how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles
This is not something done to us by leadership. This is a democracy; we voted for this.
We have another election coming up momentarily. We have the opportunity to put a stop to this. There's good reason to think that the election will not be entirely fair, but there are limits: if people are genuinely against this, they will turn out and say so.
We'll see what happens, but even in the best possible case, tens of millions of people will come out to say "Yes, destroying American science is exactly what I want". This is not a leadership problem. This is an us problem.
It is an information problem. A majority of voters believes in the nonsense that is spread on social media, and are not properly informed about important topics.
Proper information is readily available, and everyone on social media has been constantly exhorted to avoid scams.
At this point if people are being taken in by the really obvious and bald lies, the problem isn't a lack of information. They're just plain stupid.
Social media is allowing both views and the against is winning. But the mainstream media is under the thumb of fcc and too afraid to challenge so they keep neutral (or like Fox is a cheerleading) and that's where the disinformation is coming from.
The people are fairly irrelevant these days. We just saw this week how Israel and billionaires can just spam AI slop adverts to replace a popular candidate with a complete no one.
Boomers will see the ai generated video and believe it immediately.