

In addition to this I didn’t even touch upon the resentment towards stupid bullshit outside of defense
Like I like in Pennsylvania and the amount of tax dollars that are spent propping up fossil fuel industries. Like I want to spend money on developing energy infrastructure, of course. But I want that money to go into putting power lines underground (my power goes out every six weeks minimum and 2-3x a year for over 24hours, sometimes over 72), nuclear, solar, hydroelectric, etc
But what do I get? Fracking, propping up the coal industry, etc. fucking ridiculous.
Road quality decreases and yet no public transportation expansion. It’s garbage if you have a car and if you don’t it’s impossible if you’re outside of a city.
So that stuff too
This is not an incorrect point but rfks motives are more likely delegitimization of major journals to make the hacky bullshit journals he cites not seem so quacky
If this is successful in 5-10 years it will be much less normal to say “at least show me a paper from nature”. Then the confusing landscape of journals that are not well known become even harder to differentiate from the ones he cites
For reference, when he was citing his antivax bullshit at (I believe it was) his confirmation hearing the article he cited came from a journal of extremely dubious quality. The board of directors were all antivaxxers, one of which being the guy who published the article, and the journal was registered out of a residential home. It was basically the academic journal equivalent of a fanzine with obvious and extreme conflicts of interest in its peer review. The paper itself had glaring methodology issues (shocker).
If scientists are forced to leave the most reputable publications it just muddies the waters even more for articles that are of very high quality or importance
The issues you point out are still very relevant and need resolution of course but they can be solved in other ways. Regulation surrounding how government funded research is handled, how government endowment funds for library access to journals are handled, etc could give significant leverage over private publishers without having to start over from scratch. Or you could be more aggressive and force the publishers to be more equitable, but good luck with that in America