired seed corn are trying to give it away to homeowners who have a corn-burning stove.

Unfortunately? Lack of fortune? That’s a weird way to describe predictable harms driven by extreme short-sighted financial greed.

Like it’s unfortunate that Americans are encouraged to burn seed corn despite the effect of being a literal weapon that will kill them?

Oh, wait, it gets even worse. Do these chemical weapons polluting seed corn carry any rationalization? Alas, science says there’s no benefit, just harms.

…the researchers found no evidence that neonicotinoids increased yield in corn.

So while it’s shocking to hear a top scientist say America is now stupidly destroying seed corn, on the other hand there’s evidence that is exactly the thoughtless harm that some Americans have been trying to cause for generations. Trump is clearly the worst of the worst, yet not the only one.

One thing I remember clearly as a country boy is the farmers’ warnings in the 1980s about Ronald Reagan—they saw through the façade and predicted disastrous consequences for rural America.

The economic devastation by the GOP enabled corporate consolidation as banks seized family farms. Simultaneously, technology corporations pushed farmers into dangerous centralized platform dependencies through proprietary equipment and modified seeds. Local farmers recognized they were losing autonomy to corporate interests hiding behind Reagan’s policies, the same executives who surveyed farmland from helicopters, eagerly anticipating how a “golden age” of 1980s technology would replace generations of agricultural knowledge.

Thus, the push into pesticides represented something more insidious than mere agricultural tools. It was akin to how today certain social media platforms are manipulated to suppress beneficial content while amplifying harmful elements. Consider how a privileged heir of South Africa’s apartheid system, a man who openly discusses his plans to distance himself from ordinary citizens on Earth, has methodically undermined valuable online discourse while allowing destructive content to flourish for the benefit of the GOP. Should we be surprised that this individual self-describes himself as a dangerous threat to any American institutions setup to provide sustainability, while also claiming to embody American values more authentically than native-born citizens who work the land?

The historical record clearly shows how agricultural chemicals originated from American warfare technology and (like a Tesla) were known to be unsafe for deployment in or around communities, yet were dropped onto Americans anyway. Even during Reagan’s administration the New York Times was reporting on these connections, as if the exposure didn’t matter.

Chemicals like parathion and malathion were known to scientists as essentially diluted versions of the First World War nerve agents. When the EPA raised alarms (PDF) about careless use of militarized chemicals decimating honeybee populations, government officials remained inactive for decades. Honeybee colonies collapsed (let alone many other species) as direct WWI-era chemical weapons saturated the American landscape.

The effects were real for those of us in the front row. I grew up on the wide open Konza prairie fishing with a string tied to a stick, bringing home enough healthy catch to feed a family. By the time I was an adult, our healthy waterways and lakes, hundreds of miles from any big city, were showing up in tests as too poisoned from chemical weapons (carelessly sprayed pesticides).

The shortsighted policies of dumping chemical weapons for profit reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of what truly builds national strength and security. When I was invited to personally meet with Senator Bob Dole in the early 1990s, he unapologetically lectured me with a troubling mindset behind this GOP strategy, lamenting how the foreign war-torn nations I had experience in wouldn’t allow wealthy Americans like him to acquire cheap land for future development. He perfectly encapsulated the problem: treating essential resources—whether agricultural land, scientific knowledge, or literal seed corn—not as foundations for sustainable prosperity, but as commodities to be devastated and then exploited for quick remote profits regardless of long-term local consequences.

American peace and prosperity has always depended on planting seeds for future generations, not poisoning them or selling them to the highest bidder. President Grant perhaps understood this better than any other leader, as he created the Department of Justice and National Parks, using federal troops to protect and preserve ecological and human rights. The destruction of our metaphorical and literal seed corn isn’t unfortunate, it’s the very predictable result of policies that prioritize short-term gains for a very few over national resilience.

America has strayed from valuing long-term sustainability. And as any wise farmer knows, once the stupid flamethrowers of the angry oligarchs burn your seed corn, you can’t just plant fantasy coins to grow next season’s crops.