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Wednesday Morning Rant

The Results of Capture

... Throughout my career I have always been critical of a museum profession that was awash in whiteness. The lack of diversity, especially in leadership positions, means that museums have not made the commitment to their communities or to their colleagues to be institutions that grapple with our differences. To see culture, history, and the arts as more than sources of beauty, exoticism, and nostalgia, but to use them as tools that help the audiences navigate the challenges of contemporary America. In an article I wrote twenty years ago, "Flies in the Buttermilk: Museums, Diversity, and the Will to Change," I challenged the museum profession to train, promote, and hire people of color as leaders of institutions.

That could be from anything. It's boilerplate academic identity politics of the type that used to be comfortably cloistered in the ivory towers of the academy and its various institutional adjuncts. In this case, it was written by a man called Lonnie Bunch for his memoir entitled "A Fool's Errand.". Lonnie Bunch is the outgoing secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, which controls America's network of national museums. He was appointed by the Smithsonian Board of Regents in 2019.

At the Smithsonian, he and his underlings continued the core mission of all progressives: destruction. Those under him in control of the individual museums enthusiastically delivered the progressive vision for America's repositories of cultural legacy. They degraded American history, turned the Institution into an activist network, injected its progressive poison into American public schools and reframed everything through identity politics. None of this started with Bunch and it will certainly not end with him, but he was a capable and competent progressive culture warrior who rained destruction down during his watch. For the first time in a long time, however, progressive destruction is receiving a modicum of scrutiny.

One way in which Trump 47 is different from Trump 45 is that the current administration is taking aim at a lot of institutions that usually fly under the RADAR as they decay into progressive morasses while everybody is focused on more important things. In March of this year, Trump issued Executive Order 14253 with the title "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," in which he ordered that Vice President Vance lead a group to study the Smithsonian's alleged "improper ideology." In July of this year, they delivered the report. From the executive summary:

This report by the Domestic Policy Council demonstrates that NMAH [National Museum of American History] fails in the basic task of illuminating our heritage. Our central finding is not that the Museum has simply added overlooked stories, corrected perceived errors, or broadened its historical scope. Rather, it is that Museum leadership has explicitly adopted 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.

As this report shows, the Museum 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 the Museum’s current telling, the country is, above all, defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and systemic injustice.

But of course. This is as it must be. To the progressive academic this is all true and thus the institution must reflect that truth. Progressive academics truly believe that the good is the enemy of the perfect and that anything short of progressive utopia is manifestly evil. Every institution they control will reveal this belief, whatever the institution happens to be.

They control the universities, and as a result they control downstream institutions. Go to college to become a librarian or a curator, get radicalized and then destroy the libraries and museums. It proceeds like clockwork, and only grows. It only grows, that is, if nobody bothers to stop it. For a very long time now, nobody bothered to stop it. The report outlines the consequences of inaction, of what happens when progressive rot overtakes an institution. It lays out exhibit after exhibit of the museum's illegal alien activism, displeasure with the English language, progressive public education "assistance" programs, abortion activism, hatred of the country's founding fathers, "land acknowledgment" nonsense, removal of flag ceremonies, twisting of American history and more.

The report concludes that

For purposes of policy formulation under EO 14253, this review of the National Museum of American History concludes that NMAH, by the intention and at the direction of current Museum and Smithsonian leadership, has become subject to institutional capture by a radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of the great country we know and love.

That's putting it mildly. The progressives have eroded the foundations of the institution, just like what has happened at the National Archives and countless other public and private cultural institutions. The report is pretty blunt about what needs to happen first to try to restore the Smithsonian: fire the activist radicals in charge.

The report concludes that the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Museum of American History in particular, under its current leadership and current interpretive ideology, cannot be trusted to tell America’s story honestly and in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic.

Progressives capture institutions like the Smithsonian and ruin them by leaving no stone unturned and ensuring that all positions are filled with like-minded activists. It must be the same in reverse. To wrest control of the institutions back from the progressives, the progressives must be removed from them, root and branch. Secretary Bunch is retiring before he can be fired, but his departure is an opportunity for the Regents to install someone who can attempt to undo the damage wrought by the total capture of the institution by academic progressives. Whether this will happen remains unknown, but it would be a good start.