“The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE,’” President Donald Trump wrote recently on his Truth Social. “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.”

JD Vance calls American universities “fundamentally corrupt” and has referred to them as “the enemy.” In his 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference, Vance stated that universities “control the knowledge in our society” and promote “deceit and lies” rather than truth, and he pledged to “aggressively attack” these institutions to reform what he sees as their left-wing ideological domination.

But we shouldn’t trust any administration to decide what museums, universities or the media tell us. It’s not a matter of right or left or “woke.” It’s about the political independence of truth-tellers.

A free people needs to know things that an administration may not want them to know and must be able to trust that the agents of truth — museums, universities, the media — are not compromised.