Air Date: 8-16-2026

Today we look at what Toni Morrison called "sanctioned ignorance," the deliberate manufacture of a version of the past that keeps citizens from connecting the dots between what their government did then and what it's doing now. They're doing it by attacking museums, libraries, and everyone dedicated to ensuring that people have access to accurate information because that's what it takes to implement authoritarian control over a society. It's also the reason that countries under authoritarian rule suffer from the lack of benefits that comes with the free exchange of ideas.

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left Podcast. Today, we look at what Toni Morrison called sanctioned ignorance, the deliberate manufacturer of a vision of the past that keeps citizens from connecting the dots between what their government did then and what it's doing now.

They're doing it by attacking museums, libraries, and everyone dedicated to ensuring that people have access to accurate information, because that's what it takes to implement authoritarian control over a society. It's also the reason that countries under authoritarian rule suffer from the lack of benefits that come with the free exchange of ideas.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our top takes in about 55 minutes today include the PBS NewsHour, Letters From An American, The Thom Hartmann Program, The Intercept Briefing, Start Making Sense, On The Media, and Movement Memos. Then in the additional deeper dives half of the show, there will be more in four sections: section A: The Crackdown, section B: Historians Push Back, section C: Libraries Under Siege, and section D: The Longer Arc, Empire, Ideology, and the World's View.

And now, onto the show.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Madam, ranking member and members of the committee. it's a very special privilege, as a historian to have this opportunity to defend one's craft. As historians, we often dwell in the past, and professionally, we should But in spring of 2025, with President Trump's executive order restoring truth and sanity to American history, and now with the White House's report saving America's story, the present has come storming into our work lives with vengeance, and we welcome the challenge.

The present is inherently interwoven with the past. The White House now believes it should pronounce on the nature of history and the presentation of the nation's treasures at the Smithsonian. The recent report by the White House Domestic Policy Council is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historian's profession, as well as on the freedom and curiosity of anyone who reads or visits museums.

In other words, President Trump has declared war on free minds and free education. Historians are not voices of the state. We are keepers of memory, and in, at our best, we're storytellers with trained imaginations. And yet, they declare with such certainty what forms of, and these are the words of the report, heritage, destiny, subtle truths, and indeed stories that the Smithsonian should instill, one of the report's favorite verbs, in the minds of the public.

Historians are now fighting back in the interest of scholarly history well told for the broadest possible public. Ours is a beautiful and ancient craft, essential for any society's need for self-understanding. We are equipped with a host of modern methods, but guided ethically by very old rules that no authoritarian political project ought to be allowed to profane.

As historian, a historian reads, listens, searches, measures, imagines his or her way into and through all manner of evidence, facts, sometimes clear, sometimes slanted every which way. We examine, read, accumulate, sift, study these modes of evidence with hopefully empathy and humility. Then we rise up from all our data and our sources and all manner of context and fashion all this into a story, into narrative, in order to inspire and take our audiences somewhere.

And once we get them there, we are bound by our craft to make an argument about why this all happened and why it matters. People often comment on how Trumpism would like to return us to some version of the 1950s when America was great. In this report, they have transparently done just that. The report is rooted explicitly in the Cold War of the 1950s, in the founding of the National Museum of American History, its legislation and dedication speeches.

The founding words and sentiments understandably breathed the rhetoric of Cold War triumphalism. How could it have been otherwise? The report offers no context for what might have invoked such expressions, the Soviet achievement of the hydrogen bomb, Sputnik, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the March on Washington, and the assassination of President Kennedy.

Had the Domestic Policy Council consulted trained historians, they might have provided some context. They might also have consulted Edward R. Murrow's famous commentary in nineteen fifty-four, the, the year after the museum was conceived, on Joseph McCarthy and his assaults on free speech. "We can deny our heritage and our history," said Murrow, "but we cannot escape responsibility for the result."

Erase McCarthyism, and it will come back. Erase any other fifty difficult aspects of American history, they will come back. Triumphalist history cannot tolerate nuance, ambiguity, complexity, but they are lifeblood for real historians. Also, in a deep Cold War context, James Baldwin wrote in an essay entitled, also nineteen sixty-two, As Much Truth as One Can Bear, that the problem with the way Americans approach history is that, quoting him, "Words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, but not to wake him up."

We do not write woke history, whatever that is, but we do try to awaken citizens. In recent decades, we sowed the wind with new kinds of history. Here comes the whirlwind. If we're not careful, we will end up with what the great writer Toni Morrison called statist history, and it will create what she called sanctioned ignorance.

That's what's at risk. Thank you.

On July 4th, the White House Domestic Policy Council released a report titled Saving America's Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage. The report says that the National Museum of American History, or NMAH, fails in the basic task of illuminating our heritage.

It continued, "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 the 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."

Even more oddly, the report was a direct and personal attack on Dr. Anthea M. Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History, whom it accused of exercising an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country The report claims that the National Museum of American History 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. It claims that the founders are minimized or excluded and that the story told of the nation is one of regret, tragedy, and shame.

It claims the museum has a longtime staff reading group devoted to a framework that treats museums as places of activism and that the National Museum of American History engages in illegal alien activism and transgender activism. It attributes to the museum guilt by association for organizations that have helped to fund exhibits, including the Mellon Foundation, which, an endnote explains, allotted seventy-two million dollars to racial justice projects.

Indeed, the authors of the report appear to be most exercised over racism, shown in their anger over the museum's presentation of human enslavement. They said the National Museum of American History should tell the story of how the colonies inherited slavery from both global and European slaving practices and how America's founders helped spark a worldwide movement that ultimately ended slavery.

They want the museum to emphasize how seven hundred and fifty thousand Americans died in the Civil War. They did not appear to want mentioned that two hundred and fifty-eight thousand of them died to protect enslavement and how Americans came to reject Jim Crow and segregation. It should tell how the United States has done more to advance and secure fundamental rights than any other nation in the world.

Part of that, the report says, should include America's contributions to global freedom, from saving Europe from multiple tyrannies to illustrating the virtues of a market economy and a free people. The White House report is a nakedly political document seeking to prove that the museum profession has catechized and codified the ideological dogma of DEI to an astonishing degree.

It builds on Trump's belief that the Smithsonian has an improper ideology that Trump says is too focused on how bad slavery was. That political purpose was clear on July twenty-first when Hartig and Yale University US historian David Blight appeared before the House Delivering on Government Efficiency subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Testifying as well were two critics of the Smithsonian, Mike Gonzalez of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and Matthew Spalding from Michigan's Christian Hillsdale College. Another hearing the next day before the House Administration Committee continued the same themes. Hartig told the committee that the report was inaccurate, saying, "We unwaveringly attest that it does not accurately or fairly characterize the full range of work at the museum."

In fact, the report ignores large, long-term gallery exhibitions on subjects like the history of the US military currently on display. That exhibit includes George Washington's sword and the chairs Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee used at the Appomattox surrender, in favor of past temporary revolving wall exhibitions in display cases along a wall.

The exhibit that infuriated the Republicans by mentioning transgender youth, called Girlhood: It's Complicated, closed more than three years ago. In her testimony, Harding responded to the report's accusation that the museum fails to substantively present America's founders and founding. As Kelsey Ables of The Atlantic reported, Harding pointed out, "We have a dozen exhibitions that include the founding era right now, 368 objects, 340 labels.

George Washington is mentioned 54 times. You have to walk by a whole section on George Washington in the Kenneth Behring Hall of Military History to get to a 15-foot-tall reproduction of the Declaration of Independence."

 

But in fact, the goal of the report was demonstrably to create a straw man for MAGA supporters to hate.

Ben Davis of Artnet reported that Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican of South Carolina, claimed Harding strives to represent queer pedophiles, indoctrination, and grooming of kids at an American history museum, and demanded, "Do you know how many kids get raped by adults every year in this country?"

Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican of Colorado, repeatedly demanded of Harding where the exhibitions honoring 50 million aborted babies are. Representative Eric Burlison, a Republican of Missouri, demanded, "Do you love America?" "I love this country unconditionally," Hartig replied. She would repeat that sentiment repeatedly over the course of two days of hearings as representatives talked over her to get clips to put on social media.

In a response to the administration's report, Representative Joe Morelle of New York, the top-ranking Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, pointed out that in February 2017, a month after his first inauguration, Trump praised the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture and its founding director, Dr.

Lonnie Bunch, for sharing the great struggle for freedom and equality that prevailed against the sins of slavery and the injustice of discrimination. "Smithsonian museums did not change what they teach about slavery between 2017 and today," Morelle writes. "Instead, the president changed his position on whether they should be allowed to teach it."

Morelle pointed out that the White House report demonized Hartig by taking her words out of context. For example, it made much of her statement, "Loving America is very complicated," while omitting that she said that in a discussion with descendants of enslaved Americans. It attacked her use of the common historical term problematize, which means to show that a simple idea is more complex than people realize.

Criticizing her statement that, "The profession has to figure out how we're going to problematize the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026." Morelle points out that the disjointed fragments of this sentence show how deliberately the authors of the report butchered it.

The full sentence was, "We have to figure out, all together, how we're going to commemorate, problematize, remember, and celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026." The report cut those words and then criticized her for insufficient celebration of the US. The president doesn't control the Smithsonian, so the only thing the report's authors could recommend was a label at every entrance that reads, "Warning.

The exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don't want you to love your country." On July 24th, the president issued executive order 14415, titled Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution. It ordered the National Park Service to place temporary signage outside the Smithsonian that corrects inaccurate information presented inside the museum.

As Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post noted, the attacks will take a toll on the scholars, curators, volunteers, security guards, and the rest of the loyal staff who will have to pass signs that demean the integrity of their work. And it's likely the MAGA ecosystem will pick up the harassment.

History is not just a set of facts and events. It's the study of how and why societies change. Why do people act in certain ways? Are there patterns in human behavior? What makes a society successful? What makes one fail? Accuracy is imperative. Without it, we will learn the wrong answers, not just about the way Jim and Juan Crow worked, but also about whether our country's foundation is about race and land, or, as the founders said, about principles and the rule of law.

But I wanna start out with something that seems like a small story, right? It's just another indication of how petty and bizarre and, just fruitcake these guys are. They're, just Looney Tunes, the guys in the White House. That they're putting signs out in front of the S- Smithsonian.

Trump issued this executive order directing the, interior department, Doug Burgum's, organization, to put signs out in front of the Smithsonian Museum of American History, saying that, the information in here is biased and, not credible, and if you want good information, go someplace else.

Words to that effect. They haven't put the signs up yet, but they're planning it. And when this was reported on a couple of days ago, most of the people in the media laughed at it. Oh, yeah. Oh, look, this isn't that pathetic. but it seems so trivial, right? Now, this was based on a bizarre report written by the White House Domestic Policy Council, which is a group made up of, a whole bunch of, you know, basically leftovers from right-wing think tanks and activist groups like American Compass, Heritage, Manhattan Institute, and Stephen Miller's America First Policy Institute.

And it claims that the American Museum of American History has displays that cover the fights for women's and civil rights and to end slavery and talk about the positive role of immigrants and women and queer people in our country, and it finds all that deplorable. Seriously. They wrote, quote, the Smithsonian leadership and museum curators, quote, "have directed the museum's emission, mission away from historical education and scholarship of a shared national inheritance to be celebrated and toward extreme political activism rooted in Marxism to divide, dispirit and discourage Americans, and they have denigrated and displaced whites, males, Christians, and Americans while focusing on race in areas where it has little to no historical relevance."

they're complaining about the fact that it's not a white supremacist museum. that's what it really comes down to. I- but this goes, this speaks to a larger issue. Pretty much every dictator in history, both ancient and modern, have rewritten their nation's history because as George Orwell famously said, "Those who control the past can control the future, and those who control the present can control the past, and thus the future."

dictators and wannabe dictators rewrite the past to legitimize their rule, right? Typically portraying themselves as the inevitable culmination of history, the savior of the na- I alone can fix it. In the process, they ar- typically erase their rivals from the historical record. Donald Trump has replaced the picture of Joe Biden in the White House with a picture of an autopen Dictatorial regimes frequently use rewritten history to justify wars of aggression, to suppress minorities, and to gut civil liberties, and Trump is doing all those things.

this is like Sam Alito quoting a 17th century witch-burning judge to justify getting rid of abortion in the United States, or how Trump has reinvented Obama's deal with Iran, the JCPOA. They rewrite history to bind themselves to the country's majority group with simplified stories of a nat- national glorious past when we were in charge, right?

yeah. This is why Trump called Kamala Harris a DEI hire. Remember that. Rewriting history is also a powerful way to shift the Overton window to the right, causing the previously unthinkable to become just common sense. when the history of protest movements, democratic movements, civil rights efforts are reframed as chaos or crises in the nation's history, young people don't learn about how democracy happens.

literally, they don't learn about successful alternatives to authoritarian rule, and it can make democracy or pluralism seem unnatural or even impossible, particularly to young people. And we've seen this throughout history. When, Louise and I were in Egypt back 20-some odd years ago, we, with a church group, we went to, to Egypt and in Luxor, there's a wall where it's like, this kinda like graffiti from the third century BC when Alexander conquered the area.

And on the wall-- And we had the, the guy who was our tour guide was a, a museum curator, and an anthropologist, and he pointed out that on the wall, written in script that the Egyptians could read, it said, basically, "I am Alexander, son of the god Amun." Now, Amun was the god who was the god over all the other gods in, in the Egyp- in the Egyptian worldview.

some people argue that this is why we say "amen" at the end of prayers today, that it's that old, right? So here's Alexander the Great rewriting the history of Egypt to make himself the god king. Joe Stalin, removed purged officials from photographs, rewrote school textbooks, reshaped the official government accounts of the Russian Revolution and World War I to make himself the hero.

Adolf Hitler and the Nazis taught a racialized version of German history that portrayed Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and other racial and political minorities as enemies. And that Germany was stabbed in the back in World War I. Mao Zedong, was, saw repeated revisions of Chinese history, especially after the Cultural Revolution, with history textbooks and official records regularly being edited.

they, to this day, they, they- you can't learn about the Ti- Tiananmen Square massacre if you live in China. And even small-timers like Saddam Hussein did this. He was ha- he hung giant banners of his own face all over, all over this capital city and Baghdad, and, basically, linked himself to Mesopotamian rulers and claimed a grand lineage and all this.

the simple reality is in democracies, it's historians and journalists and courts and archives and universities and scholars who write history. 

In dictatorships, on the other hand, it's the dictatorship that writes the history. And this is why it's so important that we push back on this attempt to rewrite the history of America, to claim that America was created as a Christian nation.

It wasn't. To claim that, y- democracy is basically a, a failed experiment, is essentially what some of these billionaires are saying. And, we need to, people need to understand. for example, the Amer- I write about this in my new book, Who Killed the American Dream?

The American Revolution was a fight against corporate power. It was the first m- actual real, in the history of the world, the first real revolution against the most powerful corporation in the world at that time, the British East In- India Company. that was the Boston Tea Party. That was the foundation of our revolution.

The Civil War was a fight against oligarchy in the South. we just, and obviously, World War II was a fight against fascism. We were the anti-fascists, the Antifa. we've gotta push back loudly on this and say, "This is wrong."

We're talking about this history of myth-making in the US, particularly when it comes to the, quote-unquote, founders, right? M- and as you mentioned, most people don't know that the first president, George Washington, was a land speculator interested in seizing Indian land.

can you tell us a little bit more about that history? 

So for people who don't know, and it's not just George Washington, the lot of, a lot of the, the gentry men of this era are involved- The good men ... in this business, yeah, called land speculation. and actually, George Washington's, family did it.

it was a pretty well-established practice. But basically, what they would do is they would buy land that either England and then later the United States claimed in this kind of racist, abstract way where, they would f- sail somewhere and, plant a flag and be like, "This is our land."

But it's still governed and controlled on the ground by indigenous people. And so they would buy that land, and then like a modern-day real estate developer would flip it, they would flip it. And so once indigenous people were forced off that land, they would sell the land to settlers for a profit.

Sometimes they would sell the land while indigenous people were still living there. And so what happened is in the 1760s There is this Indigenous uprising where a group led by an Odawa chief named Pontiac sack a bunch of British forts. So Britain, in a very loose way claims all this land in the Great Lakes region.

The way they claim that land on the ground is by having these forts. They're these, military outposts, and Indigenous nations sack a bunch of them. And the Crown is looking at fighting a very expensive war in North America. It's just been fighting this big global war, sometimes called the French and Indian War, sometimes called the Seven Years' War, and it's broke.

The Crown is broke, and it doesn't wanna fight another war with Indigenous nations. And so what the Crown does is it makes this line, this proclamation, issues a royal proclamation, and that royal proclamation draws a line basically down the Appalachian Mountains, and it tells settlers, colonists, "You can live to the east of this line, but everything to the west is reserved for Indigenous nations."

And what we have is George Washington telling his kinda business guy, "Hey, ignore the proclamation and continue to buy land and speculate in land west of the King's boundary. we're not gonna, we're not gonna follow this law." And so we know that the elite didn't like the Royal Proclamation of 1763, and it also upset regular folks, too, who felt felt entitled to more Indigenous land out west 

You're talking about this project as a way to correct the record, as you said, when it comes to US history and Native peoples.

And it brings it to mind another effort by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who published the 1619 Project, recasting the way we understand how slavery shaped the founding of the country. There was a massive backlash to that project. I'm curious, have you gotten any pushback on this series in that vein?

Not to the extent that the 1619 Project did, by a long shot. But I think 

also- It would be hard to replicate that. 

Yeah. I also just think we, don't have the visibility of The New York Times, it's a different cultural moment. There have been, like, a few, right-wing websites that have criticized the podcast and perhaps there'll be more.

I don't, we'll see what happens. What I will say, broadly speaking, is that I think we're in this moment where we are fighting over how America tells its past. And I think that fight is really important, which is also why projects like the 1619 Project are really important and are definitely an inspiration for the work we're doing with First America.

But I think that the fight over who we are as a country, where we come from, how we started, I think that fight is so bitter because so much power flows from the stories that we tell ourselves, right? the stories that we tell ourselves as a country about who we are and where we come from, I believe really shape public policy and public sentiment, and h- and how we have these conversations around law, around equity today.

And what I will say as a Native person is what I often feel like I experience is both sides leaving us out. And so I think we're left out of the America was great, 250 rah, the founders were perfect version of the story, 'cause obviously, genocide doesn't fit easily into that version.

But I think we're also left out of the more progressive side, too. things like the No Kings protest or this idea of wanting to go back to this democratic foundation, and one of the big claims that the series makes is that foundation is in itself is a myth. Because at the same time that our founders were building a democracy, they were also building an empire.

And the way that you govern an empire, the way that you govern other people by force, is not democratic. And so this identity crisis we're having around authoritarianism and democracy, and how could authoritarianism be sneaking into our democracy, what we argue is that it's actually always been there. I don't think people, on both sides of the aisle, I feel like most people aren't having that conversation.

Libraries. They're often indispensable places for lots of people. They're not just repositories of books.

In a lot of poorer neighborhoods, they're often the nicest and the safest place a kid or a family can go. Kids can get help with homework. They and their families can use the computer. People can learn English. They can get help with official documents, immigration and citizenship, unemployment and social security.

I'm reading here from the Los Angeles Public Library website, but lots of public libraries do this sort of thing. And there's one other thing: it's all free. It's for everybody, provided by the city or county. It's like an island of socialism in the middle of dog-eat-dog capitalist America. One friend told me, "If you wanna find the socialist in Fargo, go to the library."

And of course, libraries also have books, including children's books, and those are the books that have become the targets of attack by Republican culture warriors. For example, attacks on the library and the librarians in Dayton, Washington. That's what you wrote about for The Nation. First of all, where is Dayton, and how did this all start?

Dayton's a tiny little community in the southeast corner of Washington State. It's about as far from any of the big cities, in the region as you can get. it's about a four-and-a-half, five-hour drive east of Portland, Oregon. It's about a four-hour drive from Boise, Idaho. It's in the middle of nowhere.

Got a few thousand people, and it's got this lovely library. It's a New Deal Era library. It was built in the 1930s after a huge amount of fundraising in the community. It's had this really good run for 75 years, but as you said, now it's under attack by a sort of group of cultural warriors who don't like the content of some of the books, and have reached for a sort of nuclear option of shutting down the entire library or trying to shut down the entire library. 

Now, I understand from your piece that the attacks on the library in Dayton, Washington are part of a national campaign inspired by an organization called Moms for Liberty. What is Moms for Liberty and how big is it? 

So Moms for Liberty started in 2021 in Florida, and it grew out of parents' rights movements around the pandemic, essentially.

People who didn't want their kids out of school, people who didn't want their kids to be vaccinated, people who didn't want to have to wear masks, and so on. And it's morphed and grown over the last two, three years, and so now it's this organization with hundreds of chapters around the country, and it's very influential in school board elections, and the Republican Party presidential hopefuls make a sort of homage to the Moms for Liberty, going to attend their conferences and so on.

And it's morphed from being just about the pandemic to being about the sort of great culture war issues of the moment around race and around gender and around sexuality. So basically what they do is they go around looking for, quote-unquote, "offensive books" that talk about issues of sexuality to young kids and talk about issues of race in a critical way, and then they highlight these books, and they go after the libraries and the librarians, and they work to get those books removed from the bookshelves or marginalized by being put out of reach of children in, in the libraries.

And more nefariously, it's one thing to have a debate over the books, but more nefariously, these, anti-library groups have morphed into really personalized attacks against librarians. They accuse, school librarians and public librarians of being pedophiles or of grooming children. They use this very loaded, very, guaranteed-to-stoke-outrage kind of language, and that's what I found fascinating in Dayton: that it's this little community- With a ginned-up culture war, basically.

It's got a few books in the library that talk about sexuality, that deal with issues of transsexual, identity in particular, and those books have caused such a brouhaha that you now have this organization that's led by a young woman called Jessica Rothkorn. You now have this organization of locals that, as I said, it reached for the nuclear option.

They basically said, "Look, if you're not gonna remove these books, we're gonna try and put forward a citizen initiative to be voted on to defund the entire library district." this is extraordinary. Imagine having the sort of hubris to think that you have the right to shut down your community's library simply because it's stocking books that you view to be a little bit offensive.

In your piece, you point out that there are forces on the left that also target, some books and some authors. some authors are accused of cultural appropriation or ethnic stereotyping or other offenses, but you say there's a difference between the left efforts to target and ban some books and what the right has been doing.

What is the difference? 

Yeah, let me be absolutely up front on this. I have no truck with book banning. I don't care whether it comes from the left-wing or the right-wing. It's misguided, it's bigoted, and it impoverishes us culturally. We shouldn't be a community that's so fragile that if we don't like a book, our immediate solution is to ban that book or to cancel the author.

So I'm not in any way, shape, or form defending left-wing book banning. I think it's just as toxic as right-wing book banning. But I do think there's a structural difference, and the structural difference is that the Democratic Party as a whole has not bought into book bans, whereas the Republican Party as a whole now is using this to whip up an electoral base.

So when you have an entire major political party that is on board with the project of banning books or limiting what can be taught in schools, you look at the way in which the, curricula has been restricted in Florida and in various other states, that's a whole different ballgame. And so that's why I think that when the right goes after books at the moment in America, it's far more dangerous than when the left goes after books.

So there is another difference as well. Generally, when the left goes after books, it's because those books contain fairly inflammatory racial language, that, that's been the major provocation leading to book-banning efforts on the left. Now, I don't think those books should be banned, but I do think there's a difference between being offended by racial language And in the right wing's case, just being i- offended by marginalized communities.

So the right has gone after deeply vulnerable, deeply marginalized communities: the transgendered community, the teenage gay community. They've gone after racial minorities. They've gone after basically not groups with influence, but groups already on the margins. Now, that's the quintessential definition of a bully.

When a strong person or a strong group goes after a weak person or a weak group, that's bullying, and that's being institutionalized and legislated on by the Republican Party at the moment. And that's why there's a difference, and that's why I think it's worth focusing more on what the right wing is doing around censorship, because it's far more toxic and it's far more destructive.

So tell me a little bit about the people who are leading this effort, first of all, to censor and now to close the libraries in this one little town in Eastern Washington. Who are the people? 

It's a small group of people religiously motivated on the whole. It's led by a woman called Jessica Rothkorn, who actually worked in a library in the recent past.

She's a young mother. She volunteers for the Little League. She's, perfectly pleasant. I met her on the stoop of her house, and we talked for a while. She's perfectly pleasant when you have that conversation, except when you start talking about the idea of book banning, and suddenly you have this absolutely no-compromise approach to book banning that, is unfathomable to me.

And Jessica Rothkorn and her, group of, fellow book banners have ginned up this sort of manufactured crisis. they identified a handful of books that, were fairly sexually explicit, not in a titillating way. There was nothing pornographic about it, but they were sexually explicit in an educational way.

And they looked at these books, and they said they were inappropriate for children. Now, you can have a perfectly legitimate argument as to whether or not that's true. I certainly wouldn't say all of these books were 100% perfect, and, all of these books I'd be happy with kids of any age reading.

Seems to me that there's legitimate room for having a conversation as to whether or not those books should be on kids' shelves in libraries. But it's one thing to have that debate internally. It's another thing to say, unless you agree with our demands to move these books, we're gonna try and shut down the library."

That's when you end up in a deeply authoritarian moment, and that's what we're seeing. We're seeing it in Idaho as well, just across the state line in Meridian, Idaho, and a few other places. We're seeing it in Michigan, and we're seeing it in a handful of places around the country now, this notion that libraries are the enemy, and that librarians are the enemy, and that we are so vulnerable to books on library shelves that our default response has to be to close down the library.

And so I think, you ask who these people are. They start from a place of, a legitimate debating point around what sorts of books should be in libraries, but they finish in this absolutely authoritarian position about defunding libraries and shutting down the choice of other people as to what books they should or shouldn't be able to access.

A public college in Florida has commissioned a statue of Charlie Kirk for the campus. 

This assassin, he didn't like what Charlie Kirk was saying, and so he wanted to silence him through violence, and he killed him for it. So I think it's appropriate what New College is doing.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Wednesday said such a memorial was right and proper because the Charlie Kirk he knew was- 

Bringing conservative principles to college campuses, that's basically like the lion's den for political debate, right? 

DeSantis and Kirk were longtime comrades in the culture wars.

In the fight against, quote, "liberal capture," they boosted conservative agendas in schools, universities, museums, and libraries. A new documentary, The Librarians, follows a group of public servants whose libraries have been targeted by activist groups like Moms for Liberty all across the country, from Florida- 

I wrote an email back and just asked, "Could you please provide us with the reason why each of these books is being removed?"

I was removed from my library for asking questions 

To Texas 

We were gonna pull books off the shelves. It's the transgender, LGBTQ, and the sexuality in books 

To New Jersey 

I see the kid emerge from the stacks, holding Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison. 24 hours later, that student's mother was standing in front of the Board of Education and calling me a pornographer, pedophile, and groomer of children 

To Louisiana 

In our parish, we have the highest concentration of KKK, Aryan Nation, those type of groups 

Amanda Jones is a school librarian in Livingston Parish, Louisiana.

In 2021, she was named the School Library Journal's School Librarian of the Year, one of the profession's highest honors. In 2022, she found herself in the crosshairs of book-banning activists after she spoke up at her public library board meeting 

I talked about how libraries already have policies and procedures that, if anyone doesn't like a book in a library, whether it's school or public, there are processes in place 

After the meeting, two men Amanda didn't know created memes about her that circulated all over the internet, and were read by family and friends 

And one meme said that I advocate the teaching of anal sex to 11-year-olds.

The other meme was a picture of me that had a circle that looked like a target around my face, and that post identified me as a school librarian and where I worked, and insisted that I give pornography and erotica to six-year-olds. They circulated all over the state that weekend, and then by the next week, it was all over the country 

It was excruciating 

That first weekend, I cried to the point my eyes swelled shut.

I couldn't see for a day. I didn't know that was possible. I eventually had to take a leave of absence from work for debilitating panic attacks that I had never had before. I had a little pity party for a few days, but then I woke up that third or fourth day with just a burning rage at people that I had stood up for that were saying these awful things about me.

And so I decided to stick up for myself and fight back 

And how did you do that? 

I filed a defamation lawsuit against these two men. It is still ongoing today. It's been three years. Then they turned around and said I was filing the lawsuit to keep sexually explicit books in the children's section of the library

which is not what the lawsuit is about. That's still what they say. It's still what is on one of the men's GoFundMes. just lies

What's at stake here? Lives are at stake, children's lives. People tell me I'm exaggerating, it's hyperbolic. It's not. I've taught, for 25 years I've taught thousands of students, and I have had many students who have grown up and taken their own lives. Over two dozen. I stopped counting at around 20 'cause it was too heartbreaking, and they generally fall into two categories.

They're either veterans that served our country and weren't given resources when they returned, or they were members of the LGBTQ community. Almost every single former student that I know of that has taken their own life fall into one of those two categories. To me, both of those reasons are preventable, and so I do raise money every year for disabled American veterans, but I thought that what I could do for maybe mitigating some of this in our community would be to make sure that kids are represented in the books, in our public library, in our school library, and make sure they can see themselves and feel seen and heard and represented.

Students have spoken to you about what certain books have meant to them over the years. 

Oh, yes. W- I teach middle school, so they're not the most talkative, forthcoming bunch. But a lot of former students, yeah, in their 20s and 30s. One student, right after this happened, wrote me and said, "I was thinking of taking my life, and you gave me a book that made me feel like there was other people like me, and I decided to live for one more day."

And, that's powerful. One of my former students was substituting at our school. She stopped by the library to come talk to me. She hadn't been in our school library in 10 years, and she walked around, and within minutes she said, Ms. Jones, this library's changed so much. I see books with people that look like me.

I see Brown characters on the covers of these books. I never saw that when I went to this school." I wanna preface, I was not the librarian at that time. It made me tear up. 

You've mentioned kids' safety. How about yours? 

I generally feel unsafe most of the time. 

Tell me why. Describe what you've encountered.

Getting a death threat saying that they know where you live and work will change you forever 

It was the work part that got me. My fear is that someone will come after me and that in the process, children will be harmed. I don't think I could ever live with myself if that happened, and I know it wouldn't be my fault, but I think about that almost daily.

Tell me about guns. 

When I go to library board meetings, I have to travel through very rural areas, wooded areas, and I'm by myself a lot of these times. I'm scared they're gonna follow me home. I'm gonna be on this stretch of road where no one's around. And so yeah, I carry a weapon, and I do sleep with a shotgun under my bed because I have a teenager that I wanna protect if someone breaks into my home.

I don't go out in my community. I've been called a groomer and a pedophile in public. People are gonna slap me or whatever, and I don't grocery shop. I can't even take my daughter out in my community. We went prom shopping at a local boutique, and we had to leave 'cause people were whispering, and then she started crying.

So I just don't go out in my community anymore.

 

So the documentary shows the connection between all of these movements to ban books or censor them or move them across the country from where you live in Louisiana to Texas to Florida, even New Jersey. We learn that some of the people behind these campaigns have connections to the, Christian Nationalist Movement, among them Dan and Farris Wilks, billionaire oil tycoons who've donated lots of money to politicians and conservative media outlets.

Here's a clip of Farris from the documentary. 

A male on male or female on female is against nature. So this lifestyle is a predatorial lifestyle in that they need your children and straight people having kids to fulfill their sexual habits. They want your children. 

There's also a company, Patriot Mobile, that's been financing these book-censoring groups.

Here's a clip from one of their meetings. 

God takes what the Devil meant to harm us, and He turns it into good. He blesses us with it. Every time we're attacked at Patriot Mobile, our sales just go through the roof. We increase our sales. And so what does increasing our sales mean? It means we can give more money back to organizations like Moms for Liberty.

How have you seen that play out in your town, in your state? 

They're apparently not worshiping the same God I am. That's not Christianity. So I created an organization called Livingston Parish Library Alliance. We've been tracking campaign donations, and we have noticed that when politicians specifically speak out about the library and insist, there's sexually explicit materials or whatever, we've noticed an uptick in donations.

They play on people's fears that there's these evildoers coming after your children. 

And where are those donations coming from? 

It's a dark money nonprofit extremist group, they don't live or work in my community, that have entered my community, working with local politicians to create this fear so these politicians can get votes, power, and money.

The lady that originally, on our library board, started all of this nonsense, who is now on our parish governing, 'cause we're parishes and not counties in Louisiana, it catapulted her into a higher elected position. Her husband formed a PAC, and the Koch brothers have donated over $60,000 to their PAC. 

It's all money and power. 

From your perspective, what role do libraries actually play in community life? 

you said it, Kelly, so many essential functions of community life, and I think in particular in this moment where the public sphere is being robbed of its last few coins by the ruling class, that libraries are in this position where they've been forced to step up and take on new responsibilities as other areas of public life have been defunded.

But one thing in particular that you said I think is so important, that it's a space where people who can't purchase something are allowed to congregate. We have so few of these spaces where you're not expected to make a purchase, or, really in the library, there's, almost no purchase you can even make.

And in this way, it also means that it's a space where all kinds of people within your community can mix with each other. Another really essential part of community life, for libraries is that it's a space where trans people are defended and celebrated, especially trans children, both in the sense of materials and programming, that is welcoming and celebratory of trans people, and also a space where a lot of trans people work.

So trans library workers have this visible community role. And so I think that one of the big reasons that there's been such a reactionary backlash against libraries is that it's a space where queer adults and queer children can be together and show not just that it's okay, but necessary. 

I think so many of the things that Alison has underlined are absolutely essential, and a reason why libraries are so dear to the hearts of so many of us.

I think that, we could talk for hours about what libraries do, and in some ways, I think it's also important to think about what they are not, especially in this moment. Libraries are not a place of transaction in the capitalist sense, right? They're not a place where you have to spend money.

Certainly, they are a place where we devote our common public resources, ideally to the common good, but you don't have to make a purchase. It doesn't matter what the number is in your bank account. It doesn't matter what your housing status is. It doesn't matter what your immigration status is. Now, this is the ideal, of course.

We do not see this articulated in every library, or those ideals carried out in every library in the way that we would want them to. But I think in the highest and best expression of the public library that we all strive for, you are there simply as a human being, as a neighbor, as a member of your community, and you have intrinsic value.

You don't have to do anything. You don't have to perform anything. You don't have to have a reason for being there. you don't have to be productive. You can just exist, and there are very few spaces in our public life, certainly, where that remains the case today. I think also public libraries continue to be resistant to surveillance, resistant to incursions on people's privacy in a way that many of our other public spaces are not.

Again, this is something I think we, we strive for. We don't always see that embodied in every public library. But what you look at, what you borrow, the programs you attend, all of that is your business and nobody else's. And I think, again, there are very few public spaces, very few taxpayer funded spaces, spaces that we all support, that can say that 

Yeah.

yes to what Alison and Katie both said. I think something that we need to also maybe nail down a little bit more is at a time in our culture, Alison made mention of this, where there's a need for third spaces, a need for actual public amenities in community that people can access, libraries are critical, right?

they are places where you can have public space to meet, where there are sometimes venues in libraries where people, go to theater per- performances, and they go to concerts, and they do a bunch of things that they can do with other people in common. This is so critical and really important, and something that a lot of people have been talking about lately as we've descended further into fascism.

Where can you go in this country where you can bump in to people of multiple class backgrounds, different racial backgrounds, different creeds, right? on a regular basis. You usually can find that at a public library in whatever city or town you're in. That's really important. and it's not to say that libraries can't be exclusionary.

Sometimes they are, by... 'cause human beings run these institutions, right? but they do offer still opportunities for the kind of cross engagement of people that I just don't know where else you find that today. You don't often find it in local churches anymore, or local synagogues or mosques. You don't find it, we still have it in some of our public schools, but they're, quickly trying to dissolve those as opportunities for multiple types of people to come into contact with each other regularly.

so I do think that is really incredibly important to think about, and to think about libraries as public amenities, libraries as infrastructure in a time when we're dealing with climate change. places where people usually can find a place that's hot and not have to be heated during very cold spells, a place that's hopefully in many places has AC, you can cool down.

These are just... We need to think about libraries expansively in order to understand how important they are in our culture and our society 

Thank you. I really appreciate these points. I think libraries are often missing from our conversations about what it actually takes to resist authoritarianism and defend people's ability to think, learn, and question freely.

Why do libraries matter so much to that struggle? 

Thanks so much of what Miriam and Katie said. It's just gonna be that the whole time, by the way, Kelly, like we all agree. we're, three colleagues who are, like, in such amazing community and agreement with what one another are saying. but yeah, what Miriam was saying about, these third spaces, I think that the fact of the library being a community space, interacting with people from all walks of life under its-- Obviously, we're talking about the most ideal conditions, right?

Under the most ideal conditions, it can be those things. I think that it's not only that the library is this infrastructure that's devoted to free inquiry, but I think that we learn best when we are in those kinds of spaces where we're introduced to people and ideas that are not like ourselves.

And I think particularly we-- libraries are that infrastructure in this current moment when we're at a, misinformation crisis levels. There's AI slop everywhere, we're dealing with the theft of our attention from big tech platforms. The library is the most visible institution defending knowledge and truth, and I think, thinking about the way that we, as a society, decided that was infrastructure that was important to us in spite of all the other things in the US society that we get wrong, we have libraries in every single community, and they are beloved, and they literally exist to make free thought and inquiry possible, under the best conditions.

So it really, it really boggles the mind when they aren't front and center in these conversations. I see a lot of times when actually libraries do get centered rhetorically in conversations about resisting authoritarianism, but rarely do people with any power translate that rhetorical reference into material resources.

And, in particular, I'm thinking about where I live in Philadelphia, our mayor, Cherelle Parker, has extolled the virtues of libraries many times. But when libraries, when there was the huge cold snap over the winter here just a few weeks ago, the libraries were all required to serve as warming centers, which the workers were so ready and willing to do, but the city offered them absolutely no resources.

And this, this way that, the austerity takes away from the library, even when it's positioned as something that can meet that moment, it's really unfortunate. 

We've just heard clips starting with the PBS NewsHour detailing how historian David Blight told Congress the White House's Saving America's Story report and Trump's executive order declare political war on historians and free education. Letters from an American traced how Trump praised the Smithsonian's slavery exhibits in 2017, then reversed course, 

culminating in hearings where Republicans berated the museum's director, talking over her to get social media clips. The Tom Hartman Program warned that Trump's plan to post signs at the Smithsonian follows a dictator's playbook of rewriting the past to control the future, as Orwell described.

The Intercept Debriefing argued that both the conservative and progressive versions of American history leave Native peoples out. Start Making Sense reported how Republican culture warriors from Idaho to Michigan have moved from banning books to defunding library districts. On the Media profiled Louisiana librarian Amanda Jones, who filed a defamation lawsuit after activists spread lies calling her a groomer and now sleeps with a shotgun for protection.

And Movement Memos explored why public libraries matter so much in a fascist moment where people can simply exist without spending money, being surveilled, or performing productivity. deeper dive sections. 

If you get value out of the show and want to make sure we can keep going while getting it delivered ad-free to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support. There's a link in the show notes through our Patreon page or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app.

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As for today's topic, whenever I see the stories of the Trump administration working to forcibly change what's allowed to be shown in a museum, the image that comes to mind is that of marauding invaders sacking a city and burning the cultural artifacts of their enemies. In essence, they're sending in lawyers to burn the Library of Alexandria.

It feels more civilized, but the result, all of us ending up worse off for the lost knowledge, is not much different. 

Of course, the more accurate comparison is that of governments that have attacked their own museums and libraries or built them from the ground up with self-serving bias in mind. While researching this topic, I came across the story of a Chinese dynasty attempting to build the greatest library in the world back in the 1700s.

In their effort, they collected over 10,000 manuscripts, 

but destroyed nearly a third and selected only about a third for inclusion because they were never building a repository of all knowledge and open inquiry. Scholars have dubbed the whole project a literary inquisition because the authorities were promoting the idea as a project to collect knowledge, but purging anything they found threatening or undesirable was always the point.

The authoritarians of the last century, both fascist and communist, did much the same. Sometimes it was with bonfires of books on cutting-edge gender and sexuality research, like in Nazi Germany, and other times it was a decree handed down to restrict scientific inquiry to stay within ideological guidelines, as in the Soviet Union.

But it was always about upholding their own power to the detriment of all others. 

Now, when the Trump administration threatens the Smithsonian, scrubs information from the National Park Service, and physically alters the informational plaques on slavery memorials, they're doing it for the same reason and with the same result. And just in case you're still suffering from a Cold War propaganda hangover, the instinct to crush opposing thought isn't linked to an economic system.

Favoring capitalism, socialism, or even communism doesn't have a bearing on whether you pursue your goals through authoritarianism. But it is the authoritarian instinct, and not the economic system, that drives the anti-intellectualism and the desire to suppress free thought and free inquiry.

interestingly, in a mixed society like ours, while Cold War propaganda was touting the benefits of capitalism, America's scientific golden age was actually primarily funded publicly and socialized. The federal government funded the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, DARPA, and funded research universities directly.

It is absolutely to our nation's credit that we decided to not just allow the unfettered pursuit of knowledge, but to fund it directly. That's also precisely why giving the power of the purse strings to anti-intellectual authoritarians gives them so much leverage, threatening to suppress and restrict what we're allowed to research, hampering our future, and what we're allowed to learn about ourselves and our history.

As a comparison, China is an authoritarian state, and they've made impressive technological advancements in recent decades, but only in the areas that are visible and strongly supported by the government.

What's impossible to see from the outside is what was never built or discovered because of the restrictions on what people were allowed to think, teach, and research. 

Much of their advancements have come from borrowed freedom, talent that had to be foreign trained and allowed to operate in limited zones of government-sanctioned openness. And a former Chinese premier said the root cause of China's technological stranglehold problem 

lies in the weakness of their basic research, which determines the depth and breadth of a country's innovation. And now China is in the middle of trying to correct that error. They're investing billions to build exactly the kind of capacity for basic research that we've taken for granted. At the same time, as Republicans are finally getting their long-held wish to fundamentally undermine the sciences they find to be ideologically uncomfortable and cut funding for basic research on the assumption it's a waste of money just because they don't understand it.

When we start restricting libraries, museums, universities, and research institutions, we can know exactly what lies down that path because so many others have taken it before us. These authoritarian regimes, by nature of their wildly inflated self-assessment of their own greatness, genuinely believe that if their own ideology were to replace all of the parts of scientific inquiry they don't like, their societies would end up better off.

But there's never been a case where that's true, and sometimes we can be quite glad for that. Famously, Nazi Germany purged more than 1,300 academics, including a quarter of German physicists, and later implemented what they called Aryan physics to replace what they had deemed the Jewish theory of relativity.

Many of those exiled went on to help build the first nuclear bomb in New Mexico rather than Germany. With the benefit of hindsight, we know how that played out, but when warned early on about how German science would suffer under these new policies, Hitler reportedly responded, quote, "Then we shall do without science for a few years."

End quote. That for a few years framing is the really telling part. He imagined that you could fundamentally hamper science with your ideology, and you might have a staffing problem for a little while, but would surely bounce back relatively unaffected. Classic authoritarian delusion.

Now, because the authoritarians currently running our country either live in the mirror world or speak primarily to their constituency that does, they run the same basic strategy while declaring themselves the defenders of scientific neutral ground and accusing their opponents of being ideologically driven.

that goes over better here than it would to put Aryan in the name or to attempt to instruct people in the ways of Donald Trump thought the way the Chinese are force-fed Xi Jinping thought. So the propaganda is a bit better, and the strategy is catered to our own modern time and place, but the goal is the same, as is the intellectual dead end they're aiming us toward.

Institutions of learning and research, as well as the people who work to make them possible, are the way we understand where we've come from, while also being the driving force behind the possibilities of what the future can hold. Defending them in any way possible from the forces currently attacking is absolutely heroic.

But we should understand the authoritarian assault as all the evidence we need that defending the status quo of 2024 or restoring the norms of the middle of the last century should be considered woefully inadequate. If education and free exchange of knowledge are our links to both our past and future, then the only reasonable action is to do everything in our power to make them as open and accessible to as many people as possible.

One of the great things about the Smithsonian is that they're all free to enter. Far more museums should be publicly funded and made free for all. In countries throughout Europe, all of them notably non-authoritarian, there has been a movement to make university free for all their citizens.

Germany's gone a step farther and made nearly all of their public universities charge no tuition at all, 

including for foreign students. The dividing lines have never been clearer between those who want to restrict access and those who want to expand access to information. And we know how both versions go. Authoritarians throughout history have driven their brightest minds away with their crackdowns on free thought, 

And we in the US have been the most notable example of the opposite side of that coin, taking in those great intellectuals cast out of their own countries who came here and helped build the future on our soil instead. we should be fighting to be the country the world's free thinkers run toward when their own governments turn on them.

that used to be us, and it's just more evidence that those trying to make America great again never had any idea what made us great in the first place. We should do what we did before and more to make us attractive to those fleeing intellectual persecution.

Knowing that we should go in that direction again, only further this time, doesn't take a genius 

And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics today.

First up, section A: The Crackdown, followed by section B: Historians Push Back, section C: Libraries Under Siege, and section D: The Longer Arc: Empire, Ideology, and the World's View. 

There was this point a few months before we were headed to Washington, D.C., and we were talking about which museums to visit, et cetera, et cetera, when I realized something, and I am ashamed to admit that it took me as long as it did.

I had no idea what the, quote-unquote, Smithsonian was. 

not no idea, Hannah. 

Yeah, okay, not no idea. it is museums. They are museums. I, a, a museum spread across a bunch of different places. And then, of course, I got to thinking about the sheer number of times that I have seen that Smithsonian logo on things.

Do you know the one I'm talking about? 

Yeah, that blue circle with the yellow thing inside. It's everywhere in D.C. 

It, not just D.C., all over the country, and that yellow thing, Nick, is the sun, which has a lot to do with the whole point of the Smithsonian. but it is everywhere. I was recently checking out the USS Constitution in the Charlestown Navy Yard, and I was walking into the museum, and there it was.

And while we are on the subject of my home state, I have seen it in Cambridge, Massachusetts on an observatory. I have seen it in Springfield. I've seen it in Plymouth. I've seen it in Lowell. 

And for those of you not afflicted with the myopia that is being from Massachusetts- 

Yeah. it's true. I cannot be the one to make an episode about the Kennedy family.

I have found in my own family's archives a Christmas card that has the Pope on one side and JFK on the other. 

Camelot aside, I'm pretty sure if you wanted to find a Smithsonian something in whatever state you're listening to this episode, you sure can. 

You sure can. The Smithsonian is in every state in the nation via its, quote-unquote, affiliates, many of those states several times over.

It is also in Puerto Rico and Panama. And we are not just talking about museums. It is also a research institution, an educational institution, and Nick, it is the biggest one. 

The biggest one what? 

The biggest museum, research, and education complex in the world. 

Now, I feel this is a good time to remind our listeners that we are Civics 101, and in trying to address something that is the biggest in the world, we really are gonna have to stick to the 101.

Are you reminding our listeners, or are you reminding someone else? 

I think that question says more about you than it does about me, Hannah. 

All right. 101 it is. So to take us through it, let's meet Richard. 

so I'm, Richard Kurin. I'm the distinguished scholar and ambassador-at-large at the Smithsonian.

We should just go ahead and get this out there right now. We really like Richard. 

Yeah. We really do. I walked out of that interview and I was like, "Oh, no, Nick, did I just get dazzled?" And then I was like, never mind, I don't care." 

Which is important to note, because nothing that big can be without issues.

Nothing that big that is also about the preservation of natural and cultural history and science and the storytelling thereof. yeah, you better bet that the Smithsonian has 170-plus years of controversy, and I will talk about that a bit, and I encourage you to follow your own rabbit holes, but as promised, I am sticking to the 101 with a person who very much believes in this institution.

I've worked at the Smithso- I started working at the Smithsonian in 1976 for the bicentennial of the United States. Now we're heading to the 250th. So I've had almost 50 years at the Smithsonian. I've been the undersecretary of the Smithsonian, I've run several of the museums, I've run various programs, and now I do a lot of special projects and a lot of my own research.

I have a bunch of books to write. that's what I do. 

Richard is also an author many times over, including a book about the Hope Diamond, which was particularly delightful to us that afternoon, as the night before, Hannah had fallen down the tunnels of Hope Diamond lore after watching Titanic. 

That was the same night that I learned the best floating position for conserving body heat when waiting for rescue in the water.

You can just email me if you wanna talk about that. But yeah, Richard has studied and written about many objects that tell the history of the United States and the world, and objects are certainly in the Smithsonian's wheelhouse. 

And real quick, the Smithsonian is what? I know it's, museums and research, education, but what is it?

which museums, which research institutions, et cetera? 

Okay. The there are 21 of them, including the National Museums of Natural History, Asian Art, Air and Space, African American History and Culture, many more, and the National Zoo. 

A lot of people don't realize, wait, the Smithsonian has a zoo.

We operate the National Zoo. how did that happen? the zoo happened because we had this taxidermist in the 1870s and 1880s who had to figure out how to stuff buffalo skins, and he'd never seen a buffalo. He was a guy from the East. He'd never seen a live buffalo. He goes out West, he finds that the buffalo are being decimated.

There's very few buffalo. He goes out again later, ends up bringing buffalo back to the National Mall of the United States, and that starts the Division of Living Animals, or the National Zoo. And people want more animals, and over the years, we start getting involved, he was at the beginning, but others following him, in the conservation of species.

So the irony that you start off with a taxidermist figuring out how to stuff dead skin, and the institution, well over 100 years later and more, still going, interested in the conservation of species around the planet, and that's one of the things the Smithsonian does. 

You know what I find poetic about this story?

A lot of people ask, why do we have zoos in the first place, right? And a big part of the answer is, people mess things up. 

And not just zoos. Why do we have institutions to preserve things? because we destroy things. even with the buffalo, we weren't just killing the buffalo. We were doing it in part to starve indigenous people in America.

Also, a note on the taxidermist who helped to establish the National Zoo. He went on to be the director of the Bronx Zoo, where he unapologetically exhibited a human, a Congolese man, and you can learn more about that story in our episode on why we have a national zoo. All right. So there are 21 museums.

There's the zoo, several environmental research centers, an astrophysical observatory, archives, research programs, cultural institutions, educational initiatives. the Smithsonian is just so many things. 

so many things takes a lot of money and a lot of people, McCarthy, so let's get that part out of the way.

Okay, great. you think that's a simple question. There's been lawsuits about that. So there's actually a statute that founds the Smithsonian. Now, where is the Smithsonian Kind of in the federal government, the, there's something called the Board of Regents that was formed, and the Board of Regents, to some minds, violates the Constitution of the United States.

So who's on the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian, which is our governing body, the fiduciary body where the authority is established? the ex officio members are the Vice President of the United States, the Chief Justice of the United States, three senators, three representatives, and nine citizens.

So you have nine citizens and eight from the government, and the government people represent all three branches, which probably violates the Constitution. 

All right, so Richard told us twice that the way the Smithsonian is run probably violates the Constitution. 

Which is not something that people volunteer all too often when it comes to their own organizations.

just think about it. you have all three branches of government represented, so just on the face it seems like there's an issue, right? I'm not a legal scholar on that. 

A separation of powers issue. 

Which has not, by the way, gone unnoticed over the years. 

The Smithsonian doesn't... it's like its own th- It's c- technically called a public trust establishment, and, th- there's been all sorts of things.

there was a point back in the early, 1900s, Taft, who had been president, then became head of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice. He was the chancellor of the Smithsonian. And Taft, they asked Taft, "What's the, what the heck is the Smithsonian?" And he thought it was a public foundation.

That was his kind of interpretation. Now, we go back and forth. If you look at laws where, for example, oftentimes with federal laws, they'll say, "This applies to the Smithsonian." But other times they'll say, "This law does not apply to the Smithsonian because of its particular characteristic." And there's been a lot of court cases over the nature of the Smithsonian and what kind of agency it is and what kind of power it has.

Jenny, let's start with the big picture. Walk us through the letter the administration sent to the secretary of the Smithsonian and what the goal is here. 

I, It was a pretty sweeping letter that came suddenly, and yet it's really just the latest sort of salvo in, President, Trump's campaign to exert more control at the muse- at the Smithsonian.

So as some background, back in late March, he issued an executive, ex- an executive order called Re- Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, and it covered a number of things. But the m- the sort of big headline there was that he h- was accusing Smithsonian of promoting, sort of derogatory views of America at its museums, and it ordered JD Vance, who is a member of the Smithsonian's governing board, to use his influence to, reshape the institution.

So what happened last week was that, three officials of the White Hou- from the White House, three political appointees, sent a quite sweeping letter to Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian, announcing a very broad review of the entire Smithsonian, starting with eight museums. and basically, they really asked for everything.

they... Within 30 days, the Smithsonian has to release, or provide all plans a- and drafts and outlines for all of its exhibits relating to the 250th anniversary of American independence next summer, details of all of its current exhibition content, details of all, traveling and upcoming exhibitions for the next three years, audience surveys, job descriptions, organizational charts- basic- educational materials, basically everything. And there's 100- So Jenny, that's 

the, that's the text of the letter. What's the subtext? What's the subtext in your educated reading here? 

the subtext here is that the White House is turning up the pressure on the Smithsonian, which sees itself as independent and has operated independently of the executive, to conform to President Trump's ideas of how American history should be discussed, taught, described, debated.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, you were previously director, of a research center and an archive, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem in New York. what do you hear when you hear that administration officials want to enter these exhibits at the Smithsonian and, quote, "remove partisan narratives"?

What does that say to you? 

it is a consistent, pattern for the Trump administration, to control, all aspects of how American history is taught, read, discussed, diplomatically across the world. There have been changes, in how US history is communicated, to people in foreign embassies, et cetera.

So the broad strokes here are that the Trump administration want to ensure that their authoritarian grasp for power in the United States is less likely to be challenged by everyday citizens who can connect the dots between an American past where forms of, g- of government control over populations, and pr- most particularly the African American population that experience, what we call Jim Crow and formal disenfranchisement, and, some scholars would compare to a form of American homegrown fascism.

so these are, consistent patterns where, the Trump administration wants American history to underwrite or to support a form of, quote, "patriotic education," that will miseducate the population to believe that his approach to governance is the only way forward for this country. 

Jenny, what reactions have you heard from historians, curators, about the review that we're talking about?

I think mostly quite negative and pretty much in line with what we just heard from Professor Mohammed. the American Organization of American Historians very quickly issued a statement criticizing this. The American Historical Association, which is the largest, organization of professional historians in the country itself, issued a statement.

It was joined by 25 other groups. And here I think there are two things going on. I think there's tremendous wariness of the substance of what President Trump and his administration wants, but also people see a very broad attack on authority and expertise. The, the argument is that regardless of what changes the Trump administration wants here, it is simply not their place or that of any other, president or administration to demand changes at a museum which is run by professional curators, archivists, leaders, and, reflects the sort of cumulative judgment, arrived at through a lot of debate and discussion over decades of professionals who are trained.

Let's take a moment for this message that we got from one of you. 

People who want to own public memory quite literally want to own it. This is about ownership. This is about owning what is going to be the official story, not just of our nation, but the official story that you have to accept to participate in our nation state.

So when you hear someone like Secretary, Heg- Hegseth say, this erodes legacy, the question is whose legacy? This has always been the debate when it comes to history. There is not a history, there's not a singular history. There are different histories, and this is a battle about whose history is going to be dominant, is going to be central.

the Smithsonian review is the latest in a series of attempts to change references to history. In February, 1A covered Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's decision to rename Fort Liberty Base in North Carolina, giving it back its previous name, Fort Bragg, a name that originally honored a Confederate general.

Tressie McMillan Cottom spoke to us at the time. She's a sociologist and a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She's also an opinion columnist for The New York Times 

With the recent firing of the head of the Labor Statistics Board, as well as Trump appointing himself as the head of the Kennedy Center, and now the ordering of a review of a, quote-unquote, "independent museum" since the 1840s, I think it's the far more critical question to ask ourselves why aren't stopgaps in place to keep these institutions and reporting boards actually independent from this sort of takeover?

And why aren't we more concerned about this administration's actions, and what tangible repercussions are there going to be? 

Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad of Princeton, what's your reaction to what you just heard there? 

Tressie is correct in that, historians, debate the facts of the past, and that is to say that, museums, like classrooms, like scholarship, are defined by the weight that historians use to measure, movements in history, the impact of, political culture, everything from, Abraham Lincoln's decision to deploy habeas corpus in the time of the Civil War.

i-i- history is not static in this sense, so what, a politician might perceive to be, revisionist, meaning making things up i-in the way that they are criticizing, what they call, woke or divisive, or race-based, teaching, are really, reflections of the changes in, how the historical profession understands the role of previously oppressed and excluded populations of, for example, indigenous populations.

There's more Native American history taught today. It's not made up. It is the work of historians in archives, to discover facts that were often erased or ignored, or simply destroyed. And, what Trump is trying to do is trying to push us back to a time, say, in the 1950s and before, when American history, like one of your callers described, was genuinely whitewashed.

It was about great white men as movers and shakers of history. So today, we have many narratives. We have a much more diverse, narrative about the American past, but for professionals at the Smithsonian and across our universities and in our classrooms, they rely on facts as the basis of those interpretations.

we're hearing from lots and lots of you about this story. David in Minnesota emails to say, "Trump's call to align the Smithsonian with his American values is a blatant Soviet-style effort to impose propaganda instead of history on the institution. It's a standard dictator playbook tactic."

And we got this from Jay in Virginia, who says, "Trump's exerting control over Smithsonian exhibits in addition to controlling the Kennedy Center and attempting to control universities is just another authoritarian move, this time in the cultural area. This is what authoritarians and tyrants do." As in 1984.

And we got this from Barbara, who says, "The Smithsonian is the jewel in the crown in Washington, DC. So many museums across the country have had to raise their admission fees to meet budgetary needs. The Smithsonian museums are still free. The professional staff and curators should be allowed to continue their best work.

Hands off," says Barbara.

Ben, at the end of last year, you and I had a conversation, I think just as Trump had been elected, in which we tried to have a bit of a think about what might happen in relation to culture, and it was very unclear, and we had the evidence of the first term, which was not very much.

And this time around we have a very clear picture, and it's very dark, isn't it? 

Yes. I was thinking back to that conversation and remembering foolishly saying that I think art is under the radar and we'll be fine which was, in hindsight, very much wishful thinking. yeah, from day one, Trump has come out swinging.

we saw it in an executive order that he signed literally on his first day in office, undoing about 78- Executive orders and memoranda issued by Joe Biden, one of which was to reestablish the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. So already on day one, he was taking out this body that advises the president on cultural policy, that Biden had reestablished after it was dissolved in Trump's first term when everybody resigned in protest.

So I guess that kind of set the tone for what was to come. But since then, obviously, it's just been a sort of full-frontal assault on most, not all, I would say conspicuously escaping the worst of things has been the National Endowment for the Arts thus far, although they've also bent to Trump's will.

But certainly, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which are the two other big funnels for federal arts funding in the US, have definitely taken just massive hits. He's basically trying to eliminate both of them. The Smithsonian has been targeted in an executive order, so its 21 museums and the National Zoo are on notice about, what he sees as like dangerous ideology.

In other words, essentially grappling with the horror of American history. and the National Gallery of Art also, which gets something like eighty percent of its funding from the federal government, has also toed the line and has peeled back its diversity efforts and has made a big show of touting its 250th anniversary programming, which is one of the big focuses of Trump's efforts it seems.

Indeed it is. Let's go back to the detail. One of the things that is very hard to do as journalists in this, and this is a deliberate strategy, we know this from the first term, and we know how it's described. It is called flooding the zone with shit. Okay? That is how Steve Bannon termed it, and they're doing it again, but they're doing it with hard policy this time, not just information and all that kind of stuff.

So what we're having is regular announcements from all sorts of government departments and executive orders and so on, and it is difficult, frankly, to keep up with it. But we are trying, and we are going to try through this conversation. But let's pick up on the most important thing. So let's begin with the museums and library service because this is, as you say, it's one of those kind of key government-funded institutions, and the level of interference there is massive.

As you say, it's basically, on the one hand, it's getting rid of it, but it's also installing at its helm people who are going to do Trump's bidding, right? 

Yeah, absolutely. this was definitely, as far as I'm concerned, the most direct attack he's made thus far. certainly his attack on the Smithsonian was quite startling, but it's not an attempt to shut it down.

Yeah, so the Institute of Museum and Library Services on March 14th, so you know, about six weeks- After coming into office, Trump signs this executive order which deemed IMLS and about six or seven other federal agencies, quote-unquote, "unnecessary," and essentially moved to eliminate them to the fullest extent of the law permissible.

There's obviously disagreement on that, and there are lawsuits that have been filed because these are congressionally mandated and funded agencies. And so to what extent Trump has any authority to try to pare back what they do or cancel their grants or shut them down would appear to be none, but certainly he's testing that appearance to the best of his ability, and he's stacked the courts in his favor, so there's Some reason to believe that he will be allowed to proceed.

But yeah, effectively, he has sought to eliminate the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which has, I think, just under three hundred million dollars in funding last year. All that funding is, approved by Congress and determined by Congress, and it funds museums and libraries in literally every state and every US territory.

it's just this huge funnel that kind of filters down through state-specific agencies and reaches basically every community in the United States. And so the loss of that would just be enormous, but that doesn't seem to be dissuading anyone on the inside and- 

No, absolutely. And crucially, the board of the service tried to tell Trump he could not do this, and the person he had installed at the top of the organization, who's called Keith Sunderling, he sacked the board immediately when they told him that.

In other words, he's put this person in charge, who's just wiping the floor with the whole thing. 

Yeah, exactly. basically less than a week after making quite clear in this executive order that he wanted to eliminate IMLS completely, he appoints Keith Sunderling, as you said, who had been made a deputy secretary in the Department of Labor just a couple of days before.

So very new to government and Washington and these types of agencies, but basically puts him in charge of IMLS with a mandate to do away with it. And a few days later, like you said, the, the board of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which is the advisory committee that sort of governs what it does, told him in a publicly released letter that they can't actually do what you've been mandated to do without violating congressional intent and federal statute.

And then about ten days later, Sunderling fired all the members of that board. So there's a pretty flagrant and consistent disregard for, what would appear to be the rule of law.

 

And he is quoted as saying that he wants to restore the institute's focus on patriotism, which is a curious thing because it's working with all these libraries and it's-- how on earth he can try to do that across multiple libraries, the entire service and museums and so on.

It's a complicated organization in so many different ways. How exactly he would go about doing this, of course, that we have no details on. 

Yeah. and it seems like a fairly disingenuous statement to make, given that you're saying that you want to restore it on the one hand, and then you're also laying off pretty much the entire staff.

I mean- Yeah ... IMLS had about seventy staff, full-time staff at the beginning of the year, and I think they're down to twelve now. And those folks, a lot of them were on administrative leave and have been brought back, but it seems like it's just for the sake of winding down the operation. 

Khalil, if the administration changes exhibits at museums, for example, the National Museum of American History and Culture, just down the street from the White House incidentally, or if, federally employed curators feel they need to consider politics before they finish a historical exhibit that the public will see, what does that mean for Ameri- for the public's understanding of history?

I don't know, ta- five floors of the African American Museum, according to my memory, take us through a one-minute tour of that museum and what it would mean if curators there had to switch it up on orders of the White House. 

first it'd be impossible. let's be really crystal clear. there is no way to empty that, wonderful, rich, encyclopedic museum of 400 years of history in a way that would meet the test of what Donald Trump and the administration are insisting.

You simply cannot tell a patriotic story without understanding that there was slavery in the United States, nearly 250 years, longer than, there has been freedom in this country. That history of slavery was followed by 100 years of formal segregation, a segregation history that also inspired Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

And although conservatives prior to Donald Trump have often used that 350 years up until 1965 as a kind of a story of America's past that has now heroically been overcome by great Americans, which of course denies that most white Americans were not in favor of the civil rights movement. Most legislators around the country fought against that change.

And as quickly as the late 1960s and early 1970s, we saw a rollback in some of the freedoms that Black people had gained. That is what the museum tells, and you'd simply have to close the museum for all intents and purposes. You- There's just n- There's... it would be impossible to do. 

Close it? 

Yeah, you'd have to close it.

I don't... It just-- There is no way, there's just no way to do it. It-- I, I'm not exaggerating. so I don't know how they actually plan to pull this off. I don't think they can. 

Given the imperatives, of the job, what a curator does, what a museum executive does, and their role in history, if you're told by a politician, or given a review of your exhibits and told what's in, what's out, do you expect resignations?

absolutely. but let's re- be really clear here. th- I just need to say this ex- as, as explicitly as possible. Donald Trump and the Republican Party imagine themselves as the, caretakers of freedom. This is a party, for all of its history, since the 1860s, that has celebrated a kind of American freedom where individuals have rights, where government is limited.

Remember, Ronald Reagan, who up until Donald Trump had been a kind of archetype of the great American president, famously said that government was the problem, and we should, to shrink it as much as possible. We have just the opposite happening now. We have a government under Donald Trump that wants to make every single decision about what is factual, what is truth, what is history, what is art, what is culture, wh- who can be the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party in a Democratic primary race in New York City.

there is no limit to the control of this organization. They are controlling law firms. They are controlling higher education curriculum. This is what dictatorship looks like. It is, by any standard, anti-American, by the standards of the very Republican Party that has prided itself on carrying the banner of freedom for all of its history.

We got this message from Ian, who emails to say, "I don't agree with others' assessment of Trump as ignorant or uneducated. I feel his move to whitewash history is an aware move that if you steer the narrative of history of the nation, then you can control its future." Jenny Schuessler of The New York Times, we talked a little bit earlier about the reaction from the historical community, roundly negative, you said.

what have you heard from individual curators, people inside the Smithsonian Institution, about what they might do next? Are there any plans developing here? 

I should say, without going into too much detail about sources, I have not been able to speak in any, great detail with curators inside the Smithsonian.

they institutionally, and I think even behind the scenes, have been saying as little as possible. I imagine it appears, excuse me, in keeping with the statement you read earlier, that they are trying to figure out how do we respond to this right house, this White House request in a way that we must, but also how do we protect our independence?

How do we defend the integrity of our exhibits? And I, I would say to me, without going too far into speculation, it does seem as though what this, is intended to do, or at least maybe more what it is doing, is really throwing the institution back on its heels. it's impossible to imagine they will close museums.

It's imp- it's very hard to imagine they will shutter entire exhibits within those museums. But at this very open-ended inquiry, which basically says, "We wanna look at absolutely everything you're doing, and if we decide we object to things, you have 120 days to either remove them or cover them up," that makes it really hard for the Smithsonian to function.

It makes them very har- it very hard to open new exhibits. It makes it very hard to announce any of its plans for the 250th. So I think there's just tremendous uncertainty as to how much of this is, a shot across the bow, which is political, versus how much of it is, reflects an actual intent to remove things.

Now, I'm gonna read back to you a message I sent to you on Slack on our internal communication system, at The Art Newspaper, because I noted when I spoke to Karen Lemmey last year at the Smithsonian American Art Museum about their show, The Shape of Power, that there was certain language in it that felt, to me, incredibly progressive and moving in a very particular direction in that catalog.

And I'll read back to you. It basically said, in one of the lines of the catalog, this is from the introduction by Karen Lemmey, Tobias Wofford, and Grace Yasumura, "Race creates an architecture of social relations in the United States that produces, for example, anti-Black violence, indigenous genocide, redlined neighborhoods, and whiteness as property rights.

That is, the way the US legal system has created and protected the property interests of those considered white." It went on to talk about the way that a particular work by Henry Kirk Brown was a racist, romanticized view which cast native peoples as inferior to European settlers and trapped them in a timeless past.

It was really striking that it was that show that was in this executive order, and to read about a museum and a particular exhibition in an executive order was really quite shocking to me 

Yeah. I th- I think one of the many things that was so striking about the executive order that Trump signed on the 27th of March targeting the Smithsonian was just how precision targeted it was.

It wasn't this kind of blanket statement about, museums should kowtow to a patriotic line of historical narrative. it was really looking very specifically at that exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Shape of Power, taking issue with an initiative under the auspices of the Smithsonian's Women's History Museum, which is one of the sort of two or three forthcoming Smithsonian institutions, taking issue with the inclusion of a trans athlete in a display, and then the narrative of American history told at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is obviously the most recent addition to the Smithsonian Museum kind of complex, and which was actually inaugurated by Obama, and whose founding director was Lonnie Bunch, who is now the secretary, the head of the Smithsonian.

Yeah, I think it's not totally unexpected that the Trump administration would want to bring the Smithsonian to heel and have it push and amplify this glorifying and very narrow-minded and exceptionalist account of American history. But I think it was pretty shocking to see just like the level of detail into which it went critiquing what was happening.

there was almost a kind of weird, I won't say flattery exactly, but the fact that they took, the care to actually examine specific exhibitions and take issue with certain wall text is wild. 

Yeah, it is. But it's striking, and I think this is a way of summarizing what we've just been saying, all these details that you've just given, is that there is an authoritarian push to control museums, libraries, and so on.

It is directly from what was called Project 25, which throughout the election campaign Trump denied knowledge of, said he hadn't even read it, and so on. Yeah. But which everybody on the other side was saying, "This is the blueprint for what he's gonna do, and it's scary." And it's being borne out. And, David Remnick in The New Yorker wrote an opinion piece in which he referred to the fact that, it was telegraphed in Project 25, this stuff.

We shouldn't be surprised. But it makes it no less shocking that it's actually happening. 

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that piece was really quite smart in drawing the parallels to Soviet Russia and what's been happening in Russia under Putin and what's been happening in China under Xi Jinping.

there is, a lot of alarm bells going off. 

Absolutely. And it does seem very clear, and I noted that some of the terminology relates to Modi's India and about rewriting history. They are accusing the people who they see as elites of rewriting history, and now it's very clear that is exactly what they want to do.

Yes, absolutely. I feel this is maybe slightly off topic, but I think the thing that has been most impressed upon me these last, God, not even three months, is just to what extent every time the Trump camp accuses someone of doing something, it's because they themselves are doing that thing.

And I think there's no clearer case of that than this attempt to reshape what the Smithsonian is doing and in accusing it of, a divisive race-centered ideology. that's a kind of like absurdist Orwellian example of the teapot calling the kettle black. 

Yeah. It-- in psychoanalytic terms, it's projection, right?

They're accusing everybody else of doing exactly what they- Exactly ... have been doing over these past few weeks.

Next, section B: Historians Push Back. 

What Trump posted on Tuesday, Professor Brinkley, about the Smithsonian specifically was this: "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." End quote. Do you agree with that critique to any degree, that the emphasis in the historical exhibitions at the Smithsonian museums tends to focus too much on the negative, on who got oppressed by whom as part of the American story, real as they may be, and downplays the successes of American democracy and American cultural advancement, and advancement of human rights over time, things like that?

No, I think it's a completely false, narrative being spewed by the president. The truth of the matter is, they're all aspects of American empowerment, including Black American empowerment, are covered at the Smithsonian. you could go see Chuck Berry's red Cadillac or the prayer hymnal book of Harriet Tubman, or the great paintings of, many, Black artists like Romare Bearden.

And, it's rich as can be, and it's, it seems to be connected to this Confederate monument. Mitch Landrieu in New Orleans took down a Robert E. Lee statue, some years back. He was on his way out as mayor, and that started triggering this idea of the de-Confederizing of the country, and that's, it started triggering a cultural war, and it exploded at the Char- Charlottesville, which Trump tried to say, there are good people on both sides of the equation.

And now in his second term, he's being very ardent. He wants to scrub 

progressivism, anything that's considered DEI at a university. He wants to, attack the idea that, this isn't a country built by white Heroes. And hence, President Trump wants to build a heroes garden in the Black Hills of South Dakota, putting statues up of people that he admires, including Davy Crockett and, William F.

Buckley and, Milton Friedman, and it's a kind of a, a random list of people, some highly deserving of it, by the way, of such a thing. But, this is where he's playing it. He wants to... He sees that getting control of the universities, busting up the media, and going after the way people are taught history, i- we always have to remember when we deal with the idea of a red and blue America, red America's the South.

It's the Confederate South. just look at a map and you will see. And this is like the old Charlie Daniels song, The South's Gonna Do It Again. but we're not- it wasn't a lost cause in the South. Trump's, saying that your Confederate ancestors were heroes, this is part of what he's trying to do to, minimize that slavery was the main cause of the Civil War.

Instead, there's some- there, there's an... There's something coming out of the right that slavery was not that big a deal, only a couple percentage points of Southerners actually had slaves. So it's trying to even rewrite the Civil War right now. why? What do you think Trump wants from this kind of revisionism?

Is it to clear the name of his own father, who had racial discrimination cases against him as a landlord, as did Trump himself at one point? Or to deepen the political support of those white Americans who think they're the discriminated against ones in this country today? Or just out of personal racial animus, if you wanna get in his head?

Why do all this? all that you mentioned are components, I believe. I think though, in the end he feels it's a winning ticket that he has to keep his MAGA base together. He's a president operating at, on a good day at 40% approval. In order to stay at 40 and not drop down to 35, he has to continue to show that he's a cultural warrior, that he's not ready to say that the United States is a majority, non-white, non-Caucasian nation.

And hence he's attacking, issues that nobody else in politics, except, fringe person like David Duke, you know, would've suggested, and he has the entire Republican Party going along with it. The Republicans are the party of Abraham Lincoln. they're the party of Theodore Roosevelt, of Ronald Reagan.

they'd all be turning over in their graves if to realize that Trump as America is turning 250 years old on this coming July 4th, is trying to divide us instead of unite us.

and in that sense of division, he feels strength. He feels that as long as he keeps things chaotic, he's controlling the narrative, he can, push buttons.

a lot of this will come back. Trump won't be here forever, and the Smithsonian will come back and put it... whatever displays are taken down, they'll be put back up probably. statues that get re-put up can be retaken down. It's just not very helpful for America in the 21st century to be wallowing in this sort of, g- it, it, look at how can we bring America back to a segregationist era, And how do we, stop teaching Black history or the s- the true story of indigenous people, or the expansion of women's history that's been going on the last decade. So he wants to, riptide all that back to really a, call it 1950s America on a, or even further back than that.

the report not only criticizes specific exhibits that are there and sp- and things that aren't there, they actually threaten budget cuts.

62% of the Smithsonian's annual budget, a billion dollars for all the Smithsonian museums, comes from funds appropriated by Congress. Trump proposed cutting the Smithsonian budget by 12% this fiscal year. Doesn't really seem up to what the critique here, but Congress has maintained the same level of funding this year.

The July 4th report cites how the president's executive order instructed JD Vance, who is ex officio, an official of the Board of s- Regents of the Smithsonian. JD Vance is supposed to work with the Office of Management and Budget to, quote, "prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy," close quote.

Now, that policy, of course, is opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion. So presumably they would like to cut the funding for all exhibits that refer to immigrants, for example. I wonder, is it even possible to tell the story of American history today without diversity? 

the answer is no. It's really not, and the standard for what they're talking about is not did something happen and is it true, which ought to be our basic standard for history, but, as I said, is a kind of purified top-down story of only the good stuff, as you might think of it.

And what's happening at the Smithsonian is something that is also happening at many other major cultural institutions. The National Park Service for the last year or so has had to hang signs that are s- really to that same effect of what you're saying the signs say. if you see anything that unduly disparages, a great American of the past, you know, report this to your federal government.

so they've been under huge pressure, both financially and in terms of control over, what's on display and what employees and guides can say. the National Endowment for the Humanities, any number of these institutions, and unfortunately, I think they've been quite effective at, breaking Bringing caution into these institutions, really making people run scared, which of course is the goal.

Now, I'm an optimist about the telling of history, which is that once people know this history, and we've documented all of this history that is being, shoved to the side here, it's not that easy actually, to get rid of history or tell people that things that they know to be true aren't true. but I do think that these federal institutions are in an incredibly hard spot, and to some degree, they do have a different set of both civic and legal obligations than a lot of privately run institutions do.

the defense of the Smithsonian's History Museum is led by Lonnie Bunch. He was the founding director of the Smithsonian's Museum a- of African American History, and he became the first historian and the first African American to be appointed to lead the entire Smithsonian, all 21 museums, in its 173-year history.

There's an amazing anecdote he reports in a memoir he published in 2019. When, Trump became president in January 2017, Lonnie Bunch gave him a tour of the African American History Museum, and he reports that he showed Trump an exhibit of the history of slavery in the United States, and they passed an exhibit on the Dutch role in the slave trade.

And Trump commented, they love me in the Netherlands," close quote. And that was his only comment. it's just so pure Trump, but still it's amazing. 

If we could only have a museum that would tell the entire American story leading up to the election of Donald Trump as the end of history, the coming together of all things, our great leader, having arrived.

that's really what the American people want, isn't it? 

It is, as you've suggested, it's a familiar view of the American past, the great white men and their his- heroic, achievements. It's the way American history was taught when Trump himself was in high school. no civil rights movement, no feminist movement, no gay liberation movement, no Mexicans, no Muslims.

It's the America Trump recalls when he says, "Make America great again." you might wonder, why does he care so much about history? We worry that no one is majoring in history anymore. the courses are being, shut down, and the TAs are being fired. But you can see why it's so important to him to take back control of how we understand American history.

It's the America that he wants to make great again. Last time we talked, you said history is hard to suppress, and you brought that up again a couple of minutes ago. Wonder if you'd explain that a little bit more. 

I think we've had decades and decades of expanding ideas about American history, expanding the study of American history, and that exists.

So unless we're going to engage, which I wouldn't put it past us, but in, in mass book burning- ... and jailing of history professors, I think that this, these stories are out there, the research is there, and if the federal government isn't gonna be in a position to take up those stories, other people will.

I do think that there is real value in continuing to study some of the touchstones, the most important figures of the American past, the figures that have been gone over again and again. So I am not one for, not looking at George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Davy Crockett and Abraham Lincoln, and I believe in that kind of history.

I'm a political historian. I think it's important. But it should not be studied to the exclusion of studying the worlds in which these men existed, the other people who played really important roles, in creating American politics and society and institutions. And I think we've gotten a little locked in this country to, an either/or division that is both methodological, who do you study, how much power do they have, do you do history from the top down and bottom up?

And then is also ideological in the sense of this great debate that is underway, about how you ought to tell history. It is true that, if anyone thought that history didn't matter, the Trump administration thinks that the study of history, how we teach it, how we learn it, how we narrate it, they believe it really matters.

So I guess that's a vote of confidence for the history profession maybe. 

The way I would answer is that there was more of an American triumphalism, an American exceptionalism, presented. And let's just pick the 1950s, meaning we just won World War II and the country was in a, in a, a consumer, boom. but it was still a period where African Americans could not vote.

There was housing discrimination. Women were, considered to be consigned to the home or a few secretarial nursing jobs. Native American history hadn't been really examined to the point where somebody like, Andrew Jackson, who's still on our $20 bill and still has Jackson, Mississippi, named after him, and Jacksonville, Florida, and we all honor Andrew Jackson, but we hadn't really had the dialogue about the Trail of Tears and the, the, Cherokee removal and the, the, the, the essentially a genocide of people.

you... And it does come out, as the last caller said, you do have to talk about it. So we are, at least at our institutions like Smithsonian, better informed of real American history now, better than ever before. If you're talking about fantasy history or a kind of a, y- you, a nostalgia for, when of manifest destiny that God wants us to do whatever we do, even foreign wars, then things have shifted, and that shift really occurred not at the Smithsonian.

It occurred in the 1960s and '70s when there started becoming a deeper look at how to examine American history, where people would start taking Black studies, or you could take classes on US labor history. it opened the net up. And even as recently as Barack Obama's presidency, Obama signed, executive orders creating national monuments like Stonewall in New York for LGBTQ people, like Charles Young for the Buffalo Soldiers, a monument in Ohio, Harriet Tubman sites.

he created, Obama, the Cesar Chavez National Monument in California for the United Farm Workers. He was opening up the net, President Obama, of a, a, of not taking away from James Madison or Thomas Jefferson, but adding to the stories, of America by, telling a larger, story that wasn't- Yeah

just about white America. So what you're really saying is history is communicated differently now at many colleges and museums because a shift needed to take place, that a revision needed to take place toward a more full, more objective story rather than a cheerleading project of American history, if I should call it that, because it was too cheerlead-y and buried the dark sides too much in earlier generations.

Is that kinda what you're saying? Yep. Yes, and if you're talking about right after World War II, women weren't going to universities like they are now. They weren't even allowed in. a man I've written about named Colonel Earl Rudder, a hero of the US Army Rangers at Normandy at Pointe du Hoc, Earl Rudder's Rangers, he had to come into Texas A&M and help start breaking it open so women could come in after the war.

in the '50s, we had McCarthyism, which tried to do what Trump's doing, is trying to say, you were once a, a, a, a writer who sympathized with, you know, Lenin," or y- "You were somebody who, was for Eugene Debs for president in the 1920s," and tried to blacklist them. The blacklist was another attempt at shutting people up, of controlling, our very diverse and rich history and the way we express things in the arts.

So the difference is in the '50s, McCarthyism ne- while it got, it became a Red Scare, McCarthy was a, in the end, seen as a rogue senator from Wisconsin. his power was limited. With President Trump, he has really unlimited executive power for at least the next few years to try to do an assault on the Smithsonian Institute and redefine public education and public history at a time when our schools don't have the budgets that they need.

Our teachers don't have the budgets, and there's, in a, in, the, most students know nothing about any history, let alone trying to break down institutions that are doing a great job right now, like the Smithsonian is- Yeah ... at all of its, if, as it, at all of its, facilities. 

To pull the lens back to a global and historical view for you Is the way Trump is using government power to influence the narrative about his government and the history, maybe the history of his favorite constituents, is that consistent with authoritarian governments around the world over time?

what word would you use? Yes, it's authoritarianism run amok, and it's going right at the jugular of our national heritage. 

It is an attempt to rewrite history, to do away with truths and replace it with a, a kind of fake narrative, one that, that, may have existed in a past, and I've noticed the Trump administration liking to talk about William McKinley's tariffs and, the manifest destiny of James K.

Polk or, the, the story of Andrew Jackson. But they limit the history. professional historians know what they're doing. They're working very hard to understand all aspects of the American 

project. And the good news is we are the exemplary country. It is astounding how we've overcome adversity.

It, just how important it is that we are the, the Ellis Island or the Port of Houston of the world, a place people wanna come. and so nobody i- at the Smithsonian's trying to ever put down the United States. It's trying to talk and explain what happened. If it's about the s- American Revolution, they might talk about Molly, Molly Pitcher, who gets written out of the narrative back then.

If it's about, a modern era, they'll explain how Julia Childs worked as a spy while she was the great cook. ... you could just go on and on with fun, interesting things that have happened, and it's not broken. It's the opposite. Smithsonian's soaring, having its greatest time ever, and President Trump just is coming in with a, a wrecking ball attitude, which is just an extension of his political views, and he's, in a revenge tour he has against people that he perceives as being liberal and not 100% Trump, and that's authoritarianism.

I'll rewrite the history to match Trump history, just like you mentioned, he wants the Trump name ahead of the Kennedy Center. So to end on what you just said about taking a wrecking ball, when Trump talks about the Smithsonian in particular, he's talking about an institution that the federal government mostly supports financially and is part of a kind of basic tourist experience in the nation's capital.

But then he also posted this last week addressing every museum in America, most of them private institutions, as Quote, "I have instructed my attorneys to go through the museums and start the exact same process that has been done with colleges and universities." unquote. So what do you think he's talking about there?

'Cause I think a, a shudder went through the leaders and the patrons of museums all over the country. Do many history museums around the country get federal funding? Does he have power there? It will vary. There are some that get federal funding. he will probably try to talk to governors, in red states or people he's friendly with to change some of the way history's being explained.

Often the museums are in urban centers, history centers, around the country. and in, yet in those cities may be blue, but the state is red. but it's not a Republican history he's trying to do. I don't... I think it's a really, he wants to go back to when white Americans were largely defined, who was white America were, and he doesn't go so far back.

He will include Italians or Irish, but he, a- and Jewish Americans. But it's a, he particularly is trying to undo Black studies, Black history. He, it comes out of his, the Trump feeling that the Black Lives Matter movement went so far in one direction that I'll take it far in another direction and try to do away with all of that.

And his battle with women that he always has, that, after his first term, the largest march in American history was Women's March on Washington, DC against Trump, so he sees women and gender, women at the workplace as problematic. and this is a president who's mired in Jeffrey Epstein problems right now, and he's screwing around with going and telling museums what they should be displaying and what they're not.

Some of this is smoke and mirrors. Some of it is to grab headlines, to deflect. What is he really gonna be able to do at these museums? Cut some funding, make people feel some pain. But I'll promise you this, Trump administration will be toast, and you will have Harvard University and Columbia University and University of Virginia.

he will be toast, and there will be a Smithsonian Institute explaining real history because most Americans want things straight.

Now section C: Libraries Under Siege. 

we've heard this before. The Gablers had become what Texas Monthly called, quote, "An integral institution of the new right," end quote, a Reaganite contingent of free market loving fundamentalists like Baptist minister Jerry Falwell's Christian Right Moral Majority Party and Eagle Forum, a right-wing lobbying group founded in 1972 by Phyllis Schlafly.

Schlafly, of course, was the brains behind the movement to stop the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have expanded legal rights for women across the nation. By 1982, the ERA was officially dead, and Schlafly moved on to book banning as her next crusade. The same year, Eagle Forum in St. David, Arizona successfully banned required reading lists in their school system, which included classics by Joseph Conrad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Homer, Edgar Allan Poe, John Steinbeck, and Mark Twain.

Similar bans were happening in New York State targeting authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Eldridge Cleaver. 

These right-wing censorship campaigns which oppose discussions of women's suffrage and the women's movement, slavery in America, trade unions, ecology, world hunger, Native people's history and experiences, the Watergate history were radiating out to public libraries as well.

The American Library Association found that the number of books challenged tripled to nearly 1,000 by 1981. A contemporaneous Washington Post article reported that, quote, "A growing number of them were prompted by conservative groups like Moral Majority and Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum." The Post then added, quote, "Not surprisingly, teachers and librarians, fearful that parent vigilantes will raise a ruckus, are beginning to censor themselves.

They refuse to consider some worthy books for the classroom or library shelf because of the potential political consequences. Publishers, also fearful of censors, sometimes modify their texts rather than forgo major markets," unquote. So they do a lot of self-censorship or sort of preemptive censorship, which is more common often than ce- direct censorship.

In the years that followed, book censorship continued to surge. During the 1984-1985 school year, efforts to ban books cropped up in nearly 46 states, many of which were successful. Books were targeted for material dealing with, as a 1985 LA Times editorial put it, quote, "evolution, sex education, or personal values," unquote, as well as, quote, "social, political, or cultural change," unquote, which is a very benign and euphemistic way of saying anything that makes guys who look and sound like Adam Johnson upset, basically, is the criteria.

anything involving race, gender- 

Telling the history or information about anyone else. 

Anything that wasn't something that would be in a John Wayne movie, bad. 

But public libraries weren't just under siege from book banners. Around the same time as the New Right censorship project, libraries began to face major threats to their funding.

As governor of California in 1971, Ronald Reagan himself slashed state aid to public libraries by $1 million. During his presidency in 1982, Reagan cut federal funds to New York City public libraries by more than 50%. And in 1985, some California library systems, already whittled down to half-day schedules, feared they'd have to close down entire branches as a result of Reagan's proposed 1986 federal aid cuts.

And if all that weren't enough, the wheels of library privatization were already in motion. In 1981, the then Pennsylvania-based private company Library Systems and Services, abbreviated as LS&S or LSSI, was founded. The company sold automation technologies to federal libraries such as the Veterans Affairs Department, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution.

At that time, Ronald Reagan was in office, and his notorious gutting of federal funding created an opportunity for private companies to fill the library's financial vacuum. Eventually, LS&S expanded this model, targeting the public library systems of funding-starved cities and counties. By the summer of 1997, without any sort of vote from its community, California's Riverside County contracted LS&S to run day-to-day operations, including managing staff and buying books for its public library system, citing, what else, Adam?

Financial strain. 

Notably, during the New Right's book banning spree, most major media raised some objections, publishing editorials lamenting the coercive effects on such blatant censorship. Privatization, however, didn't really elicit that same level of protest, even though the effect in many ways was very similar.

In one example, The Washington Post ran a story marking the 1997 LS&S deal as a neutral, if not positive, development. Only one sentence in the piece addressed the concerns of the public, and even that was hedged by a dismissal by a librarian supportive of the corporate takeover. The paper raised no questions about the privatization other than, quote, "How LS&S can pay the same number of people the same amount of money and increase library services if Riverside County couldn't do it."

The answer? Streamline administrative functions, AKA lay people off, fire people, and gut services. Commentary on the ethics of suddenly putting librarians under the employment of a corporation or whether privatization would restrict public access to the library was nowhere to be found. LS&S gradually expanded to more regions, and by 2010 was no longer limited to those that were economically distressed.

In September of that year, the company was hired to run the library system of Santa Clarita, California. CEO Frank Pezzanite pledged to help the city save, quote, "1 million a year, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees," unquote, according to The New York Times. In the same article, Petzinite evoked classic anti-labor tropes to justify privatization, characterizing unionized librarians as lazy and self-interested.

Quote, "A lot of libraries are atrocious. Their policies are all about job security. That's why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to the library for 35 years and never have to do anything, and then have your retirement. We're not running our company that way. You come to us and you're gonna have to work," unquote.

Petzinite would later insist his words were taken out of context, adding, quote, "Anyone who works in a library is an unsung hero in my book," but just not enough to actually pay them.

 

Not like heroes who deserve union job security. no, 

Yeah, this was... Again, you see the similar parallels to the attacks on teachers' unions, which is they're all lazy, entitled.

They collect checks, and they're just, they a- they're living too high on the hog. 

And you can't fire the bad ones, right? 

Yeah, the working class is not allowed to have a modicum of job security, peace of mind, or economic security. 

You gotta work. You gotta constantly work. Prove yourself. 

They have to constantly be paranoid, precarious, and fearful of being terminated at any moment.

That's right. That's how we run our schools and our libraries. Anything that has to do with education and information, whoever is working there has to be absolutely terrified. 

this is how the ruling class treats anything that's popular or beneficial to society, and especially in the fascist project, they're really... as we've seen, it's end times fascism. It's full on eugenics.

They're only engaged in a project of destruction. So therefore, something as popular as the library, and I love what you said, Katie, it really is true, there's more of us than there are of them, and you can see this in the popularity of libraries. You can see this in the variety of people, all different kinds of people who are willing to stand up for libraries.

But what the fascists want is they want us to not only, they not only want to destroy the library, but they want people to be afraid of what the library represents. But fortunately, I think there are s- many ways where there is so much local community resistance to that part of the fascist project, and we've seen it because the, the fascist attack on libraries has now been happening for years and years, and people in all kinds of local communities have been resisting these incursions.

They love the library because of all the things that we've been talking about here today. People love not having to purchase anything. They love a place that doesn't have expectations of them other than very basic, code of conduct, be nice to each other. They love that the library is a place that, generally speaking, is not gonna break their trust like so many other parts of our society, like all the private platforms that we have to engage with all the time.

And I think that people, even though they have a lot of complaints about the nature of sharing things in common, they also love doing that. And I think that this is part of the reason why libraries are so intentionally underfunded and so many attempts to destroy them are being made because I think that the members of the ruling class understand that radical potential in a lot of ways.

And I think that there's also a very specific strategy to defunding public goods where they wanna make public goods seem inherently dysfunctional. you defund them to a point where then you can say it allows for the narrative that privatization is a better choice, But I think that part of this is that they know that if the public sector, libraries included, were well-funded, we would have a completely different society.

It wouldn't solve all our problems, certainly not, but it would solve a lot of them, and the ruling class can't have that. 

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I-- we've talked a lot about where we are in this current moment politically and the more intense versions of fascism that we're seeing day over day.

But I wanna underline that a lot of what we are seeing in our public libraries is not new. This is not something that has happened in the last four years or the last eight years or the last ten years. The problems in America's public libraries are often the result of a lack of investment over decades.

Many of our library buildings are buildings that were built at the beginning of the twentieth century or perhaps in the middle of the century, and they're falling apart. I can't tell you how many conversations I have with trustees all over the country, and they say, "I don't know where we're gonna find the money.

We need thirty million dollars to fix our elevator that doesn't work, to fix our roof that leaks. We can't use half the building because, it's got asbestos, and we can't afford to remediate it." And these basic problems of just capital infrastructure, like the building itself does not work, does not function, and we are not investing in it to say nothing of what we're spending on staffing, on paying the people who actually make the library function, making sure they have a fair and livable wage, making sure that they have healthcare and benefits and all the things that they are entitled to, making sure that we have funded programs and collections and services.

This lack of investment is a long-standing problem. It has been an issue for decades. And at the same time, it does not exist in a universe where we are not funding all public ser-- We are certainly funding some public services. We are funding police departments. We are funding surveillance. We are funding programs that punish and contain and control people.

We are not funding programs that support and encourage and connect people 

I'm cheering yes to all of that. And I wanna just say, p- picking up on Katie's point about the import- that these are not new things, that this has been a long time problem with public libraries and public goods in general, except for the goods that are, again, in the punishment carceral state.

I want to also suggest that, How to put this? It is concerning to me the conversation about how much people actually love the library. Because I think both Katie pointed out, brought up before the romantic vision of libraries that doesn't necessarily look at the ways in which they are sometimes exclusionary and other things.

there are institutions within a carceral state, so they're gonna have carceral tendencies in s- different kinds of ways, and they are institutions run by human beings, and those human beings are flawed. All that being true, but I don't think a lot of people know how their library, public library actually works or functions.

I don't think people know who pays for the library and how it gets paid for. I don't think people, for example, people definitely don't know about the governance structure of their public libraries. we have found this at For the People. People don't know about library boards. I didn't know about library boards until, 10 years ago.

Do you know? And I know a lot about different public institutions. I didn't even know we had boards that govern many of our libraries. W- I think that kind of not... The, the ability not to understand how institutions actually function make it so that it's easier for the ruling class to be able to defund those institutions.

It makes it easier for those who want to, for example, come into censorship, to censor because they can take control of library governing boards, right? And do their work that way. So we really have to engage and build our knowledge and do political education around how these institutions actually function, how they work, in order for us to be able to defend, but also call for expansion of them because, yes, we do need new capital campaigns to be able to deal with buildings that were built 100 years ago.

We do need to pay people who are library workers a living wage. we do need to make sure that we can run the programs that people want in their communities, right? All that takes resources and money. That's why budget campaigns that we run on the left must include the public library. We must include them on the list of the things that ought to be funded at an actual level that allows us to sustain them.

I think the other thing I want to point out is that something about where we are right now in, if we're in late stage capitalism or some form of, the mutation of the capitalist, model of, e- of economics and politics, I think that it is really... I've heard people, workers, library workers tell stories of people who come to the library and ask to rent books People who ask what the monthly subscription fee is.

Because we have gotten to the point in this country where it's actually inconceivable to people that you can access anything without paying for it out of pocket, and that people will be like, "What's the catch? How is this a scam?" "How is this not a scam?" Because every single thing as we've hit on costs, quote-unquote, money out of pocket for you to be able to get what you want or need from it.

Whereas actually at the library, it's each according to your need. That's the basic way of how it's organized. This is extremely antithetical to the, late stage capitalist model of everything. And I think in... That also makes libraries super dangerous and super threatening to certain groups of people who want to see, a, an expansion of the not e- the idea to each according to what you can pay.

they're in a fight with the each according to your need model of how to live in society. we're not customers at the public library, and I think that means that a lot of people in the country don't know how to relate to institutions or to the government in a way that is not a customer relationship.

A consumer relationship. You're a patron of the library. That's very 

different, and that's why we have to fight for this institution because if we lose this as a public good and a free, as a free public service, we will have lost everything. And so I just want people to really think deeply about that.

We have been talking about this for a very long time, so I'm happy we finally are doing it. Libraries are a rare place of public education that's for everyone, not just children, at least in principle.

That scene increasingly, by the right, it's gotten tangled up into this book banning attacks on critical race theory. There have been some examples of intimidation for various kinds of books and drag sh- that sort of the, the broader drag show panic it got caught up in. But of course, it's not new, right?

It's I think it's, as we argue in this episode, it's gotten more acute of late, but it's part of a broader continuum that goes back a very long time since they were, originally founded. What do you think the sort of main reasons why it has gotten more acute of late, and why libraries of all places, whether they be in schools or be public libraries or what have you, have become a target of the forces of reaction?

I know that's a big question, but if you could just indulge me about what you think the sort of broader trends are of late. 

It's a big question, and who doesn't have it, right? 'Cause you think about the library and You take your kid there for a story time, and you maybe go and pick up a book and read it, and maybe use the bathroom.

And, who could be against that? So it's quite befuddling, I think, to a lot of us, certainly to me, to see that the library is now this place. I think I was reading today that someone in Louisiana is saying that the library is where Satan goes to hang out. it's really- Wow ... just off the charts. 

I've seen him there, that's true, but, 

Yeah, no

verified ... he's, always has trouble with the printer, right? 

It's true. He's, yeah. 

So confusing. But I think in some ways it's because the library is the last public institution standing. The right has attacked public education for a long time. They're very far along in the process of dismantling that through vouchers and privatization and charter schools and all that kind of stuff.

And higher ed the same, right? You've got an institution that's been gutted by adjunctification and lack of resources, and the library is the last one, a little bit. It's also not as if it's been immune to the forces of decimation, right? you've got very few school librarians left, public libraries operating on sort of shoestrings, and so they're...

We don't have the staff there who could fight against these things. I think we're in kind of a fragile moment, and we're also, good places that do all kinds of things that people on the right don't like. 

Yeah. to that point, though, it's also not just the far right. I think, we hear the kind of newsworthy headline stories, these full-frontal horrible attacks, right?

Which then become policy positions. They become core talking points from the right, of course. But austerity inflicted by both parties over many decades has long made it more difficult for libraries to serve many of their core functions. Emily, can you talk about some of the ways that libraries have really for such a long time, maybe since, the public library system was really created in this country, have been a site of social struggle, of also worker struggle and worker power, to protect and expand the public sphere against forces of austerity, which, to be clear again, are not just coming from the right.

So it's interesting, right? So public libraries get their start, like they really get going in the United States out of philanthropy. They are, in fact, established by, like the Carnegie libraries are funded in order to educate the working classes into the ways of, the right ways of reading.

So from their very inception, they've been sort of political projects. And then we see them as I think of them as about both public services and public goods. They're about the circulation of public goods to the public, and they're also Public space. They produce public space. And so the bigger the library, the more space that is reserved for people to come in and hang out and do all kinds of things like that.

So the Schwarzman, or the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, which is the remodel of the Mid-Manhattan library in Manhattan, remodeled to the tune of $125 million. Big space, lots of new seating, just greatly expanded public seating in the middle of New York City. And on the same day that opened, or right around the same time that opened, the city signed design and build contracts on new jails to replace Rikers Island to the tune of $8.3 billion.

So I think of the li- fight for the library as a fight for the public. do we want expanded public space for people to come in and use the library and all of the things that happen there, or do we wanna fund the expansion of a jail system? And we see what the state has chosen to do. And I think you're absolutely right that's bipartisan and has been going on for a very long time.

And those of us who work in libraries, and especially people who work in public libraries, see the result of decades of disinvestment in the public, and the sort of extraordinary concentration of wealth in the hands of very few people. And we see that every day in the library. we're the last place anyone can go and sit during the day without spending money.

And there are many more people than there ought to be who don't have anywhere to go and sit during the day. So in that way, I think it's a site of struggle just 'cause we see what's happening. 

So in an interview with Jacobin, you wrote, quote, "I believe the way to get people to understand why libraries are important is by engaging people in a struggle for their fair share of the social wage.

It isn't a matter of better advertising. It's a matter of stronger connections between libraries and our communities and the communities we serve and the shared struggle that we have because we are all suffering from the maldistribution of wealth," unquote. In that interview, you you mentioned your own labor struggles as a librarian worker.

So I wanna ask you how you think those labor struggles intersect with the broader social purpose of libraries in terms of the theme you touched on of solidarity and building places of community. I know that's a little wishy-washy of a question, but I think we're a little romantic about libraries, so we're asking romantic questions, so indulge us.

Sorry. 

So in 2016, I was part of the faculty at Long Island University's Brooklyn campus that was subject to a lockout. It was the first lockout in the history of higher education in the United States. And it was, like, totally, life-changing. like one of those things that happens and you're like, "Oh, everything I thought about how the world worked was wrong."

'Cause I think I did... I'm a little sentimental myself, and I thought that- If I did a good job and helped students find their articles and pass their classes and write good papers that, I could live a good life. But that was like one day I was being a librarian, and the next day I was locked out. I couldn't go to work.

They wouldn't let us on campus. They locked us out of our email, replaced us with people they found on monster.com and paid, $15 an hour. We had, an Alvin Ailey trained dancer who taught dance class, and she was replaced in the classroom by the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, who was, like, an 84-year-old trained biologist, right?

Just like the most cynical end game possible in higher education, right? That, it doesn't-- you don't even need students and faculty. You just need tuition dollars that you extract. But I was like... It just-- You experience brute power, and you're like, "Oh, fuck." they could just destroy us at any moment, and the only way that we could fight back against that was by organizing collectively And taking a stand all of us at once.

And that was, like, a bumper sticker, and I kinda believed it before, but now I, truly believe it, 'cause I saw what would... it didn't matter if we were right, it didn't matter if it was just one of us, we needed all of us standing together. And so if I wanna claw back space for the public, if I wanna claw it out of the prison system and instead make it, a place where kids can come and sit and read a book, I just don't get it.

who doesn't want that? who says, "More people in cages, fewer children reading books"? nobody wants that. And so if we can understand that, fighting for the library is fighting for everybody and for all of us, that seems like part of the project for me. 

So Regina Wel- Weldert is a transgender woman in her 70s, and she had been, I believe, a fisheries scientist and then retired, and in her 60s transitioned, and was now running a coffee roasting company in this little town of Dayton. And Regina Weldert said to me, "Look, I've never had trouble.

Nobody's attacked me for my identity before in Dayton." In fact, she said, "I've had more trouble when I go to the big cities like Seattle, where people heckle me and insult me." But then she said, "Now I feel scared because suddenly there's this cultural war going on in Dayton, and suddenly intolerance is bubbling up to the surface."

And Regina Weldert said to me, look, if you marginalize the voices of people like me," she said, "or if you marginalize the voices of young people exploring their sexual identity or their gender identity, what you do is you push people into the closet, people who are already marginalized, already psychologically vulnerable, already at risk for abuse, already at risk for homelessness, all the things that transgender youth are disproportionately at risk of.

And you make it more likely, if you invisibilize them, you make it more likely that at the end of the day there are gonna be bad outcomes, that, psychologically bad things are gonna happen, or that they're gonna end up on the streets with no resources to help them." And so Regina Weldert said, "Look, I'm in my 70s, but I've got to fight against this censorship movement because it's trying to invisibilize people like me," she said.

I think there's this sort of concept that, you know, all the issues around gender identity and sexual identity, that's a big city thing. it's absolutely not true. You can go to any small town, any small community anywhere in this country, and if you look, you're gonna find people exploring those same issues about who they are and how they want to portray themselves to the world.

it's not a big town, small town thing. But I think there's this idea among conservatives, among hyper conservatives in a place like Dayton, there's this idea that, if we could just get rid of a few books, everything's gonna go back to the 1950s and everything's gonna be easy to understand again.

That's absolutely nonsense. you can get rid of those books, but life is gonna be just as complicated and just as messy and just as ambiguous today as it was yesterday. We've just made it harder on already vulnerable people. 

One of the people they made it hard around was the librarian of their town, Todd VanderBark.

What happened to him? 

He had been attacked again and again for defending the sort of right of the library to pick and choose books, and he'd been called a groomer, he'd been called a pedophile, he'd had violent threats against him online, he'd been told he should be in prison, he should be in jail, he'd been heckled at public meetings.

And he stood firm. He stood firm for over a year of this conflict, and he made sure the library still had those books. At the end of the day, though, he had enough, and a few months ago, earlier this summer, he packed up and left. He accepted a job somewhere else. He said, I've done it. I've done everything I can here.

I don't want any more of this." And he left Dayton. And he said to me, "Look, frankly, I've got real, no real interest in going back to Dayton." And I felt terribly sad about this because this was someone who had stood firm, and he had, faced some really quite gruesome personal insults for standing firm, but at the end of the day, he just felt it was too much.

And I think this is the danger, that, even if groups don't succeed in defunding libraries, and it's quite likely that initiative will, be defeated in November, because even conservatives in Dayton, many of them are very uncomfortable with getting rid of their library. But even if the library remains in place, at the end of the day, the librarian was driven out of office, and the interim director who came in and succeeded him immediately moved some of those books that had created such a furore, immediately moved some of those books away from the kids' section.

that's bowing to pressure from, a really authoritarian, intimidatory movement, and that's an ugly harbinger of what's to come. And I think that's, that's a real risk that you go round the country from place to place, and as these censorship wars heat up, even if they don't formally work, they create enough soft pressure that librarians say, "You know what?

This isn't worth it. Let me compromise on free speech just a little bit. Let me bow to these demands just a little bit." And that's a really slippery slope

 

One last thing: what was it like for you to go to this small town in rural Washington and talk to these far right-wing activists whose actions you find so reprehensible?

No, I find it fascinating, and I've spent quite a lot of the last few years doing this kind of reporting, where I find these movements in these communities, and I go in and I talk to a lot of people. this is, to me, what makes journalism worthwhile. It's okay to just talk to people that you agree with, but it's boring.

It's far more interesting- ... and far more productive, and it's far more honest intellectually to talk to people from an array of different backgrounds, and it helps you understand where we are. look, if you want to understand where America is in 2023, if you want to understand the potency of these culture war issues, look, if you want to understand why Donald Trump is still electorally competitive despite facing 640-something years in prison, if you want to understand all of those things, you've got to understand these kind of s- cultural war conflicts that are going on.

I lo- I love going to these places. I find it 

fa- but surely they see you as, the enemy. 

it depends. I have a lot of the times people saying, "I'm not gonna talk to you." Jessica Rothkorn originally said to me, "I'm not gonna talk to you," and I persisted, and I just kept asking questions, and I kept talking.

And, if you talk long enough, and if you show an interest in what people are saying, people will talk to you. Not everybody. You can have some people who just will not talk to the media, come what may, but you're gonna have a lot of people who after a while do. One of the things that has increasingly struck me as being important about this moment is the dangerousness of our levels of polarization, that we are s- so confined to our own echo chambers, and we're so willing and able to see a political opponent as the enemy, and that's really dangerous.

we live in a democracy, and we've got to have an ability to, at least have some conversations across ideological divides. no, I don't agree with these censorship movements. I think they're really dangerous, and I profoundly hope that these, they don't succeed. But I think it's really important to talk with people who do buy into those movements and try and understand where they're coming from.

And finally, section D: The Longer Arc: Empire, Ideology, and the World's View.

Ben, inevitably in the 250th anniversary year of a nation, there is a focus on the history of that nation. But one thing I'm aware of, having seen the Super Bowl performance by Bad Bunny over the weekend, is that it's very much out of the kind of territory that the government really wants it to be on already, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely. I think we've seen, especially since Trump's, return to office early last year, that the stakes of this anniversary are ideologically enormous. there's a lot of erasing and de-emphasizing and rewriting of history, both recent and foundational going on. and I think we're seeing that manifest in all kinds of expected and unexpected ways around this year's 250th anniversary extravaganza, which will culminate obviously on, on the 4th of July, which will mark 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

And so the latest news that's happened just this week is in relation to the Stonewall Monument. Can you first of all tell us-- I'm sure most people will know what the Stonewall Monument is, but tell us a bit about it just in case there are people that are in the dark. 

Sure. so the Stonewall Monument is a site in New York City's Greenwich Village that was sort of ground zero for the LGBTQ plus liberation movement.

It was the sort of or-origin point of, an event that was alternately called the Stonewall Uprising or the Stonewall Riots, which is essentially this, this act of police brutality that led to a massive sort of outpouring of support and activism by the LGBT community in New York City. And so I believe it was declared a national historic site and therefore, under the purview of the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior under President Obama, I think.

2016. That's right. Yeah. 

Yeah. So that's kinda become like the de facto nationally sanctioned historical site for LGBTQ rights, and activism. 

And so tell us a-- You mentioned the NPS there, the National Park Service. It might be confusing to people that the National Park Service would be running something which is based in Greenwich Village.

But the National Park Service is a vast umbrella organization for all sorts of monuments, which include national parks, right? 

Yes, exactly. The National Park Service has a sort of bizarrely broad, at times, mandate, and that includes managing things like historic presidential homes, where such and such president was born or lived most of their life, are also managed by the National Park Service.

and so the Stonewall Site is also managed by the National Park Service. There is technically a very small park there, although the Stonewall Inn itself, the bar, is obviously a bar. yes, the whole site is a National Park Service project, which falls under the Department of the Interior. 

Yes. And that's the rub of all this.

So it's really interesting to me that last year at the end of the year when we were talking about 2025, you pointed out that one of the most insidious sort of manifestations of the Trump crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives was the way that certain information was being scrubbed from websites and information relating to National Park Services sites.

And that- Happened with the Stonewall site. So last year, any reference to trans people, for instance, was taken off the website. So this is something that's been happening for a while, but now what's happened is that the flag, the LGBTQ flag, the rainbow flag, has been removed from the flagpole outside this monument, and that's crucial, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly. I think we've seen sort of the groundwork being laid for this in places like Florida and Texas, which have outlawed rainbow crosswalks and, that street level mural- have been using arbitrary studies of traffic patterns to have these expressions of LGBTQ solidarity removed.

Yeah. so it's not as if this comes out of nowhere, and as you said, a lot of National Park Services websites for various historic sites have been scrubbed of anything broaching the subject or, any difficult subject really, in US history. And so it's not totally surprising, but, nevertheless, earlier this month, I believe it was on February 9th, the National Park Service removed a large pride flag, like a National Park Service pride-branded flag that had been installed on a flagpole outside of the Stonewall Inn, ostensibly to comply with a Trump administration directive that basically had dec- had decided or decreed that, only certain sort of, official flags could be flown at national sites.

And this one, even though it says, National Park Service on it, because the backdrop of it is not white or some neutral color but the pride pattern, it was found to be afoul of this new directive. 

Yeah, they've tried to hide behind sort of bureaucratic language about what kinds of flags can be shown outside of these sort of federal spaces, right?

Yeah, exactly. In that sense, it's like a, an escalation of what we saw with the, with the rainbow crosswalks last year.

 

And tell me, what's the reaction been? has there been a political reaction to this? 

Yeah, absolutely. I think people are outraged, understandably.

It's such a sort of, petty thing to do. Yeah. and I think it's really struck a chord in New York City 'cause New Yorkers, perhaps rightly are bracing for all kinds of dust-ups with the Trump administration. And so this is definitely a flashpoint for those anxieties and, there are innumerable others from the ongoing ICE raids in parts of the city to the shutdown of construction on this, $16 billion tunnel between New York and New Jersey that's also entirely due to sort of Washington, DC pettiness.

So- 

Yeah ... 

yeah, this just feels like a sort of an added bit of salt in the wound, basically. 

It's interesting to compare it with another scandal involving the NPS, which has been taking place in Philadelphia, and this is in relation to a slavery exhibition, which is an outdoor site and had been long-running but had been taken down.

So tell us about this. 

Yeah. This involves a set of outdoor placards at a site, in Philadelphia, in this section of Philadelphia called Independence Mall, which is, where a lot of the kind of foundational sites of the US are located, including Independence Hall, and, the Liberty Bell, and outside of Washington, DC, basically, ground zero for, American history buffs.

And at that site, there is the outline or remnants of a house that was occupied by both President George Washington and President John Adams. And as part of that, there was, there had been until very recently, a sort of large display and a kind of memorial wall paying tribute to the nine enslaved people who were owned by George Washington and who lived there with him during his time as president in Philadelphia.

That display was taken down summarily last month, and shortly thereafter, the city of Philadelphia sued the National Park Service, basically saying that, this site was co-managed by us in collaboration, and you gave us no warning or explanation as to why this was being removed.

I believe there's actually a protest at the site happening as we're speaking. So yeah, it's become this very kind of contentious fight over... it's not just about a placard, obviously. It's about the version of American history that is told, especially in the current moment of commemorating that history around the 250th anniversary.

is George Washington just this heroic figure who, fought in the Revolutionary War and then was the first president and did all these great things, or is he, a complicated human being who also had some very serious strikes against him? And it's not exactly surprising that the current administration wants to tell the sort of sanitized version of that story, but it's obviously striking a nerve that the revising of that history, is happening so haphazardly and so out in the open.

we have built this understanding of museums as informed by their staff internally and as informed by the relationships you just described externally.

And in, in the Substack essay, you pointed to or at least nodded at how this tension has created a situation in which most art museums have remained fairly silent over the upheavals of the last year or few years. What types of responses would you like to see coming from the sector? let's go there first.

What, what types of responses would you like to see the sector having to, to the present crises? 

let's start with the easiest point to make, which is that I don't have a dog in this hunt. I'm not a director anymore. I was for about 30 years, but it's easy to offer prescriptions to people when you're not in the mix.

And I would be loath to do that to people who are sitting in a saddle and have their own sets of challenges that I don't know anything about. And so to say what I hope people do is different from what seems plausible and practical for a lot of people. What I would hope is that the emergency we're in our democracy is so extreme, it's not comparable to any moment in American history of late other than perhaps the McCarthy era when fear was everywhere in the creative industries.

And that type of shutting down of research, inquiry, shaping views and opinions is completely contrary to the purpose of museums. And without having to be, say, directly engaged in attacking what's happened at the Smithsonian, for example, I think directors can be pretty explicit of their advocacy of the First Amendment and free speech and the apo- the ability of artists to make a case for something that the directors themselves might be loath to do and in the case, for example, of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which I'm president of, we've put dozens of quilts by Black artists from the '20s forward in dozens of museums.

Those could be hung today in kind of acknowledgement of the battle for voting rights in Alabama right now. And it wouldn't have to say anything. It could just have a testament to the fight for civil rights in the 1960s that those women in Alabama staged with their families to protest and march.

And so I think there are ways of being powerful forces for open thinking and progressive values without necessarily putting yourself at risk.

 

Is your wish that directors and other art museum leaders would respond to the moment only internally, or do you have wishes that museum directors become more public figures within their communities and regions?

I think it's fair to say that there aren't that many museum directors who publish thought pieces and articles. I think that's, it's a bit of a rarity. Would you agree, Tyler? I don't think that- I 

would agree that's an absolute rarity, and I rather bemoan that it is. 

And I guess I didn't succumb to that impulse.

I did write fairly often throughout my tenure as a director, and did so in part because I felt it was a public responsibility to articulate the values of an institution, even if it engendered ill feeling or upset. And so I think that the predicament a director faces, and I've heard this offline, is, that's so risky."

yes, but then what are you doing the job for? in, in effect, what called you to this profession if not to lead? Why didn't you stay a curator, in a province that might be safer? And why did you step into an administrative role where Most obviously, you are the party responsible for steering the ship and giving dimension to the, the challenges that are facing the institution from without as well as from within.

A moment ago, you noted that hanging historical material can speak to the present. I think that an issue that your essay nods at without being explicit about is the museo habit of throwing contemporary artists at whatever issue pops up. That is almost always an artist not constructed into whiteness. it's a practice that almost always transfers the institution's work of either institutional self-interrogation or the histo-historical interrogation of artworks to one artist, to often one person to do something that's on view for 10 weeks, and the museum then feels, "Great, we've done it."

in my field, in, in historical American art, I can count the number of U.S. art museums that have done revisionist and interrogative exhibitions about art's role in the construction of the nation, historical art's role in the construction of the nation in the last decade on one hand. I'm not sure I can get to five.

When we think of how museums address present circumstance, is looking at and understanding the past through artworks of the past, does that have to be a part of how museums go forward, or am I being a smaller romantic? 

No, I think that's right. I think the biggest obvious concern museums should have is around the war against diversity on the part of the Trump administration- Agreed

independent of all the other insanities that have come out of the White House of late. And the default seems to have been to present works by artists of color who have a market presence that's sufficient to counteract anybody, to say, "This artist's works sell for a lot. They're appreciated in all sorts of quarters, and therefore they have authority that's warranting their being displayed as and serving as the proxy for institutional conscience."

After George Floyd's murder, we all remember museum websites having a black screen and all of these performative- Yep ... efforts to s- to find some way to be visible and evident in recognizing that tragedy and its implications. But as time has marched on, and certainly as the Trump returned to the throne, that has faded to the point where presenting successful Black artists is seen as the antidote to silence.

And we're all for doing that, but it's not s- it's necessary but not sufficient, is the way I would describe it. 

Yeah, I've s- I think I've said this before on this show, al- although probably not recently, but w- we have 40 or 50, 40, 40, 50 artists a year on this show, and, I, there's always some side chat before and, and after we tape.

and one of the things that artists not constructed into whiteness increasingly tell me off tape is how frustrated they are by the sort of essentialism that Frank Bowling, for example, complained about in the 1970s and that Paul Chaat Smith started complaining about in the early 21st century, and how they see institutions handing off work to them, and that they do not see the white leadership of traditional white institutions joining them in their work, in that work.

They simply see TWI leadership assigning it to them, and that's a significant issue. And I think we also-- I think artists, maybe more than my colleagues in the historical American field, have noticed that while US art museums have within their collections much art that was an important factor in, say, racialization or in arguments around smaller republicanism and who got to be involved in it within the country as that debate evolved between the 1780s and the 1850s, that museums don't highlight or feature or, the role that art played in those histories.

And I also don't see any movement in the foundation sector to change that. I think that when you look at the, the big foundations that lead the way in the funding for especially American exhibitions, you see them strongly oriented around essentialist strategies rather than in- interrogative strategies.

Finally, as we're taping this at the end of May, it's become really clear that the Trump administration is taking dead aim at the Smithsonian Institution because it can.

It's trying to effect changes, including to staff, senior staff across the institution. So I suppose I should point out here that the Smithsonian is not as federal as I think a lot of people think it is. A little over a third of its funding is not from the federal government, and depending on the year, more if you count capital projects.

Is there something from the Trumpist targeting of the Smithsonians from which leaders in the art museum sector should learn, perhaps because Trump minions may target them next? 

we've seen what happened with law firms and universities that- Yeah ... simply caved to the initial pressure, that they ended up- Yes

suffering more than those which decided to stand pat and fight. Now, no one wants to lose their job over an aging president who will theoretically be out of office, in a period of time that we can all imagine. So most, I think, are looking at just coping until the end of the Trump administration and assuming that at that point there'll be a purge of all of the henchmen who have sought to encumber the Smithsonian with these ridiculous quests to cleanse them of mentions of race.

So I think it's as, especially as we near the midterms, the impulse to fight back is gonna lessen, honestly, on the 

part- I think 

that's right ... And one can understand that because we're all watching and counting the days till the end of this national crisis. But I think that what the legacy of it is to suggest new protections are going to be needed in a legislative sense to protect free speech at the Smithsonian and avoid the type of interference that is now upon it, and make sure that going forward there is, if there's a revival of federal support for the arts, which we don't foresee for other reasons because federal support in general is getting tighter in all sorts of areas, that there's a hands-off understanding, much as the European institutions have historically enjoyed.

Mind you, there are exceptions in Europe as well, even with ministries of culture funding institutions. But I think that has to be the playbook. Just as in universities, these proscriptions against free speech have to end, and there has to be greater resilience on the part of educational, cultural leaders to say, "No, this is not gonna stand."

You've given a couple exa- of examples of this, but I wonder if you can zoom out a little bit and connect the dots a bit more on how, as you've put it, the specific Native part of our history helps to explain the current political crisis. 

Yeah. Again, this is from the scholarship of Maggie Blackhawk, who's Ojibwe, and her work is amazing.

I'll tell a story. Yeah. So the same summer our founders were drafting the Constitution in Philadelphia, at the time, New York, is where Congress met, the Congress at the time. And so a bunch of people actually leave the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia so Congress can have quorum in New York.

So you've got these, two meetings happening at the same time. And in New York, Congress passes the Northwest Ordinance to govern an area that's like Ohio to Minnesota. It's like the Great Lakes region. and the founders actually call this area America's first colony, and they're gonna govern it like a colony.

And so the, the person who oversees the colony is appointed, is not elected. There aren't elections, even for the, the w- white people. It's majority Native, but even for the white people who are living there, they don't have elections. They don't have a representative in Congress. It's not democracy the way that we would think about it.

It's top-down government, and that's how we've ruled every territory. That's as we stretch from sea to shining sea, and then as we stretch from the Philippines and Guam and Puerto Rico, and as we governed big, huge swaths of area that way. this isn't a small, subset of the United States. under, Thomas Jefferson's presidency, there, two-thirds of the land mass of the United States was governed by unelected appointed leaders.

And so th- the way that we governed those areas built up certain practices. It's a big legal term. It's called plenary power, but it basically built up a stronger precedent. And so these are areas where the president could get away with a lot and kinda do what the president wanted. It's an area where also the courts have this tradition of saying, "Ah," "This isn't really our business.

we're not gonna intervene. We're gonna defer." and there are also areas where constitutional rights don't apply as much, and Native people were the first example of that. We're the first example where we developed some of these areas of laws, but then it's been applied to other groups of people.

So it's been applied to places like Puerto Rico and Guam. It's been applied to immigrants, and I think what we're seeing right now is it getting applied to everybody here, right? But, and I think, too, the other thing that's happening Is that the Trump administration is pushing on some of these weaknesses in our democracy.

And so you can see that in the controversy over war powers, you can see that in the birthright citizenship case. Even in the, the fund for, like January 6th defendants part of the, precedent for that fund comes from settlement funds with tribes that had been established under previous presidents.

And so the way I think about it is what our government did to Native people, it's like it set up these fault lines in our democracy, and what we're living through right now is the earthquake, is those fault lines moving everything around to where it feels like it's gonna fall apart.

And so there are these very concrete ways where, whether it's birthright citizenship, detaining migrant families, the war in Iran, threatening to annex places like Greenland or Canada or Panama , that actually come from this long colonial history in the United States that I think as Americans we're not used to seeing, right?

And so it's like this, we ha- I feel like we have this like knee-jerk reaction as a public of "This is unconstitutional, this is unprecedented, this is un-American." you heard that a lot around the ICE search in Minneapolis of this is unprecedented. it's not the first time a president has sent federal troops to the land that is now Minnesota to round people up and remove them.

Like we, we've actually done that before as a government, and we never went back and said, "Oops," "That's bad. We don't wanna do that," right? That is against our values as a democracy. That's dangerous. And so it's no surprise that a lot of that history is repeating itself. 

You have alluded to your answer to this question several times already, but I'm gonna ask you directly.

Knowing that you are not, an expert in authoritarianism, but you've raised the question in the podcast, are we really a democracy? Can you give us your answer? 

I think we're both. 

Sorry, both meaning authoritarianism and democracy? 

Yeah, I think there's parts of our government- Yeah ... that are democratic, and I think there are parts of our government that are authoritarian.

Like a lot of empires, I think that we thought we could keep those things separate, that we could have colonialism over there, and we could have colonialism over there and democracy over here. That- ... we could rule this group of people by force, and we could rule this group of people by consent.

But history tells us that's not how it works, and what we're seeing right now is those things come together. And 

there's this theory of where authoritarianism comes from that actually became popular at the end of World War II as a way to explain the rise of fascism in Europe. 

What theorists said is, like- Why are you surprised about the violence and the horrors of World War II and Nazi Germany when Europe has been doing these things to colonize people across the globe?

this is Germany committed genocide in Africa before it committed genocide in Europe. And so this theory is called the boomerang of empire, and the idea like in the way that you throw out a boomerang and it comes back to you, is that colonialism works the same way. we oftentimes think about colonialism as just impacting the people who are colonized.

So we think of, the terrible history of what our government did to Native people as just impacting Native people, that's, the bad thing that happened to Native Americans. But it changed our government. It changed the structure of our government permanently, indelibly. And so what we're seeing in this moment is things, is those arms of our government that we thought could be authoritarian towards some people coming back home and coming back to impact everybody.

That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. You can record and re-record a voice message by tapping the link in the show notes. 

You can reach us on Signal at the handle bestofleft.01 or simply email me to [email protected]. The additional sections of the show included clips from Civics 101, 1A, The Week in Art, The Brian Lehrer Show, Start Making Sense, Citations Needed, Movement Memos, The Weeds, The Modern Art Notes podcast, and The Intercept Briefing.

Further details are in the show notes. Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Dion and Aaron for their production work for the show. Thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes. Thanks to our editors and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations.

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