Scientists Plan Anti-Trump March on Washington

Protest is response to Trump's 'attacks on science'
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 26, 2017 7:16 AM CST
Scientists Plan Own March on Washington
Demonstrators march on 5th Ave towards Trump Tower during a protest in New York, Saturday, Jan. 21, 2017.   (AP Photo/Alexander F. Yuan)

Some of the women who marched on Washington on Saturday will be back soon in the name of science. The Scientists' March on Washington started as a Reddit conversation over the weekend and has now grown into a group with tens of thousands of supporters, Live Science reports. The group, which has more than 125,000 followers of its Twitter account, says it is taking action to support scientific research and people are welcome to join the march whether they are scientists or not. The group says it plans to set a date for a march on Washington soon and it is also coordinating sister marches in cities across America to protest the Trump administration's freezing of government grants and restrictions on communication.

"We hope to use this as a starting point to take a stand for science in politics," the group says on its website. "Slashing funding and restricting scientists from communicating their findings (from tax-funded research!) with the public is absurd and cannot be allowed to stand as policy," the group says, calling support for empirical research and science "a non-partisan issue." Public health researcher Caroline Weinberg, one of the movement's co-chairs, tells the Washington Post that organizers were inspired—and infuriated—by the new administration's "attacks on science." (Parks and government agencies are "going rogue" on Twitter in defiance of Trump's policies.)

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