The Media Research Center’s Trump Regime Media mode on President Trump’s planned purge of anything he doesn’t like continued in an Aug. 24 post by Mark Finkelstein:
On Sunday’s edition of MSNBC’s The Weekend, a frequent MSNBC guest, Fordham professor Christina Greer, unloaded:
“The history of the United States is literally predicated onwhite supremacy, anti-black racism, patriarchy, and capitalism . . . Let’s be clear, our history is filled with murder. We are a bellicose nation. It’s filled with rapes and exclusion.“
Greer made her comments in the context of a discussion condemning the Trump administration’s moves to change the prevailing, negative, approach of the Smithsonian to American history.
But Greer unwittingly made Trump’s case. If her incredibly bleak depiction of America is what the museums should be embracing, then the Trump administration’s changes are surely needed.
But nowhere did Finkelstein dispute the accuracy of Greer’s statement. It seems that museums ought to be telling the truth, no matter how bleak right-wingers like Finkelstein think it is. Nevertheless, he continued to grumble:
You’ll see at about 0:55 Greer shake her head in disgust in reaction to a statement made by Lindsey Halligan, a special assistant to President Trump who is leading the review of Smithsonian content. Halligan called slavery “a horrible aspect of our nation’s history,” but said that we need to focus on the progress made since then, rather than on the lack of progress. That was evidently intolerable for Greer.
To understand American history, Greer recommended reading the late Bell Hooks, a black, feminist, Marxist. No wonder Greer lumps “capitalism” with white supremacy and anti-black racism as among the evils on which America was built! She will briefly acknowledge racial progress, but then quickly return to the perennial guilt trip and white-privilege slinging.
Again, Finkelstein did not dispute the accuracy of anything Greer said — which tells us that he’s on Trump’s side in censoring museums. And, despite his name-calling, he didn’t dispute anything attributed to Hooks.
A Sept. 1 post by Curtis Houck was devoted to reinforcing the narrative with the help of another right-wing outlet:
In a story published on Monday for Labor Day, Washington Free Beacon reporter Jonathan Levine visited the Smithsonian African-American History Museum for what became an incredibly disturbing encapsulation of the hateful bias and woke ideology President Trump and his administration face as it seeks to ensure the government-funded museums “celebrate American exceptionalism” and not symbolize “the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’”
Levine found that the museum – which opened in 2016 – “features exhibits that glorify violent radical groups like the Nation of Islam (NOI)” that make “little mention of the organization’s history of violence, anti-White radicalism, and anti-Semitism.”
Writ large, he said the museum “offer[s] historical falsehoods on issues like slavery,” including a refusal to place the shameful chapter of American history in the broader context of the slave trade.
[…]Perhaps least surprising was Levine showing readers how little the museum cared to mention prominent black conservatives such as Justice Clarence Thomas and Dr. Ben Carson, a former Housing and Urban Development Secretary.
Of course there was whining that right-wingers weren’t celebrated. There was no mention of the fact that Levine is a right-wing white guy who might not be the best or most objective judge of African-American history.