The past month has seen bold advances in President Donald Trump’s crusade to recapture cultural ground that the Left had conquered in recent decades. Whether on museums, media, or universities, the president is on the offensive and the Left is in retreat.
Two weeks ago alone saw advances on two fronts: a congressional win against NPR and PBS, and a retreat by the Smithsonian.
The House of Representatives’ 214-212 vote on June 12 to rescind $1.1 billion that Congress had already appropriated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the nonprofit that distributes taxpayer money to NPR, PBS, and public radio and television stations, was a milestone. The tightness of the vote reveals the stakes.
Ever since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act authorizing the CPB in 1967, every Republican president and Congress has tried to bring public broadcasting to heel.
But all efforts have failed. Democrats have voted in unison to protect their interests, and thus those of NPR and PBS, and enough Republicans have thought, “Well, PBS may give my party 85% negative coverage, but if I vote for it, my local station will spare me.”
The June 12 vote saw four of those, but not enough to save the broadcasters’ bacon this time. The rescission package now heads to the Senate, where Republicans have a 53-47 advantage. That still won’t make it a cakewalk, and timid senators will find any excuse not to take a stand on an important issue.
But Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., lead Senate sponsor of the rescissions package, told Punchbowl, “I think broadly there’s a lot of agreement that we need to move forward on it.”
Eliminating public funding for NPR and PBS is an important step in the cultural reconquista. The Left uses both institutions to tear down America’s cultural and historical narrative and put in place a distorted counternarrative. And, of course, the Left funds this with money from every American taxpayer.
Another such institution is the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum complex, with 21 museums and 14 educational and research centers. Trump in March issued an executive order that, right at the start, identified the problem: “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
Museums, added the order, “should be places where individuals go to learn—not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination.” It instructed Vice President JD Vance to “effectuate the policies of this order through his role on the Smithsonian Board of Regents.”
The first meeting of the board with the vice president was earlier this month. Vance worked the room with a mixture of persuasion and outright pressure, according to published reports from the always secretive meeting, and he got results.
Initial reports emphasized how the board had circled the wagons around Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch III, under whose leadership much of the wokeness has come in, and rebuffed Trump’s firing of National Portrait Gallery head Kim Sajet.
But Sajet was gone in a matter of days, resigning “on her own.” Bunch put out a statement thanking her for putting the Smithsonian’s interests “above her own.”
The Smithsonian also agreed to conduct a wide audit of all its content in order to eliminate biased material and perhaps even personnel.
Then, it emerged that Bunch emailed staff to admit to bias. “On occasion, some of our work has not aligned with our institutional values of scholarship, evenhandedness and nonpartisanship,” he wrote. “For that, we must all work to do better.”
Even better, in his budget request to Congress, Trump asked the legislature not to fund the Smithsonian’s creation of a Latino museum. Early exhibits of the planned museum have revealed that the Left will use it as an incubator of grievances against the United States, a place to stoke resentments among Americans with roots in Iberia or her colonies.
Instead, Trump wants the Smithsonian to return to sharing collections on the culture and history of these Americans across the complex’s many museums—reviving the so-called Smithsonian Latino Center of old, rather than sectioning off this part of American history in a segregated institution under the direction of woke curators.
Acting on my own capacity, I was one of more than 20 scholars with these roots to sign a letter supporting the president’s decision not to fund this mistake.
On the university front, lest we forget, it was about a month ago that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that she had ordered the cancellation of Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, barring the school from enrolling foreign students.
The second Trump administration understands the supreme importance of these ideological battles. And, as the past 30 days have shown, its decision to go on offense is working.
Originally published by the Washington Examiner
