Organizers had described the Earth Day event as a non-partisan celebration of science and evidence-based policymaking. But as Saturday’s rainy rally in D.C. showed, it’s kinda hard to control the message of hundreds of thousands of people. Sure, many marched for reasons totally unrelated to Trump; I met one woman who just wanted to express her love for Miss Frizzle. But walking around the rally, it was hard to avoid one main theme: that a lot of people consider the president to be a threat to science and objective truth. In the spirit of the march, here is some evidence:
Many attendees were upset about Trump’s proposed budget cuts to scientific research. Amy and Dana Blackmer, from Richmond, Virginia, have two daughters who are scientists, one of whom is trying to get into a National Institutes of Health program that studies the CRISPR gene-editing method. “She has been studying her little butt off to get in,” Dana said. Trump’s budget proposes cutting NIH by 18 percent.