Donald Trump Will Dismantle Smithsonian To Save America From Curse Of Woke ... Butterflies?
Everything is a Culture War, forever.
Yr Wonkette is a little late getting to the White House’s latest salvo in its war on American history, which dropped on Independence Day with the force of a damp firework falling into the Reflecting Pool. To mark 250 years of American Freedom, the “White House Domestic Policy Council” released a 162-page whine about allegedly America-destroying wokeness at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH).
The report was compiled following Donald Trump’s stupid executive order last year ordering the Smithsonian to expunge “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from its museums, so children may safely visit them without being taught to hate America.
The report’s executive summary claims that the museum has been “captured” by an “ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”
In the report’s telling, NMAH has become a tool of extreme leftist indoctrination that “purposely presents America as a problematic country irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression.”
In other words, it’s 162 pages (including 522 footnotes) of the same butthurt Culture Warring we’ve come to expect whenever American history is presented as anything other than a celebration of great triumphs by great men who must be praised for creating the Greatest Nation in History, or the communists will win.
Here’s Washington Post art-n-culture critic and opinion writer Philip Kennicott in a brief video calling the report “the most relentlessly tendentious piece of trash I have read in a long time.”
Paradoxically, Kennicott finds one good use for the report, as he explained further in a column (gift link) fleshing out points from the video: Kennicott compares the White House report to the 1937 Nazi exhibition of “degenerate art” that Hitler’s regime sought to mock and wipe out. In curating the exhibition, he says, the Nazis actually “constructed a fairly thorough and reliable compendium of the best art” of the time — although of course they also destroyed thousands of works of art.
[With] the perverse logic of authoritarianism, this document is an accidental guide not just to how to do history right, but to many of the salient moments of struggle and ugliness that define the American narrative. […]
The writers have dug deeply into the Smithsonian and revealed a large and vibrant institution which can surely be improved but is fundamentally doing exactly what it needs to do: asking questions, prompting us to ask questions, and bringing into the American conversation ever new perspectives, materials, objects and ideas.
The White House report itself will make for an interesting exhibit in some future museum display about America in the Trump era. The trick will be in getting through the next few years without the Smithsonian being pillaged.
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Operation Enduring Grievance
If the report weren’t so fundamentally nasty and destructive, many of its component parts would be hilarious, like the snotty sarcasm of one section heading that declares “America’s Flagship Museum Insists the Country Hasn’t Changed Since 1957.”
The NMAH doesn’t say anything remotely like that in any of its exhibits or publications, but the report insists that because some displays shockingly suggest racism still exists today, the museum does tell visitors America is unchanged from the days of Jim Crow. Smithsonian leadership, the report says, thereby “seeks to highlight and twist tragic events in America’s past to achieve its partisan goal of shaming Americans into supporting radical social and political change in the present.”
Honestly, all America’s problems are in the past, and if you must mention unpleasant things like segregation, why not simply say racism ended and we’re all equal now, like the Supreme Court decided?
A Statue Of Limitations
In another typical nitpick, the report takes issue with the text on a placard accompanying the goofy 1840 Horatio Greenough sculpture of George Washington as some kind of Greco-Roman god, complete with toga and sandals. It’s one of my favorite bits of tacky Founder-worship.
Pop quiz, kids! Can you find the sneering elitist “thinly-veiled anti-Americanism” in this description of the ornate carvings on the chair upon which George sits?
George Washington’s chair is covered with symbols of a heroic nation. The Greek god Apollo in his chariot represents American enlightenment. Hercules saving himself and his brother Iphicles from a snake symbolizes the perceived courage of the American people. Christopher Columbus and a Native American represent the meeting of the old and new worlds.
It’s that adjective “perceived,” of course. The report complains mightily that the museum “refuses to affirm the exceptional courage of the American people,” and isn’t that just terrible? Why does the Smithsonian hate the always-courageous American people so much?
Socratic Method? Get The Hemlock!
Even when the museum presents open-ended questions you’d find in any high school history textbook, the report complains. Rightwing culture warriors have never trusted invitations to critical thinking. (We’re sure the authors would also complain about such questions being in a textbook.)
For example, the introductory text for an exhibit titled American Democracy comes in for a scolding because it “asks visitors, ‘How should Americans remember their Revolution and the founding of the nation?’ without providing an answer.” That’s bad because the question suggests that “no one really knows” whether America is perfect or not.
There must be approved, definitive answers, and they must be positive and patriotic.
The report does some typical lying by omission here, too, griping that the text calls the Revolution “deeply imperfect,” but not mentioning the sign’s lines about how it might be considered “part of a wider, unfinished movement for liberty … with sacred aspirations open to all people.”
Besides, suggesting that America is a work in progress toward greater opportunity and equality implies something should be done to achieve them, when in fact we’re already the greatest nation possible.
Butterflies Are Free, And That’s Terrible
As Catherine Rampell notes at the Bulwark, the report is really unhappy with monarch butterflies because they supposedly promote open borders. The authors come down repeatedly on butterflies — nine times, by our text search — as part of their broader attack on museum director Anthea Hartig, who is framed as the chief villain of the Smithsonian’s unrelenting leftist attack on everything good and true in America.
Hartig, we’re told, is a very bad person who loves other countries more than she loves America, because among her “favorite items” in the NMAH collections is a cane owned by Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the Haitian revolution of 1804. Hartig listed these favorite things as part of a 2022 lecture series, proving that the Smithsonian now hates America.
We learn that another of the terrible anti-American items Hartig likes is a set of
“homemade and hand-painted butterfly wings…collected from a young Nebraskan activist who was marching on Capitol Hill in 2018” because “Monarch wings are an important symbol to undocumented organizers as their annual journey across the North American continent speaks to the migration, survival, and transformation of many immigrants”
Some of Hartig’s other favorite artifacts are 100 percent American, like protesters’ “Handmaid’s Tale” costumes or Billie Jean King’s tennis outfit, but let’s not expect logical consistency from a MAGA report. Maybe feminism is a foreign country.
The butterfly motif turns up again, this time as a piece of folk art, in this illustration from a 2022 PowerPoint presentation about what Hartig called the “core values” of the NAMH. Prepare to be horrified!
In addition to those wimpy liberal values, not one of which is Patriotism or Christianity, a lengthy footnote in the report explains that the butterfly is
a well-known symbol in the illegal alien activist community, symbolizing illegal aliens crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S. (mirroring the migration patterns of Monarch butterflies across North America), the fight to grant illegal aliens U.S. citizenship, and President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program—which was designed to protect millions of illegal aliens from deportation.
Kids, the actual slideshow doesn’t mention any of that. But you should be outraged anyway, because ILLEGAL ALIENS SCARY.
The pictured wings were included in the exhibit “Girlhood (It’s Complicated),” which ran from 2020 to 2023. A placard explained they were similar to those worn by Nebraska students at a 2018 pro-DACA protest.
Worse, the wings were part of a display called “raising citizens,” which treasonously alleged
Girls’ power over the future made many adults uncomfortable. Who would raise future citizens? Who would raise children denied this right? The battleground over national belonging was waged over a girl’s education. Girls could shape the future and create new versions of America.
Ergo, cries the report, “the exhibit’s implication is clear: illegal aliens’ citizenship is another ‘battleground over national belonging,’” and that’s just self-evidently bad.
Once again: The report harps about those fucking butterfly wings in nine separate mentions. That includes the display of a t-shirt and an umbrella — in a completely different exhibit that doesn’t have the explanatory text — printed with a red, white, and blue outline of a butterfly and the word “VOTE.” The report claims the artifacts obviously imply “that illegal aliens should be given the right to vote,” and whines that “it is the illegal alien whose rights and interests NMAH seeks to prioritize and tell the story of, not the American people’s.”
That’s some treasonous butterfly! Maybe that explains the QAnon Propaganda war against that Texas butterfly refuge on the Rio Grande, when excitable patriots insisted the conservationists were helping undocumented migrants sneak into the country.
There’s plenty more wrong with the idiotic report, like its weird insistence that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 shouldn’t be considered an example of white supremacy. But that’s discussed in hilarious detail by both Rampell and in this fine Atlantic piece (gift link), so we’ll instead close with this thought from a Smithsonian employee who confided to the Atlantic that when they read the report, “My reaction was: Wow, I didn’t realize I worked for such a progressive, left-leaning institution. I didn’t realize all my colleagues were Marxists.”
I guess we all are, Comrade Butterfly!
[Bulwark / White House report / WaPo (gift link) / Atlantic (gift link) / New York Times (reprint at Seattle Times)]
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