Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
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“Anti-Globalism Against Itself”
analyzes the overlaps and disjunctures between the anti-globalization left and anti-globalist right for Compact. He reviews the recent body of work produced by left writer Quinn Slobodian: “In 2020, Quinn Slobodian published the best book on the politics of globalization: Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. In the opening pages of that marvellous work, he wrote that he had composed it partly by way of belated apology for having been absent from the ‘Battle of Seattle,’ the anti-globalization protests that shook the American city in 1999, at which some of his friends were present. Even if he was personally absent from the protests, Slobodian served the cause well on the intellectual frontlines two decades later. From today’s vantage point, it would seem, the anti-globalists have finally won. Back in 1999, the protesters dumped imported Brazilian steel into Seattle harbor in protest at cheap imports undercutting US industry. Today, the duty on steel imported into the United States stands at 25 percent. The peak era of globalization is over, and Slobodian helped write its obituary.”“The problem, however, is that the figure currently attempting to dismantle global trade is Donald Trump—not exactly the savior Slobodian and his friends hoped for back in 1999. The rise of Trump alongside the international populist right has created a problem for Slobodian, as for other left critics of globalization. Having set out to write a book for the old ‘Teamsters and Turtles’ coalition that manned the barricades in Seattle, instead he found himself rubbing shoulders with an insurgency against neoliberalism composed of Trumpians and Brexiters.”
Cunliffe concludes: “Perhaps by removing any taint of association with the populist right, Slobodian has at last discharged his debt to the left anti-globalizers. Those of us who have enjoyed his books can only hope this will free him up to expand his interests into other realms. ‘Well-funded networks of think tanks, conferences, gatherings, and workshops, as well as investment forums, comments sections, and Reddit groups, offer nurseries for adaptive ideological strains,’ he tells us in Hayek’s Bastards. Who could doubt such a claim after the recent dissolution of USAID exposed the vast reach of its progressive empire? There is a book there to be written.”
For more on the relationship between the anti-globalization movement of the late-1990s and early-2000s and contemporary right-wing populism, see my article, “We Are All Trumpians Now.”
“Trump Was a Decoloniser All Along”
theorizes the Trump administration’s radical tariff program for Unherd: “When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 2023, the Teen Vogue writer Najma Sharif notoriously posted in defence of the violence: ‘What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.’ Loosely translated, this means that the only way to do political ‘radicalism’ without costing someone something is by not actually doing it. Vibes and papers are just vibes and papers; once translated to the living physical interpersonal world, there is always a cost.”“[T]he real ‘woke’ political horseshoe was not culture wars, nor cancel culture, but decolonisation. For the Bannonist programme is, in effect, precisely such a programme. It sets out to dismantle the global American empire that flew under the cover of ‘globalism,’ including its (as Trump himself has put it) imperial rule over America herself, in favour of a return to American economic nationalism. And, as Sharif said, what did we think decolonisation meant: vibes, papers, essays?”
Harrington concludes: “Once you step out of the world of vibes and papers, there are winners and losers. The decolonial Left grasped this some time ago; now, perhaps, the decolonial Right is joining them. It is anyone’s guess how this round of anti-globalist rewiring will work out, but I think we can expect pushback. Let us hope the disagreement escalates no further than policy and public debate.”
“What Abundance Can’t Achieve”
At The Financial Times, Janan Ganesh explains why he doesn’t expect Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s much-discussed “abundance” strategy for the Democrats “to make the slightest dent on politics”: “The biggest head-scratcher in the modern world is the lack of correlation between abundance and voter happiness. In the US, which has boomed for much of the century, populists are rampant. In Europe, which mostly hasn’t, populists are rampant. If we track one place over time, the picture is no less confounding. East Germany has been getting richer and richer since it came in from the cold. Its propensity to vote for the hard right has gone up over the same period. When Ireland was poor, its politics was a duopoly of establishment parties. As it grew richer, support for Sinn Féin grew too.”
Ganesh continues: “If not abundance, then, what is it that might defang the west’s rebellious voters? Which abstract noun should guide liberals in politics? I can give you one syllable less than the authors. Order. Whether it is the order of national borders, or the order of being able to walk unaccosted through cities, there isn’t enough of it for public tastes….The authors of Abundance trace urban disorder back to scarcity, which is fair up to a point, but also a bit of an intellectual knight’s move. The more direct question of law enforcement is still awkward to bring up in polite company. Ever since the French Revolutionaries extolled liberté, égalité and fraternité, assuming that sécurité would take care of itself, the Enlightened have had a blind spot for this stuff. Their enemies don’t. Defeating them will take a liberalism that builds, no doubt, but also one that protects, and even condemns.”
“The Cost of Trump’s Attack on American Science”
The Financial Times reports on the Trump administration’s federal funding cuts to scientific research. These cuts undoubtedly serve a sinister function as leverage to ramp up censorship on university and college campuses. At the same time, they have the potential to radically reshape the postwar scientific industrial complex that has funneled billions of federal dollars into biotech and defense research: “Since the second world war, the publicly funded science base in the US has been an engine of discovery and global economic growth. The turmoil in research is a huge risk for powerful industries such as pharmaceuticals, whose products are often built on publicly funded research…This rollback of research comes in jarring contrast to the push for global scientific pre-eminence that emerged in the US out of the second world war.”
It is impossible to understand the proposed funding cuts without reference to the massive and continued political fallout from the scientific and public health establishment’s massively unpopular covid regime: “The Trump administration wants to cut the NIH’s $47bn annual funding by about 40 per cent, according to media reports of preliminary plans. It has already announced moves to slash billions from the grant funding it gives to researchers each year…The NIH has additional political symbolism because of its association with Anthony Fauci, a top official there until 2022. Fauci was the public face of the White House Covid-19 task force, where he sometimes contradicted Trump’s claims about the virus. He became a hate figure for some in the Maga movement and Elon Musk called for him to be prosecuted—one reason Joe Biden granted him a pre-emptive pardon before leaving office.”
The article reports that “Nasa’s $7.6bn science budget could be almost halved,” which, the authors lament, would impact the Agency’s program to “bring rock samples from Mars for the first time.” One wonders how many Americans think that bringing rock samples from other planets should be a national priority.
“What Causes Autism?”
offers a rigorous inquiry into the fraught debate surrounding the causes of autism at : “The incidence of autism appears to have been increasing globally by about 0.06% per year for decades. In the US, autism prevalence estimates increased from one in 150 to one in 44 between 2000 and 2018, to one in 36 by 2020, to—just released days ago—one in 31 by 2022. This indicates a particularly intense trend in the United States that persists in recent years despite enormous consciousness around the possibility for diagnostic changes to be occurring over time. While we cannot say for sure how diagnostic inflation could be impacting these estimates, it is almost certain that there is a real increase happening.”Masterjohn writes that “It is definitively not the case that there is a single point of failure where autism is suddenly switched from off to on. Rather, there is a period of 23 (or 58) months where autism is cumulatively progressed toward, hence the ‘spectrum’ of autism disorders that can result. However, there can still be a single point where metabolic dysfunction precipitously deteriorates in response to a trigger and pushes the person over a final threshold of dysfunction that manifests to parents or caregivers as symptomatic onset.”
On the question of vaccines, he writes that “the total lack of rigorous data addressing whether total vaccine burden and timing of vaccine burden is associated with autism makes it absolutely necessary to entertain…preliminary reports until this question is addressed the way it finally should be…Here is the research program that needs to be done to settle the vaccine question: The United States HHS should organize a national randomized cluster trial of alternative vaccine schedules. Since there are other countries that vaccinate less than we do with no evidence of iller health, and since there are older US vaccine schedules at times that were not marked by increased childhood mortality, the study should compare more minimalist vaccine schedules to the current schedule. The unit of randomization could be hospitals, schools, or municipalities. Parents should have total choice about whether to withdraw from the study and follow the current schedule or no schedule. Those that deviate in either direction should have the opportunity to be studied as a free-choice side arm, and if they choose to be studied, details about their health choices should be tracked to assess for any cofounders in comparisons between groups.”
“Node Without Consent”
analyzes research on “biodigital integration” at his eponymous Substack: “Imagine discovering that your neurons—the very cells that make you you—could be transformed into networked data points, each one monitored and potentially controlled by microscopic machines. At the same time, your genetic code—your biological blueprint—is being bought, sold, and potentially auctioned to the highest bidder in bankruptcy proceedings. This isn't science fiction. Research papers published in mainstream scientific journals are already mapping out how to connect human brains directly to the cloud using injectable ‘neuralnanorobots,’ while in late 2024, 23andMe—once a $6 billion biotech darling—filed for bankruptcy, leaving 15 million DNA samples in limbo as potential assets for creditors. Though I don't claim deep technical expertise in nanotechnology or neuroscience, my deep dive into these fields—analyzing technical documentation, consulting with researchers, and tracking academic developments—has revealed an alarming landscape of converging technologies. The fundamental question isn't whether this technology will be developed—it's already underway. The real issue at stake is whether we'll maintain autonomy over our own biology as these technologies emerge.”
He writes that “What we're witnessing isn't just technological innovation—it's what I've come to see as biometric colonization, where bodily data is extracted and controlled in ways that echo the resource extraction of colonial empires. This isn't just about privacy or data security—though those concerns are serious enough. This is about the fundamental sovereignty of your own biology. When your neurons can be monitored in real-time, when your brain activity can be networked to the cloud, when your DNA is stored in corporate databases that can be sold or hacked, who truly owns the essence of your existence? Your DNA isn't just information—it's you: your genetic identity, your health predispositions, characteristics tied to your family lineage. You can't change it like a password or cancel it like a credit card. It's permanent, revealing secrets about you that you might not even know yourself…The recent experience with global medical interventions has taught many of us the importance of informed consent and bodily autonomy. Yet the technologies being developed would make current debates about medical freedom look quaint by comparison.”
Stylman documents how Israel is at the forefront of biodigital integration, citing a statement by Benjamin Netanyahu in which the Prime Minister boasts: “We have a database, 98% of our population has digitized medical records...I intend to bring on that database of personal medical records for entire population a genetic database...give me a saliva sample...now we have a genetic record on a medical record of a robust population...let pharma companies…run algorithms on this database.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.