This month’s Doublespeak Award goes to the BBC. President Trump is spearheading a ‘purge’ of America’s top museums, it breathlessly reports. The madman in the White House has instructed the Smithsonian Institution to put back all ‘memorials and statues’ that were ‘improperly removed’ from federal property in recent years, the Beeb says. Hold up. Call me a stickler for linguistic accuracy, but isn’t a purge when you tear monuments down, not when you put them back up?
Yes, a new Orwellian diktat has dropped: war is peace, freedom is slavery, and reversing a purge is a purge. What the BBC and others are madly calling Trump’s ‘purge’ is outlined in his latest executive order. It’s titled ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’. It ‘targets’ the Smithsonian Institution, which oversees 21 museums in the US, 17 of which are in Washington, DC. It tells the Smithsonian to cut out the ‘anti-American ideology’, resist any exhibitions that ‘divide Americans by race’, and restore monuments that were toppled or hidden away in the service of woke ideology over the past five years.
Shorter version: stop purging. Imagine how drunk on the Kool-Aid of anti-Trumpism you would need to be to describe a plea to museums to stop erasing American history and stop hiding American artefacts as a ‘purge’. The clue is in the name, people: the order is about ‘restoring’ things, not purging them. It says the Smithsonian and its museums were once ‘global icon[s] of cultural achievement’, but of late they’ve fallen under the sway of ‘a divisive, race-centred ideology’ that depicts ‘American and Western values as inherently harmful’. And that stops now, it says.
Come on, this is not a McCarthyite stab at cleansing museums of ‘progressive’ thinking – it’s an effort to reverse the McCarthyism of those woke ideologues who cleansed DC’s wonderful museums of their traditional mission and even of some of their objects. The order doesn’t lie. Museums really did convert to the cult of shame-faced anti-Westernism that has been all the rage in right-thinking circles these past few years.
The order reminds us that the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum hosted a sculpture exhibition that informed visitors that ‘sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism’. So it was less ‘Look at this wonderful art’ and more ‘Can you believe this racist shit?’. It also reminds us that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture became so intoxicated by critical race theory that it started referring to ‘hard work’ and ‘the nuclear family’ as obsessions of ‘white culture’. What, so black folk aren’t interested in working hard or having a family life? Isn’t that a tad racist for a museum of African-American history?
That attack on ‘white culture’ was uncovered in 2020. The museum published on its website a chart on the ‘Assumptions of Whiteness’. It described ‘objective, rational linear thinking’ as a ‘white’ trait, too. What’s the real ‘purge’ here? The Trump administration expressing disapproval of such hyper-racial propaganda in a federal-funded museum? Or the museum’s own erasure of the late 20th-century belief that we should treat people as individuals rather than as members of a racial bloc with their own distinctive ‘traits’? It’s the latter, isn’t it? They purged the spirit of MLK, not least by suggesting black people don’t do ‘objective, rational linear thinking’, and Trump’s just asking them to stop.
The order tells us that the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Museum is planning to celebrate the ‘exploits of male athletes’ who play in ‘women’s sports’. It’s true. The museum believes there is no ‘monolithic experience of womanhood’ and it plans to ‘include transgender women’ – ie, fellas – in its documenting of ‘women’s history’. If it’s a ‘purge’ to say men should be excluded from the category of womanhood, I guess I support purges now. What next: accusing London’s Science Museum of a ‘purge’ because it has no exhibitions on the magical healing of witch doctors?
The order is especially angry about the cultural establishment’s turn against American history. It reminds us there have been eruptions of woke racialism even in Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park, the very place where the Declaration of Independence was signed saying ‘all men are created equal’. There was workforce training there by an organisation that advocates the dismantling of ‘Western foundations’. The park’s rangers were told to consider the ‘racial identity’ of the visitors they engage with. You don’t have to be a Trumpist to find it deeply depressing that in the heart of old Revolutionary America, the very spot where the modern ideal of equality was born, the fumes of the divisive new racialism have taken hold.
The cultural elites have engaged in a ‘widespread effort to rewrite [American] history’ with the aim of fostering ‘a sense of national shame’, the order says. Where’s the lie? We can see this Orwellian rewriting of history in everything from the institutionalisation of shame in DC’s once great museums to the 1619 Project, the New York Times initiative to reimagine the founding year of America as 1619, when slaves first arrived, rather than 1776, when independence from Britain was declared. The cultural elites have been hell-bent on reimagining America as a nation born from the sin of slavery rather than from the wonders of revolutionary democracy. Imagine spending years waging such a Stalinist assault on historical truth and then accusing other people of carrying out a ‘purge’. The gall.
There’s no denying it: museums have lost the plot. Last year the Biden administration brought in new regulations requiring museums to ‘obtain consent from tribes’ before displaying their cultural items. This led to museums around the US hiding away Native American objects and even closing down entire rooms containing tribal artefacts. Tell me, what’s madder: the existential hysteria of throwing blankets over old objects or the new administration’s call to ‘reinstate’ all monuments and memorials that were removed? The era of sniffy elite shame over American history is over, guys. You’ll just have to get back to enlightening visitors to your museums rather than treating us as targets for your arrogant moral re-engineering.
