Last week, the Natural History Museums of LA County announced their plan to honor the Duchess of Sussex at their Night of Wonder gala. The gala was scheduled for June 14, this coming Saturday. Which would have meant that Meghan and Harry would have stepped out for a glamorous night on the town on the same day the left-behinds were looking grim on the balcony for Trooping the Colour. Unfortunately, the situation in LA is quite complicated right now – there are anti-ICE protests, and Donald Trump has sent in the National Guard AND Marines to quell the protests. So the museum is postponing the Night of Wonder gala until further notice.
Meghan Markle will no longer appear at a previously scheduled event in Los Angeles as clashes continue in the city between the National Guard and protesters. The Duchess of Sussex was set to be honored at the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County’s Night of Wonder gala on Saturday, June 14, but the event has since been postponed.
“As an institution ‘of, for, and with Los Angeles,’ our responsibility during challenging times is clear: to serve as a community resource focused on healing and unity, not celebration,” Dr. Lori Bettison-Varga, President and Director of NHMLAC, said in a statement shared with PEOPLE on Tuesday, June 10.
“Los Angeles needs us to channel our energy toward supporting our neighbors and demonstrating the values that make our city and county strong,” her statement continued.
The decision to postpone the gala was made by the Museum’s Board of Trustees, leadership and event partners, who “unanimously agreed” that pausing the event was “the appropriate response to current community circumstances,” the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County said in a release shared with PEOPLE.
NHMLAC plans to host event on a later date, but will carry on regular daily operations and will continue to host educational programs.
I understand why they’re delaying the gala but I’m still disappointed! It would have been nice to see Meghan and Harry out and about at a black-tie event. But it was the right call to postpone – it would have been worse to NOT cancel the event while LA is going through so much turmoil. I did glance at the Daily Mail’s coverage, and this made me giggle: “A woke gala set to honor Meghan Markle as a ‘champion of underserved communities’ has been scrapped because of the city’s erupting ICE riots.” A WOKE GALA! Museums are woke! Galas are WOKE!
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.
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- Beverly Hills, CA – Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, attends The Paley Center for Media hosts Paley Honors Fall Gala honoring Tyler Perry at Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills, California. Pictured: Meghan Markle, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex BACKGRID USA 4 DECEMBER 2024 USA: +1 310 798 9111 / usasales@backgrid.com UK: +44 208 344 2007 / uksales@backgrid.com *UK Clients – Pictures Containing Children Please Pixelate Face Prior To Publication*
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- Beverly Hills, CA – Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, attends The Paley Center for Media hosts Paley Honors Fall Gala honoring Tyler Perry at Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills, California. Pictured: Meghan Markle, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex BACKGRID USA 4 DECEMBER 2024 USA: +1 310 798 9111 / usasales@backgrid.com UK: +44 208 344 2007 / uksales@backgrid.com *UK Clients – Pictures Containing Children Please Pixelate Face Prior To Publication*
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- Beverly Hills, CA – Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, attends The Paley Center for Media hosts Paley Honors Fall Gala honoring Tyler Perry at Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills, California. Pictured: Meghan Markle, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex BACKGRID USA 4 DECEMBER 2024 USA: +1 310 798 9111 / usasales@backgrid.com UK: +44 208 344 2007 / uksales@backgrid.com *UK Clients – Pictures Containing Children Please Pixelate Face Prior To Publication*
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- Beverly Hills, CA – Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, attends The Paley Center for Media hosts Paley Honors Fall Gala honoring Tyler Perry at Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills, California. Pictured: Meghan Markle, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex BACKGRID USA 4 DECEMBER 2024 USA: +1 310 798 9111 / usasales@backgrid.com UK: +44 208 344 2007 / uksales@backgrid.com *UK Clients – Pictures Containing Children Please Pixelate Face Prior To Publication*
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- Beverly Hills, CA – Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, attends The Paley Center for Media hosts Paley Honors Fall Gala honoring Tyler Perry at Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills, California. Pictured: Megan Markle, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex BACKGRID USA 4 DECEMBER 2024 USA: +1 310 798 9111 / usasales@backgrid.com UK: +44 208 344 2007 / uksales@backgrid.com *UK Clients – Pictures Containing Children Please Pixelate Face Prior To Publication*
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- 2022 Ripple Of Hope Awards Featuring: Prince Harry, Meghan Markle Where: New York, New York, United States When: 06 Dec 2022 Credit: Janet Mayer/startraksphoto.com/Cover Images
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- 2022 Ripple Of Hope Awards Featuring: Prince Harry, Meghan Markle Where: New York, New York, United States When: 06 Dec 2022 Credit: Janet Mayer/startraksphoto.com/Cover Images
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- Time100 Summit at the Jazz at Lincoln Centre Featuring: Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex Where: New York City, New York, United States When: 23 Apr 2025 Credit: Roger Wong/INSTARimages
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- Time100 Summit at the Jazz at Lincoln Centre Featuring: Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex Where: New York City, New York, United States When: 23 Apr 2025 Credit: Roger Wong/INSTARimages
Good call. Priorities.
Agree
I think they did the right thing! About the woke museum. Was the museum visit that Can’t did woke too then? Asking for a friend.
Yes. Kate visited a museum in Hackney Wick which is a very liberal trendy part of East London. The reason why they didn’t announce her visit was because they didn’t want the protestors to turn up.
The Daily Mail wants you to know that it is NOT woke! And there are no “riots” in LA. The Mad King is desperately trying to incite some.
So was Kate’s recent visit to a museum woke then? What hypocrites. Anyways I’m disappointed but I get it. My heart is with LA and everyone else being affected by ICE and Trump right now. This just feels unsustainable.
The Orange Menace strikes again. He’s directly impacting life in my town.
Postponing was the right call. Trump, that evil agent of chaos, is inciting violence. And to think the Fail just gave us the spiteful “Sophie does more for women than Meghan,” they’ll have to re-run the article when the gala does happen.
It is the correct decision and am horrified to see what Trump is doing.
Btw I do think a lot of museums are woke. A lot of them focus on history, science, nature and/or other cultures and are thankfully now looking into colonial history/slavery as well. So people might actually go away having learned something.
The Met Gala last month was the most wonderfully woke Gala ever! More of that, please.
Museums aren’t woke so much as engaging in professional standards. Many are realizing–finally!–that displaying sacred items to all & sundry might perhaps be insulting to Native Americans, for example. Or that, huh, focusing on the architecture of a plantation house and ignoring the slave labor that built it, literally and figuratively, perhaps needs some rethinking & reinterpretation to the public. Or that focusing on the work of white men was a rather narrow view of the human experience. And so on.
yup, disappointed but i understand.
and lmao at it being a “woke” gala. give me a break.
Woke Gala? Didn’t Lazy just visit a woke institution in the V&A museum?
The DF sure likes to inflame the MAGA crowd.
You beat me to it! Exactly what I would’ve said.
Think of the BM that had their flights booked and tickets bought, hee, hee.
🤪
I expected this because of optics, even though L.A. isn’t in ” erupting in riots”. I’m not discounting what’s happening which is horrific but it is conservative playbook to make people think that something that is occurring in a small section of the city means that an entire city is filled with anarchy and burning down.
They want people to think that Los Angeles is on fire and being looted when that’s not the case. That’s also why they are describing a museum gala ( a fairly common bastion of the upper class forever) as being ” woke”. Don’t you know ” those people” don’t deserve to be honored ? You see how they are burning everything down?
Weirdly museums are not woke when it’s Kate going to them looking for things “related to nature”.
Poor Kate. She probably has set things to do to be out and about to steal the thunder (lol) from the Sussexes and now the gala has been postponed. Like when Meghan’s show was postponed.
She’ll need a couple of vacations before Wimbledon.
This Saturday, on June 14th – Flag Day in the US – there is a day of protests planned across the US, in cities and towns large and small. There’s a day of events in my small city, and in Boston, Worcester, and Portsmouth NH, the larger cities nearby.
There are No Kings rallies to protest the Trump administration’s abuse of power and trampling over human rights, the US Constitution, the Rule of Law. Some of the protests are in solidarity with the protests in LA. And all are planned as lawful, No Violence demonstrations. These are not riots, they are We The People making our voices heard. Same as in LA.
So if Celebitches outside the US hear of rallies and protests in the US that day, that’s what’s going on. Pay no attention to the dope in DC throwing himself a massive military parade (on the taxpayer’s dime, and a misuse of military personnel who didn’t enlist to serve at the whims of a fascist autocrat)
It was a good call to postpone the gala.
Best of luck and hope nobody loses their life over these protests. It will only be a matter of time but it’s sad to see the US spiral in this way. May the spirit of the American Revolution continue.
The Dems Abroad in my hometown, the second largest city in my home country, have organized a demo against the 🔸️tyrant for Saturday, as have many other big cities here, and the capital. As have many other European metropoles, all in solidarity.
Of course we will go, even if it will probably be very hot (~ 32°C, ~ 90°F), after we only had 14°C / ~57°F last weekend.
And I’ve talked to colleagues abroad who are all equally horrified at what we saw from DC in preparation for that parade, all the tanks being brought in.
But then we’re all in a constant state of horror anyway right now, especially here in 🇪🇺, as we all can see what’s happening in our line of work *over there*, medical research, vaccine development, public health — all the grants being cut, people fired, trials halted, databases destroyed before we’ve even begun to scrape/mine/mirror their contents *on our own research money*, for now.
Museum of Natural History is woke???? I guess dinosaurs and tar pits care about critical race theory and LGBTQ+ issues.
When I first moved to Georgia & was looking for a place to live, I had thought I might want to live in this little town not far from work. After a bit of googling I saw that they had a Creationist Museum, where dioramas of dinosaurs & human beings walked the earth at the same time. I had wanted to visit, just to check it out (I only looked at their website), but I figured I would probably find myself kicked out because I wouldn’t be able to keep my snorts & snickering to myself.
Which is a long way to say–they’re are some people in this country, sad to say, who when visiting the tar pits would be very unhappy to see any inferences to the time depth of the planet as they ‘KNOW’ it’s only 6,000 years old & would see that as being ‘woke’.
It’s funny because the history of natural history museums is very, very unwoke. Basically people of color were considered part of “nature” rather than having cultures and histories of their own.
I actually don’t find that DM headline funny. Calling anything “woke” is we are racist and proud of it. I clicked on the link and read the comments and some are like well at least the riots are good for something. Like….people are being harmed but hey, let’s be super irrational about Meghan Sussex and be glad Americans are being hurt because we hate her that much. And them talking about her not being able to twerk for trooping is gross.
Woke used to be code for Black equality but at this point the Right calls anything that helps people woke. Which honestly makes them look evil. Since when did they position themselves as being against anything that benefits their fellow countrymen?
“Since when did they position themselves as being against anything that benefits their fellow countrymen?”
Reagan?
Bush I?
Bush II and Gingrich and Cheney with an assist from Fox News?
Pat Robertson and the so-called Moral Majority (which was neither)?
The Tea Party (including Palin)?
Trump and Project 2025 and the MAGA cult are just the stinking rotten fruit from those rotten vines.
Even Nixon, as bad as he was in so many bigoted (the Southern strategy) and criminal (Watergate) and criminally inhumane (Vietnam and elsewhere) ways, was like … hmm clean air, education and protection of some public lands are probably good things, or at least good for his political career.
Once these protests started, didn’t think this event could happen. This was the right call. The 14th is a day of action all across the US with lots of protests happening. Also the Pope will be in Chicago. Praying for heavy rain in D.C.
The pope’s going to be in Chicago on the 14th? Well, that’s very interesting. All this counter-programming of the fascist fuckwit. Good.
They are not riots, they are peaceful protests for the most part which the Orange Turd has magnified into out-of-control rioting in the streets so he could send in the National Guard and military, insisting that it’s an invasion, insurrection, whatever he wants to call it so he can basically take over California and put Newsom in jail. Newsom’s going to addresses California and the Nation about this today, can’t wait to see it, he’s going to take Trump down big time.
The British Media has no standing whatsoever to criticize museums in other countries when The British Museum in London is filled with stolen & robbed items from other countries.
Y’all! You’ve buried the lede! This is a Natural History Museum! But Kate’s thing is Nature!! HOW DARE MEGHAN??