Dear Editor:

In addition to all the damage he has done to our federal government in just three weeks, Trump and his ideological clones have begun to distort our national consciousness as well.

Let’s ponder the long-term effects of their campaign to (literally) whitewash and manwash our history.

To take just one example: MAGA inquisitors have infiltrated our scientific institutions and are busy rooting out any trace of DEI that may be lurking there. (Can’t think of a better use of our tax dollars; can you?)

At the federally funded Rubin Observatory in Chile, they found an egregious piece of woke propaganda: the online biography of Vera C. Rubin, after whom the facility is named.

One of the heroes of American astronomy, Rubin was the first woman permitted to use the Palomar Observatory (creating the first women’s restroom there).

Throughout her distinguished career, she pioneered investigations into galactic formation, dark matter, and gravitational lensing — while raising young children and taking care of her family. So foundational were her discoveries that she was elected to The National Academy of Sciences; awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Gruber International Cosmology Prize, and the National Medal of Science; and granted honorary doctorates from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

Obviously, the story of this brilliant woman is a threat to the White House patriarchy. Last month, her bio was altered in ways that diminished her formidable work of expanding the role of women in the sciences.

Responding to this nefarious rewriting of scientific history, astronomer John Barentine vowed that "No executive order, no political edict is going to undermine or end our efforts to make the scientific workforce look more like our people. If anything, it is giving us more encouragement to continue to do this work, because it is the morally, philosophically and politically right thing to do.”

Alas, “morality” has been scrubbed from the Musk-Trump lexicon.

Bill Hammond

Boothbay