BLATANT INDOCTRINATION

In his continuing rampage through American democracy, Donald Trump is now going after US cultural institutions. On Thursday he revealed his intention to force changes at the Smithsonian Institution through an executive order targeting funding for what he referred to as programs that promote “divisive narratives” and “anti-American ideology”.

Most people reading this probably have no idea how sweeping a move targeting the Smithsonian is. But a mere glance at what this institution controls brings the importance of the measure immediately to light.  The Smithsonian Institution is no less than the world’s largest museum, education and research complex. It consists of twenty-one museums and the National Zoo.

The bombastic title for the  executive order kicking off this latest far-right purge of liberal democratic  ideals  is “Restoring Truth and History to American History.” Vice President JD Vance has been tapped to head up the sweep.

This terminology is typically Orwellian—in other words, the exact opposite of what it claims to be. Trump’s in-house ideologues  posit that there has been a “concerted and widespread” effort over the past decade to rewrite American history by replacing “objective facts” with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” adding that it presents America's “founding principles in a negative light.” Long-time observers of the president have come to realize that whatever Trump says he is against is precisely what he is for—hence the comparison with bizarro-world dystopian novels like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

What has taken place, in fact, in the decades since the Civil Rights Era in the US, has been a gradual nationwide effort to remove ideology from the telling of America's story, and to honestly  own up to injustices that have plagued our history, despite the noble tenets of our liberal democratic Constitution. This has necessarily been a process of expurgating the influence of white supremacy from education, and of rightfully and honestly including the history of slavery and American minorities within the narrative of how the US has developed since its inception. In other words, the effort that the Trump administration is seeking to undermine is precisely the one that has sought a sincere, objective and self-aware telling of our history, instead of promoting the self-serving fairytale of American exceptionalism that the white supremacist  far-right has long sought to sell as truth.

So the entire purpose of this latest decree is, then, one hundred percent ideological, and is aimed precisely at indoctrination. Its purpose  is to bend the telling of American history to fit the far-right narrative that precludes critical thinking, voids objectivity, bans the discussion of minority rights and virtues, and assumes that any mind that cannot be bent to fit the far-right ideology is a subversive mind that requires ostracism and/or “re-education”.

Where is Congress and the Judiciary in all of this? And, in conclusion, if one man (as well as the ideologues working in the shadows behind him) is deciding how all Americans should think, which books can be read and which can't, how all universities must be run, what all American institutions should teach, what constitutes our cultural heritage, and what constitutes “proper ideology” over what is objectively debatable, then, how is this not already a dictatorship?