Secretary of the Smithsonian Lonnie Bunch in an appearance on Finding Your Roots
The Smithsonian is named after James Smithson, a British scientist who upon his death in 1829 left his estate to the United States, a country he’d never been to, so that a center could be established in the capital that would promote “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” By 1846, President James Polk signed legislation that set in motion the building of the institution, which over time grew to comprise 21 museums across Washington DC that house our nation’s historical and cultural legacy, warts and all. That’s what the Smithsonian has been hitherto, anyway, before Trump signed the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order. Much like his hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center, Trump has targeted the Smithsonian with bigly-fisted rantings against woke and DEI. I guess no one told him the whole place is named for a foreigner! Meanwhile, actual historians are calling out the EO for what it is: “a five-alarm fire for history, science and education in America.”
Samuel Redman, professor of history: “It is a five-alarm fire for public history, science and education in America. While the Smithsonian has faced crisis moments in the past, it has not been directly attacked in quite this way by the executive branch in its long history. It’s troubling and quite scary.”
Donald Trump, racist & moron: The president believes there has been a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth”, according to the White House executive order. He argues this “revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light”. The order also asserts: “Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”
JD Vance, stooge: The order stipulates that the vice-president, JD Vance, a member of the Smithsonian’s board of regents, work with Congress and the office of management and budget to block programmes that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy”.
Tope Folarin, Nigerian-American writer: “You cannot ‘foster unity’ by refusing to tell the truth about our history. Ignorance of the truth is what actually deepens societal divides. These museums are important because they tell the full American story in an unvarnished way. We will only achieve unity when we are able to reckon with the truth about how this country was founded, and acknowledge the heroes who worked continuously to bring us together.”
David Blight, president of the Organization of American Historians: “What’s most appalling about this is the arrogance, or worse, the audacity to assume that the executive branch of government, the presidency, can simply dictate to American historians writ large the nature of doing history and its content.” … Blight regards the moves as drawn from the authoritarian playbook: “It’s what the Nazis did. It’s what Spain did. It’s what Mussolini tried. This is like the Soviets: they revised the Soviet encyclopedia every year to update the official history. Americans don’t have an official history; at least we’ve tried never to have.”
Raymond Arsenault, professor of southern history: “What is written in that order sounds almost Orwellian in the way Trump thinks he can mandate a mythic conception of American history that’s almost Disney-esque with only happy endings, only heroic figures, no attention at all to the complexity of American history and the struggles to have a more perfect union.” He added: “It’s so chilling. Everything I’ve worked on in my career is simply ruled out by this one executive order. It’s like the barbarian sack of Rome in the level of ignorance and ill-will and anti-intellectualism.”
“Ignorance and ill-will and anti-intellectualism” would actually be a perfect slogan for the Trump administration, but I suppose it doesn’t fit as tidily on the baseball caps. If Trump’s first term was characterized by reliable incompetence, his second has definitely been about brazen authoritarianism (underpinned by the same old incompetence). So of course Don has to go after art, science, and history, because those are all subjects that require thinking. What’s been on his warpath at the Smithsonian so far? Well, Kevin Young, the director of the National Museum of African American History & Culture, was quietly and mysteriously put on leave before the EO was even issued. Also, the EO explicitly namechecked an exhibit called The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and Sculpture, in which pieces spanning three centuries are put in the context of modern day perspectives. Can’t have that! But in all seriousness, let’s preserve our real history, and keep embodying James Smithson’s original intent: “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”
Photo note by CB. The photo below is of President Biden and Secretary of the Smithsonian, Lonnie Bunch, meeting with museum director Jacinto “Vladimir” Teixeira Fortuna at the National Museum of Slavery in Belas, Angola on December 3, 2024. I didn’t even know that Biden made this trip.
White male snowflakes can’t handle anything that reminds them they are not the perfect rulers they claim to be. America is still has so many hate-filled racists and misogynistic, it’s shown the world what sh-tty people MAGAs really are. I know some MAGAs in real life and will never forgive them.
When history looks back on this period in time, and of course it will, it will be writ large that it was a period of fear and ignorance, led by a fat orange dunce! What hold does this putrid person have on all the fools who follow him blindly….even against their own best interests? It can only be blind white supremacy, and it will ultimately fail…as it always inevitably does. How will future generations judge this one? Not kindly I believe. SMDH. First they burn the books, then they get rid of the intelligentsia. Dictatorship 101. This is indeed a five alarm fire, people should be screaming in the streets.
What they are doing is so despicable I don’t even have words for it.
Ever since Trump’s break-things spree started, I’ve been worried about the Smithsonian. I’ve also been worried about the Library of Congress. I’m guessing that Trump is taking special delight in not just destroying institutions that he doesn’t value, but in destroying institutions that now —finally— are headed by Black Americans who achieved their positions on merit. This is crushing me.
I try not to dwell on it, but I’m part of a generation that still included a lot of “firsts”. It’s terrifying to imagine that I might also be part of a generation of “lasts” as well. It shocked me, as a kid, when I did the math, and realized that possibly for my parents, and almost certainly for my grandparents, the OLD old people that they knew as children might have been enslaved. The most personally chilling thing for me is knowing that Trump and Musk both come from environments that celebrated racial segregation— and that’s what feels comfortable, familiar, and “great again” to them. What comforts me, just a little, is that what used to be embedded in racism is now spreading in wider ways. Maybe class warfare will unite enough of us to stop this deliberate destruction of our country and our ideals. Maybe.
Horrifying. Absolutely horrifying.
😡