How far can a government go in harming its own people before it loses support? And what does it mean if this form of harm happens via an attack on public knowledge institutions, from universities to meteorological services, in which expert knowledge is hosted? Even if you are not a friend of such institutions (and one could write many blogposts about what they could do better), isn’t there a basic sense in which they fulfill public functions in modern societies that should receive cross-partisan support? And shouldn’t there be some kind of recognition, on the part of lay people – which we all are, in the overwhelming majority of areas – that we need to trust the expertise of others for many public and private decisions?