Editorials & Other Articles

Last week, the White House let the Smithsonian know that it has plans to conduct a far-reaching review of its museums to ensure the content it presents to the public aligns with Trump’s views on American history. It’s against this backdrop that NBC News reported:

Trump voiced outrage this afternoon in a post on Truth Social about the types of exhibits shown in the Smithsonian and other museums across the country. ‘The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘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 — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,’ he said.

.....As for the larger context, The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg had a striking column late last week on what happened when a far-right political party in Poland gained power and quickly targeted the Museum of the Second World War, then being built in Gdansk.

“The museum was supposed to explore the war’s global context and to emphasize the toll it took on civilians,” Goldberg explained. “Among its collection were keys to the homes of Jews murdered in Jedwabne. Before it ever opened, [Poland’s illiberal Law and Justice party] wanted to shut it down for being insufficiently patriotic.”

If this sounds familiar, that’s not your imagination.

Pawel Machcewicz, the founding director of the Museum of the Second World War, told Goldberg it’s been unsettling to see American museums subjected to the sort of political intimidation he experienced in Poland. “I believed that American democracy had somehow stronger rules,” he said. “It’s older than Polish democracy. I thought the autonomy of research, the autonomy of museums, would be something sacred in the U.S. It turns out that it can also be subverted. So this is a very pessimistic lesson for us.”