President Trump just issued an executive order to purge the Smithsonian Institution of uncomfortable facts. He titled it “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” I would like to quote and then translate a key section of this vile document.
“Museums in our nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.
“To advance this policy, we will restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness — igniting the imagination of young minds, honoring the richness of American history and innovation, and instilling pride in the hearts of all Americans.”
Translation: “Museums in our nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.
“Therefore we will replace the contents of the Smithsonian Institution with our own ideological indoctrination and divisive narratives that will distort our shared history to conform with white supremacist and Christian nationalist mythology.”
What is happening? The Trumpistas are implementing Project 25, their plan to make America fascist.
They want to make government as inefficient as possible so that there are virtually no effective controls on the power and influence of the powerful and wealthy. They want to make Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and Obamacare so badly administered that they will have popular support for privatizing these programs and turning them into huge profit centers for the billionaires.
They want to destroy public education and privatize all education as an additional profit center and they want to control the content of schooling so that they can impose their anti-intellectual mythologies. They want to destroy safety net programs so that virtually all assistance to those in need and to the most vulnerable will be controlled and administered by the billionaires through their private foundations.
They want to defund public broadcasting so the billionaires can establish a stranglehold on the press and media and render the First Amendment irrelevant.
In short, they have a program for the rapid accumulation of wealth and power by the wealthy and powerful.
Rewriting history is a major part of their program. It is 2025, the beginning of Trump’s return to power. It is the doubleplusgood Brave New World of “1984.”
Benjamin Ben-Baruch
Ashland
