On Wednesday, Donald Trump sicced his racist thought police on museums and other cultural institutions for being too antislavery.
Trump wrote, “WOKE.” 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.”
How good is slavery, Demented one?
This is sick on so many levels, but Lindsey Halligan, a Special Assistant to the President (yeah), joined Newsmax to defend his racism by claiming museums are hiding the truth by performing political experiments.
Lindsey needs a lot more practice getting her words out. Did she major in communications? Uh huh.
HALLIGAN: The classroom shouldn’t be a stage upon which teachers can preach their various indoctrinations masquerading as eternal truths.
And similarly, museums that are over 70% funded by the federal government, shouldn’t be laboratories for political experiments.
And so what we’re doing is we just sent a letter to the Smithsonian asking for all information regarding their exhibits and their placards to try to get to the bottom of what happened and where the Smithsonian went wrong — and try to make the Smithsonian amazing and great and live up to what the president wants the Smithsonian and D.C. to be.
It’s the capital of our city and we need to make it amazing and great and beautiful.
NEWSMAX: Yeah, Lindsay, I mean obviously Sharla and I both lived in D.C. for a number of years.
I love the Smithsonian and visiting them, taking family and friends there and we often talk about preserving history in museums and not erasing it.
But how do you balance that, that you know we need to be able to review this while honoring even our not-so-pleasant past?
HALLIGAN: Yeah, I mean it’s not about whitewashing.
It’s all about full context. So while slavery is obviously a horrible aspect of our nation’s history, you can’t really talk about slavery honestly unless you also talk about hope and progress.
And I think we need to be focusing on the progress that we’ve made since then and we need to stop focusing so much on the lack of progress.
We need to keep moving forward as a country.
Our 250th anniversary as a country is coming up next July and we’re hoping that the Smithsonian and D.C. is beautiful and amazing and a place that all Americans want to come visit during that time and so I’m really excited about it.
Is it whitewashing? It’s not a museum’s job to promote hope, thoughts and prayers. They exhibit the past. Trying to turn them into jingoistic happy meals is not the object. But Trump and his white supremacist base must re-write history so they don’t feel bad.