How the Trump Smithsonian order is fighting another bulwark of woke insanity
Donald Trump is fighting back against yet another bulwark of woke insanity — issuing an executive order that “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” be removed from the Smithsonian Institution (the nation’s premier network of major museums).
It also charges the Interior Department to restore federal parks, monuments, and memorials that have been “removed or changed in the last years to perpetuate a false revision of history.”
Yes! Among the worst excesses of the woke crusade was the rush to divide and segregate America by race again, allegedly to somehow ameliorate the ills caused by social injustice.
Tax-funded institutions like the National Museum of African American History and Culture went all in on racist nonsense: In 2020, the museum put out a graphic stating that “objective, rational, linear thinking,” “quantitative emphasis,” and “hard work before play” are white qualities.
That’s an insult to everyone.
Remember too, the move to literally write out of the record even extremely important figures from America’s past by toppling monuments, painting over murals, and renaming facilities.
One recent target was William Penn, a man famous for founding a state based on the idea of religious freedom; it took public outrage to reverse 2024 National Park Service plans to remove his Philly statue.
And cosigning it all was huge swathes of our public-intellectual class, including historians and preservationists — the very people supposed to protect the past, not cheer its obliteration.
A free nation must tolerate its critics; all serious history is, in a sense, revisionist.
But the idea that the taxpaying public should sponsor race-based pseudo-sociology and the gleeful, wanton destruction of the past is beyond vile.
That’s why Trump deserves credit for striking back.
Yes, it’s an executive order, so it can be undone if a Democrat wins the White House — and Democrats are still deeply vested in this nonsense.
That is: The “museum wars” are only part of the much larger struggle to push American elite culture back toward sanity and excellence — to end the lefty bullying that elevates fourth-rate scholarship like the 1619 Project far beyond its merits.
Rooting that out is beyond the reach of any executive order, but this one is certainly an excellent first step.
