NPR: 'What's Water?'

Liberal Media Cannot Grasp That Smithsonian Flap Is Not About Right-Wing Bigotry

Y’all get a second edition today, because I have an hour to kill in the DC airport, and something has irritated me! Imagine that: Your Working Boy is irritated. Whee!

So, driving my rental car to the airport this morning, I didn’t want to get back into my audiobook, so I listened to NPR’s Morning Edition. I caught an interview segment having to do with Donald Trump’s recent complaints about exhibits at the Smithsonian — specifically, about the way slavery is depicted.

Well, I would like to know more specifically about Trump’s criticism, and whether or not it’s valid. I know a fair bit about the wokeness at museums, but I also don’t know what, in particular, Trump is criticizing. Maybe he’s missed the mark. It wouldn’t be the first time. The best you can say about the phrase in his social media post (see below), in which he complained that the Smithsonian is wrong to focus on “how bad Slavery [sic] was,” was sloppy.

So, iin this morning’s broadcast, host Michel Martin interviewed — guess who! — Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project. Here’s the audio link. I guess Ibram X. Kendi wasn’t available.

Naturally there was no discussion about the merit of Trump’s complaints, or the more substantive (I guess) complaints that conservatives have made of the way museums have embraced a highly politicized narrative in the Woke Era. It was simply assumed that Trump Is Wrong And Racist.

Second, of all the critics of Trump you could have on to talk about it, you choose Nikole Hannah-Jones?! She is an entirely ideological figure. Not once did Martin question her about the serious criticism some leading historians have leveled at the 1619 Project for distorting history to serve an ideological narrative. Why not interview a professional historian, instead of an ideological journalist? It seems pretty clear to me that as a matter of journalistic professionalism, Martin ought to have pointed out that Hannah-Jones herself has been credibly accused of doing the same thing she criticizes Trump for doing.

Again, though, none of this seems to have occurred to NPR at all. And they wonder why they were defunded!

Washington journalist Dave Weigel, no conservative he, nailed it here:

Yes, this is a small thing, but such a telling one about our media culture. I subscribe to The New York Times, which for the most part seems to have almost no curiosity about the way conservatives and MAGA populists think. I’m sure that they’re telling Times readers what they want to hear, but they ought to be telling them what they need to hear. I include myself in that number too; I don’t want to be fed news that fits my ideological priors. This is why I try to read broadly.

This NYT news analysis of the Trump controversy, up on its website now, is a classic example. Note that it’s labeled “analysis,” meaning it’s opinion. Still, there is no indication at all that there is a legitimate controversy here. From the analysis:

President Trump accused the Smithsonian Institution on Tuesday of focusing too much on “how bad slavery was” and not enough on the “brightness” of America as his administration conducts a wide-ranging review of the content in its museum exhibits.

“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” Mr. Trump said in a social media post. “This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE. We have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”

Mr. Trump made the comments a week after the White House told the Smithsonian that its museums would be required to adjust any content that the administration finds problematic in “tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals” within 120 days. Taken together, the administration’s examination and Mr. Trump’s post on Tuesday were the latest example of Mr. Trump trying to impose his will on a cultural institution and minimize the experiences and history of Black people in the United States.

Trump’s post was typically imprecise (to put it mildly). As a conservative, I certainly do not want the government imposing a right-wing ideological narrative on museums any more than I want a left-wing narrative imposed on museums (even if self-imposed by curators). If this is what Trump is after, then I disagree with him.

But if you read the analysis (by a White House correspondent), all you learn about the controversy is that this is just one more racist thing Donald Trump is doing.

Really? Is that all there is to this controversy? Read this piece by Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation, responding to the liberal freakout. Excerpt:

[New Yorker editor David] Remnick also takes aim at me, and in the lede, no less. He notes that soon after Trump’s election, “Mike Gonzalez, a contributor to Project 2025 [gasp!], and Armen Tooloee, the former chief of staff to the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, elaborated on the new Administration’s martial maneuvers, writing in the Wall Street Journal that, in order ‘to put a spike through the heart of woke,’ the White House was duty bound to ‘retake control of museums, starting with the Smithsonian Institution’.”

Yes, David, we wrote that because under Secretary Lonnie Bunch, the Smithsonian is a fully signed-up member of the crusade to “decolonize” our collective mind. Bunch has embraced every attempt to rewrite history, from Black Lives Matter, to the 1619 Project, to diversity, equity, and inclusion (whose trainings are themselves attempts at rewiring our brains).

Soon after taking the helm of the Smithsonian in 2019, Bunch told the house magazine he wanted the museums entrusted to him to “legitimize” the 1619 Project. He wanted “everybody that thought about the 1619 Project” to see “that the Smithsonian had fingerprints on it.”

The New York Times was crystal clear that the mendacious project sought “to reframe the country’s history.” For her part, its founder Nikole Hannah-Jones told the Harvard Gazette that its telling of slavery “would corrupt and corrode and shape everything about the United States.”

France’s Jacobins changed everything from the names of the days of the week, to the months in the calendar, to thousands of street names that referred to Catholic saints. Every leftist since then, from Marx to Lenin to Pol Pot, from Castro to Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, has tried to revise history.

And they have their reasons to do so. What characterizes the left — and why it’s so difficult to abandon the left-right spectrum — is a lust for destroying the social order. The intelligent right, as Edmund Burke understood, manages necessary change by maintaining what is valuable.

Classic, isn’t it? The Left does something clearly ideological, and when the Right notices and complains, the Left, all butthurt, accuses the Right of “waging culture war.” Wash, rinse, repeat. The thing is, they aren’t being cynical; they really do believe that they know all there is to know, and that anyone who objects is being racist, sexist, transphobic, or whatever bigotry fits the particular case.

Of course there is no such thing as “objective” history. How our institutions choose to frame history inevitably serves a Narrative. There’s no avoiding it. Let me go at this from a real-life example, in which the “conservative” side was in the wrong.

A few years back, there was a huge controversy in my hometown over the “Pilgrimage,” an annual spring festival highlighting the antebellum history of our area. The event has been happening since the 1970s, and was considered the most important event on the local cultural calendar.

The thing is, the event really did present a largely rosy picture of that time period in our area. I grew up going to the Pilgrimage, which was mostly about tours of area plantation houses. You would scarcely have known that the ancestors of half the people who lived in our parish were enslaved at that time! As a teenager, it occurred to me that we, in the parish, collectively celebrated a historical period in a way that airbrushed the very problematic part of that history — and in so doing, left half the people of the parish on the sidelines.

All this came to a head in 2020 (of course) when my niece Hannah, a crusading young lib, launched a public petition calling on the Pilgrimage to change its ways, or end. She handled it badly, but when she started getting beat up by angry locals, I stood up for her — because she was right.

My argument at the time (one I stand by) is that a more just and historically honest reckoning would include slavery. How could it not? Yes, that would mar the “moonlight and magnolias” narrative that many local whites preferred, but that narrative was biased and inaccurate, as well as unjust to black folks.

But to end the Pilgrimage would have been going too far too. The 1619 Project view of the Pilgrimage would have required us to understand that time period as about nothing other than the enslavement of black people. That, too, would be biased, inaccurate, and unjust. You don’t solve one problem by instituting its opposite.

One of the local plantations, Oakley, which is a state park, solves the problem by providing a balanced exhibit in its museum. It doesn’t “center” slavery, nor does it whitewash it. In my judgment, it presents the facts, and allows visitors to make up their own minds. I called at the time on the Pilgrimage organizers to rethink and recast the festival’s focus, to be more faithful to history, and to include local black people in its planning and execution. True, you can’t very well expect them to celebrate the period and the society in which their ancestors were enslaved, but there’s so much that could be said and shown about slave culture, and the way enslaved African peoples there coped with their condition, and in so doing contributed to all the people of West Feliciana being what we are today.

That’s not the route the festival organizers took. They cancelled the Pilgrimage outright. That’s regrettable, but had they gone through with it in the atmosphere of “racial reckoning” sweeping the country at the time, they would almost certainly have drawn a lot of publicity, all of it negative. It would have been a PR disaster for the parish, and probably hurt tourism, which is a big part of the local economy. If they weren’t prepared to change, to adapt, then cancelling the thing was probably the better move. Still, it was a missed opportunity.

The thing is, the Pilgrimage was not conceived as any kind of celebration of white supremacy, and I’m confident that the organizers today were genuinely shocked by the accusations in Hannah’s petition. I don’t know their minds, obviously, but my informed guess is that it simply had not occurred to them that anybody would have a reasonable problem with the Narrative. Nobody was saying “slavery was good”, but by ignoring it to focus only on the benign or positive parts of antebellum culture, they were falsifying history.

If Donald Trump is trying to do this kind of thing, well, I’m totally against it. But the woke-ification of history, and its presentation in museums, by the Left is exactly the same thing!

Remember this, from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture, in 2020?

We were all supposed to sit back and accept this bigoted nonsense as unproblematic, because true and morally correct. And this, at one of the nation’s premier public museums — one funded by American taxpayers. If you don’t like it, shut up, racist.

Again, history will always be contested. It will always be revised. This is in the nature of the thing. And this is not necessarily a bad thing! How we choose to remember the past says something about who we are today, and the kind of people we want to be in the future. The remembrance of history is incredibly important, and should be undertaken with a sense of moral seriousness. As Mike Gonzalez points out, the remembrance of history is often a source of political legitimacy and power.

Moral responsibility is absolutely not what our woke museum institutionalists, and their cheerleaders in the media, cared about. Moralistic, yes, but not moral. Lonnie Bunch, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Michel Martin, and their class have brought this backlash upon themselves. This attitude they have, that we must all hate our country and its history in order to be morally correct, is the flip side of the Yankee Doodle cheerleading that erases America’s failings.

The way NPR chose to report on it this morning was yet another sign of the inability of our elite media class to recognize that there are other ways of seeing the world, and to submit their own convictions to legitimate critique. Dave Weigel is right. Professional journalists ought to be able and willing to look at issues from various angles, and to explore the nuances, all in an effort to aid understanding. Ask yourself: will the people who depend on The New York Times, the New Yorker, and NPR to tell them what’s happening in America, really be in a position to understand the moment we are in, or their fellow Americans who live outside the liberal bubble?

There was another story I heard on Morning Edition, one about how the State of Texas is about to approve a gerrymandering plan that would give Republicans five more House seats — and how the State of California is undertaking the same kind of thing, to give the Democrats five more. We are growing ever more polarized as a country. It is vitally important that we have the clearest understanding of issues and controversies as we can. I don’t expect NPR and the rest to cheer for what Trump is doing. As I said, depending on what, exactly, he chooses to do, I might be against it too!

But enough with this ideological bullying, self-righteousness, and moral preening from the Left. You people injected a double-dose of ideology into museums, and are shocked, shocked that some people regard what you did as objectionable, and have the temerity to challenge your self-anointed authority.

Adventures In Soft Totalitarianism

Watch this:

Seriously, all he said was, “We want bacon!” He was arrested. Now, obviously the guy was saying it to be obnoxious, but … so what? You cannot even express affection for a delicious pork product in the UK without being hauled off by the authorities? Has the United Kingdom become a grand, real-life Monty Python skit? Earlier this year, David Betz said that everything the British government does now is exactly what one would do if one wanted to provoke a civil war. Yep.

Meanwhile, in Canada:

These are worrying times for free speech in this country and it is not helped with the persecution of British Columbia nurse Amy Hamm by the province’s College of Nurses and Midwives.

Hamm is the nurse who said sex is binary and also helped pay to put up a sign in Vancouver that declared, “I (heart) J K Rowling.”

For these and similar crimes, Hamm has now been suspended from nursing for a month and ordered to pay the shocking and unjustified sum of $93,639.80 in legal costs.

You cannot say that you are a fan of the most popular English-language author of the 21st century without having to pay a massive fine in Canada.

How far can these idiots push people before they’ve had enough? What sane person can possibly have faith in the institutions that do this?

That many good-faith liberals — yes, I believe there are some — don’t recognize how insane and destructive this is just boggles the mind. But they don’t. I wonder if they are educable at all on this. On MSNBC yesterday, Molly Jong-Fast, a Manhattan liberal commentator, said what the Democrats need to do to succeed is to recruit more Mamdanis and AOCs. Really? Same country, different worlds.