You can now watch the “Oscars of Science’ here. The US tech billionaires and various Hollywood starlets gathered for this ceremony on April 5, in the middle of a massive illegal defunding of US scientific research by our new Fascist dictatorship. As far as I can tell, if you watch the whole thing, you’ll hear nothing at all about this.
Turns out though, that what the Breakthrough Prize people put out is a censored version of what actually happened. According to the Hollywood Reporter:
Emboldened by a dirty martini backstage, Rogen jumped in with a none-too-subtle reference to past attendee and current DOGE mastermind Elon Musk. “And it’s amazing that others [who have been] in this room underwrote electing a man who, in the last week, single-handedly destroyed all of American science,” he said, clearly making Norton uncomfortable. The comment underlined the irony of Silicon Valley’s increasingly cozy relationship with the Trump administration, which has cut federal science funding and defied scientific consensus. “It’s amazing how much good science you can destroy with $320 million and RFK Jr, very fast,” Rogen continued.
but these comments were censored from the video. The reason?
When asked why Rogen’s potentially embarrassing comments were excised, a spokesperson for the Breakthrough Prize Foundation said, “This year’s ceremony lasted longer than the prior few years, and several edits were made in order to meet the originally planned run time.”
A significant part of the story of the disaster that has befallen the US and US science is the behavior of various tech billionaires, including Zuckerberg, who is one of the main financial backers of the Breakthrough prize. Putting out a dishonest lie about what they just did is consistent with their general support for the dishonest, lying government we now live under.
