The Media Research Center continued to be in denial about what President Trump’s planned purge of government museums to remove things he doesn’t like with an Aug. 22 post by Alex Christy:
Presidential historian and frequent MSNBC and CNN talking head Douglas Brinkley joined former CBS and NBC anchor Katie Couric on her Thursday on her YouTube channel. According to Brinkley, President Trump’s Smithsonian Institute plans are some sort of Russian or Chinese-inspired attempt to rewrite history and bring back the era of “segregation of some kind.” Meanwhile, Couric unwittingly proved Trump’s point by suggesting that institutionalized racism today is as bad as it was in the days of slavery and Jim Crow.
Asked why Trump is doing what he is, Brinkley opined, “that President Trump is trying to whitewash history and that he has a long narrative you can follow in his life of seeming to want to be hard on black Americans.”
Brinkley also rejected Trump’s depiction of the Smithsonian, “So, there’s a timeline if you go to the Smithsonian where they’ll talk about slavery. You’ll see shackles, you’ll understand the horror of it, but it’s also the triumphalism of the Civil War. They have at the Smithsonian, you know, Harriet Tubman’s hymnbook, and then it follows black, you know, progress and there are fun objects there from Muhammad Ali in boxing or Chuck Berry’s Red Cadillac or Romare Bearden’s incredible Great Migration paintings.”
Okay, fine, but that does not undermine the actual, legally relevant executive order.
When has Trump ever cared about what’s “legally relevant”? Christy doesn’t answer that question. Instead, he clung to the narrative he must peddle: “What this is really about for people like Trump is ensuring that taxpayer-funded museums do not push far-left politics under the guise of truthful history.” Of course, Christy cited no example of “far-left politics” in any museum.
Clay Waters huffed:
Here we go again, another White House correspondent “news analysis” in Friday’s New York Times that sounded just like an editorial. Zolan Kanno-Youngs conjured up racially charged attacks on “people of color” in Trump’s criticism of the Smithsonian Institution’s excessive focus on the dark parts of America’s history, including slavery.
[…]The reporter thinks any edits of “woke” history are “erasing” reality. He found a radically named and radically inclined visitor of a Smithsonian museum.
Like Christy, Waters cited no examples of this supposedly “woke” history, or any evidence that the Smithsonian has “excessive focus on the dark parts of America’s history.”
Tim Graham offered his own whining fit:
When President Trump proclaimed that our taxpayer-funded museums are too “woke,” it’s obvious that National Public Radio would stick up for “wokeness.” On Thursday’s Morning Edition, NPR turned to Nikole-Hannah Jones, whose “1619 Project” with The New York Times was excoriated by historians (including left-wingers) as misinformation.
[…]This was Trump’s point – that the “reframing” of museums to “center” our national narrative forever on slavery, as if nothing has improved, is a divisive ideological crusade.
As expected, Graham provided no evidence that the museums are too focused on slavery. He whined further:
Hannah-Jones claimed “it’s pretty clear that that criticism is baseless — that if we look at the entire history of the United States, beginning with the very first settlements in Jamestown, slavery endured in this nation longer than freedom.” But the fight isn’t about “banning” slavery from our discussion. It’s about refusing to acknowledge the great progress since the 1960s.
Martin then asked Hannah-Jones about Trump’s claim that the museums don’t have any “brightness” about America, and she made the argument that in 2017, Trump praised the African-American history museum. But hasn’t it changed since 2020, after the George Floyd riots?
Hannah-Jones then cried Fascism: “The museum hasn’t changed, so what has changed? And what has changed is, I would argue, that Donald Trump is engaging in what Jason Stanley, in his book How Fascism Works, calls trying to create this mythic past. And this mythic past is a past that was racially pure, and one that is being used to really distract us as our democratic norms are being eroded.”
Conservatives would rebut that wokeness created a mythic present — that blacks are currently suffering under systemic white supremacy. Leftists think our “democratic norms” are working when they present their views unchallenged in taxpayer-funded museums and taxpayer-funded “public” broadcasting. They dare to call this history “inclusive.” This was a five-minute crusade with no rebuttals.
Where is this museum “wokeness” Graham and his co-workers keep talking about? He never says. Also: Is he demanding that slavery be defended in the service of platforming a “rebuttal”? He closed with one more whine:
For the moment, NPR is still funded by taxpayers. But this is why defunding was just and necessary — that they serve the Left, and only the Left, and that conservatives are smeared, cartooned, and dismissed without a chance to respond.
How, exactly, does defending museums make on on the “left”? Again, Graham refused to explain.
Christy returned to grouse in an Aug. 23 post:
On Thursday, the White House put out a list of Smithsonian exhibits and programs it says prove President Trump correct when he posted on Truth Social that the Smithsonian is “out of control.” On his Saturday show, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi strongly disagreed but omitted so many vitally important details that it is a wonder he managed to keep a straight face. Regular MSNBC viewers would have been totally unaware that Velshi was defending taxpayer-funded museum exhibits, articles, and programs about the history of LGBTQ skateboarding, among other things.
[…]He then brought out the White House’s list, “Among them, artwork honoring children and pregnant women thrown overboard during the Middle Passage.”
Here’s the full context, ‘“works of speculative fiction that bring to life an immersive, feminist and sacred aquatopia inspired by the legend of Drexciya’ an ‘underwater kingdom populated by the children of pregnant women who had been thrown overboard or jumped into the ocean during the Middle Passage.’”
So, it’s not about objecting to covering slavery, it’s objecting to feminist mythmaking. It got worse from there.
It got worse for Christy, since he’s the one who omitted the “full context” despite claiming otherwise. As a Smithsonian article on a related artwork stated, the “Middle Passage” is a reference to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, meaning it is relevant to American history, not some “feminist mythmaking” as Christy insists. In other words, he omitted a vitally important detail. Still, he had one final huff:
Velshi tried to go from claiming the Trump administration is waging war on the accurate history of slavery to defending ideologies that say hard work is a white value, that there is a third sex, and “Latinx” while trying to insist that LGBTQ skateboarding needs a place in the nation’s taxpayer-funded museums. Worse than that, he was not brave or honest enough to tell his viewers that is what he was doing.
But Velshi said nothing about “LGBTQ skateboarding” — that’s something from Christy’s assigned talking points. That tells us Christy is more concerned about staying in the good graces of his Trump Regime Media masters than being accurate or truthful.