Connexion
Left-wing curators make exhibits of their own stupidity.
You just can’t trust archaeologists anymore. Earlier this year, some claimed to have found the bones of Ivar the Boneless. It can’t have been him, then, can it?
Dead Viking warlords aren’t the only ones having their remains dug up and rearranged into new and misleading forms. On July 4th, which I’m told is historically significant in some way or other, the Trump administration released a scathing new report on the politicization of museums. Called “Saving America’s Story,” the document reveals how the Smithsonian Institution—particularly its National Museum of American History—has, by the open admission of its director Anthea Hartig, endeavored to turn the preservation of the past into “a tool of social justice.”
Hartig, as the report also notes, has claimed that she was “propped up” in life “by the cushions of whiteness and the pillows of the bourgeoisie,” so naturally Trump has decided to pick a large public pillow-fight with her in return. This doesn’t sound like a very difficult thing to do, as Hartig has openly stated her intention to “problematize” this year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by moving away from a traditional “Anglo-centric” focus on the event, perhaps by claiming the US actually gained its independence from China or Uruguay.
Trump’s latest salvo in this duel has been the placement of large signs outside Smithsonian sites, alerting visitors to the fact many of the displays within are intentionally misleading, and directing them toward unnamed alternative sources of “accurate information regarding American history” instead. As Trump is the same man who once said America’s Continental Army successfully “took over the airports” in 1775, perhaps his signs will redirect tourists toward Washington’s Museum of Science Fiction (admittedly, this whimsical destination hasn’t actually opened yet, but to those with such a profound grasp of chronology as Trump and Hartig, surely such a tiny quibble won’t matter).
To return to the report: it notes that visitors to the Smithsonian will find “no major exhibit” relating to the Founding Fathers in which they are not “introduced chiefly through their connection to slavery.” And if they don’t really have much connection to slavery, then why not just make one up?
An exhibit devoted to Benjamin Franklin’s discoveries about electricity arbitrarily wonders whether he ever decided to stage experiments in running high-electric voltage through the body of “an indentured servant or an enslaved person.” If so, the exhibition reluctantly admits, “he never mentioned them in reports of his work.” Hard to prove a negative, I suppose.
Within Hartig’s expertly problematized Smithsonianland, absolutely everything that exists in America now, or has ever existed in the past, is condemned as racist, sexist or homophobic, no matter how trivial it may be. Visitors are solemnly informed that “ukuleles are both a product of U.S. imperialism and a potent symbol of Native Hawaiian resistance” and that Mickey Mouse carries the “vestiges of longstanding traditions of blackface minstrelsy.”
The museum has also selected weird new talismans to place in Perspex cases for its visitors to gaze upon. One such artifact is a gown with giant butterfly wings sewn onto the back, which someone named Jairo Javier Morales wore to his college graduation ceremony in 2020 in order to “expand the boundaries of belonging” by publicly “coming out” as “queer, Mexican and undocumented” in it. (One wonders whether ICE has lepidopterists on staff).
Trump’s report frames all this as being specifically about undermining age-old straight American values in favor of brand-new gay Mexican ones, but it is in fact part of a wider movement to convert museums all over the world into vehicles for anti-Western sentiment. The winner of the European Museum of the Year Award for 2025, for instance, went to England’s Manchester Museum, and not just because it contained an entire gallery full of Andy Burnham’s favorite vintage 1980s Smiths t-shirts.
The Museum reopened after a major refit in 2023. I would have guessed this was meant to spruce the place up, maybe give the staff a chance to sharpen the T-Rex teeth and bleach the mummy bandages. Apparently not. When the museum reopened, it had been transformed into a giant monument to the modish political preoccupations of the present. Yes, the dinosaurs and the dead are still there, but radically repurposed. Manchester Museum’s director, Esme Ward, emoted that:
Manchester Museum was born of incredible civic spirit, but it was also born of empire and of racism and we have to grapple with the legacy of that. We want to do that in a way that recognizes the harm, but also encourages healing.
One way of doing this was to give away many of the building’s exhibits in acts of “cultural repatriation”, such as the 174 “ritual objects” it returned to Australasian Aborigines in 2023. “We believe this is the future of museums,” said Esme Ward at the time: becoming empty buildings. Manchester Museum does actually contain some literal empty glass boxes, said to “contain” species driven extinct by evil white industrialism. So, not the Giant Moa (killed off by New Zealand’s Maori) then.
Even stuffed birds, Giant Moa or otherwise, are denounced in Manchester; there are more male avian samples than female ones in their inventory, curators lament, because the Victorian “cis, white, straight men” who collected them were all sexists. This can also be seen in how the antique taxidermy displays are arranged with a mommy bird, a daddy bird, and nests of baby birds, in queerphobic attempts to reproduce the oppressive heterosexual “nuclear family”.
The remodeled Museum also has a special “Decolonize! Trail”, described as being “an intervention”. Sounds like the curators are in need of one of those themselves. Staff have even sought to somehow “decolonize” their mineral collection: too much alabaster, not enough coal.
Manchester Museum aims to be “the most inclusive, imaginative and caring museum you’ll ever visit”. To this end, it contains special “safe spaces” for those who feel too overwhelmed by its exhibits to be able to cope with them. Like anyone at all who happens to possess any genuine knowledge about real-life history, for example.
Nor is this mania limited to Manchester. In 2021, Holland’s Rijksmuseum organized an exhibition of paintings all “about” colonialism, most of which were not really about colonialism at all. One, The Pipe Smoker, just showed a man smoking a pipe. But, as a censorious caption helpfully noted, he could only smoke this pipe because, somewhere, many thousands of miles away, some black slaves (who were nowhere pictured by the artist) had probably picked his tobacco for him.
A 2022 Hogarth retrospective at England’s Tate Gallery went even further in finding random fictional “connections” between artwork and slavery. One painting showed a white man (Hogarth himself) sitting on a brown chair. Two years after George Floyd, that may as well have been a white man kneeling on a brown chair’s neck, according to the associated caption:
The curvaceous chair literally supports him … The chair is made from timbers shipped from the colonies, via routes which also shipped enslaved people. Could the chair also stand in for all those unnamed Black and Brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity?
It could, I suppose, be an elaborate, all-encompassing symbol of racial hierarchy and oppression… or it might just be a chair.
Another contemporary curatorial trick is to spuriously imply everything within an exhibition space is secretly gay. London’s Imperial War Museum is a prime candidate for such wokeification, as left-wingers tend to be keen on neither war nor imperialism. Far better to transition the institution into the Anti-Imperialist Queer Museum instead, by hijacking captions describing a display about the plastic surgery techniques developed during wartime to give soldiers new lives after literally having their faces burned off on the battlefield to turn it into a musing as to how such techniques could also be used to give male combatants bespoke vaginoplasties.
What kind of twisted mind sees the face of a tragically disfigured soldier, and immediately thinks “Give him a new wound down below too?” The kind of twisted mind which now runs many of the West’s most prestigious museums and art galleries.
Alongside all the weird, Orwellian ideologues like Anthea Hartig, outfits like the Smithsonian, the Tate and the Rijksmuseum must also employ numerous sane and knowledgeable experts who can see how ridiculous and damaging this all is. So why won’t they stand up and say so?
Perhaps, some far future day, someone will dig up all their coffins and announce he’s found the family of Ivar the Spineless.
The post Blight At the Museum appeared first on The American Conservative.
Congress has a fitness problem, and Kean is just the latest example.
Against the wishes of his doctors, Rep. Tom Kean (R-NJ) returned to Congress on Tuesday, his first appearance there in more than 100 days.
Addressing the House floor, Kean began by noting that he is a “private person” before explaining his multi-month absence from his duties in Washington, DC.
“Several months ago, due to health concerns, I entered the hospital for some testing,” said the 57-year-old Kean. “I was given the diagnosis of depression.”
It was a stark admission for a politician whose critics have long questioned his absence but were met with silence. Though depression is not disqualifying in and of itself, the lack of transparency from a person who was elected to provide it is worrying. Furthermore, if a disability keeps you off the job for four months, especially a job as important as serving in Congress, then the job likely isn’t compatible with the disability Kean is currently navigating.
More worrying yet is how the rollout of Kean’s diagnosis was handled. Kean gave his speech to a largely empty House chamber, then breezed past CNN’s Manu Raju as the reporter peppered him with questions after four months of silence. Kean has also yet to hold the kind of press conference his absence warrants, one which would allow the Congressman to address questions regarding the current state of his recovery or the treatment plan given to address his diagnosis.
In the nearly four months since he stood before the public, Kean had reported expenses for personal travel in San Francisco and staff travel in Las Vegas. He also submitted his personal stock trading activity. But as the weeks turned into months, and with little details provided by staff members, questions arose as to the whereabouts and condition of the U.S. representative for New Jersey’s 7th congressional district.
Though Kean has framed his return as an act of courage, a man who had time to file expense reports and disclose stock trades but not to answer a single question about his condition is not a man who is simply managing an illness, but one who is more concerned with managing his image. Furthermore, both Kean and his staffers chose silence over a press release, statement, or a single tweet that could have addressed the issue directly.
Speaking with reporters outside Congress on Tuesday, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) refused to apologize for what she characterized as fair criticism of her Republican colleague. “I think not showing up for work is discounting the voters,” Boebert told TMZ. “That’s literally taxation without representation. It’s awful. We were elected to be here to work, and it’s unacceptable.”
And then there’s Kean’s voting record on paid sick leave. During his time in Congress, he has repeatedly voted against the sort of relief he was granted as a member of Congress. In 2018, Kean, then a member of the New Jersey Senate, voted against the Earned Sick Leave Act, a piece of legislation that mandated five paid sick leave days per year for New Jersey workers. “He’s been able to rely on things he directly voted against,” said Yarrow Willman-Cole, a member of the nonprofit New Jersey Citizen Action, the group who organized the legislation.
But despite Kean’s failure to support legislation that would’ve provided New Jersey workers with protections similar to the ones he took advantage of as a member of Congress, other congressional colleagues were sympathetic to Kean’s condition. Responding to Boebert’s claims that Kean took off four months from work because he was “sad,” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) suggested the high-octane representative from Colorado should “educate herself about mental health.”
“Depression is not an emotion, it’s a condition,” Torres told TMZ. “You should no more blame someone for their depression than you would blame a diabetic for the inability to generate insulin. It’s a condition beyond their control. When someone comes out as struggling with depression, the proper response is empathy and sympathy, not disdain and dismissiveness.”
Though Torres makes a fair point, it’s not beyond the pale for Boebert and others to point out that across the political spectrum in Congress, several politicians have suffered or are currently suffering from ailments that keep them from performing to the sort of standard expected of federal legislators. Whether it’s Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) freezing on camera or Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) suffering a stroke and being treated for depression in the aftermath, both political parties feature notable examples of lawmakers who have battled debilitating illnesses without resigning to address health concerns.
None of this is an argument that sick people don’t belong in public life. It’s an argument that Congress currently has no real standard for when illness—whether physical or mental—makes the job impossible to do, and lawmakers are left to police themselves, which mostly means they don’t. Kean didn’t create that problem. But his four months of silence, followed by a return with no real accounting for them, is exactly the kind of case that should force the question: not whether depression disqualifies someone from serving, but whether an institution this important can keep functioning on the honor system.
Until Congress builds something better, the least voters can ask of Kean and others is the transparency he’s so far refused to give them. If he can’t offer that, he should do the honorable thing and step down.
The post The Tom Kean Question appeared first on The American Conservative.
Two-hundred fifty years after the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson continues to embody America
In June of 1826, the citizens of Washington, D.C. invited Thomas Jefferson to their celebration of America’s 50th Independence Day. His health failing, the Sage of Monticello sent his regrets:
I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made. May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government.
Stirring words. The more so since, as every schoolboy knows (or used to know), their author would not live through the end of that Fourth. Jefferson’s death, twinned with that of John Adams just a few hours later, immediately passed into American legend. More than a striking coincidence, this was nothing less than a divine benediction on our republican experiment.
And in the decades following, something else remarkable happened—or rather, failed to happen. When other Founders shuffled off this mortal coil, their influence on public life tended to quickly recede. Many were honored, of course (deified, in the case of Washington), but behind museum glass, as relics and reminders of days gone by.
Not so Jefferson.
The body was barely cold before the wrangling began for his mantle. The Jacksonians pressed the first and most compelling case, making Jefferson’s enthusiasm for popular democracy and abhorrence for privilege central elements of their political creed. “The Jackson press constantly circulated his writings,” one historian relates, and “Democratic politicians developed the habit of answering their opponents by squirting Jefferson’s opinions into their eyes.”
But the Southern radicals who defied Jackson on the tariff question also had a claim. Was not Jefferson a lifelong opponent of centralization? And did he not himself write the celebrated Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, which asserted the right of states to nullify federal law? (It is a great irony of history that the occasion at which Jackson gave his famous toast—“Our Union, it must be preserved”—and Calhoun his less famous reply—“The Union, next to our liberties most dear”—was a dinner celebrating Jefferson’s birthday.) Even some Whigs, those noted defenders of privilege, wielded Jefferson’s republicanism against the purportedly dictatorial rule of “King Andrew.”
In the lead-up to the Civil War, both fire-eaters and free soil men repaired to the standard of Jefferson. Dixie enthused over his states’ rights views, his lifelong ownership of slaves, and his endorsement of a people’s prerogative to sever its existing political bonds. In seceding from the Union, Jefferson Davis claimed, the Southern states had “merely asserted a right which the Declaration of Independence of 1776 had defined to be inalienable.” Of course, the “all men are created equal” line stuck in some Southern craws, with Davis’ vice president proclaiming the Confederacy’s foundation “upon exactly the opposite idea” in his notorious Cornerstone Speech.
Among Northern Republicans, it was precisely that articulation of universal equality that resonated most powerfully. As Lincoln wrote in 1858:
All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
As the years wore on, our third president would remain a political touchstone accessible to most sides of most issues.
When America underwent its first spasm of overseas expansion, Jefferson was trotted out by anti-imperialists like William Jennings Bryan, who quoted his statement that “conquest is not in our principles [and] is inconsistent with our government” in a speech to the Democratic convention, and by imperialists like Teddy Roosevelt, who assured his own party’s convention that “the parallel between what Jefferson did with Louisiana and what is now being done with the Philippines is exact.”
New Dealers invoked Jefferson’s solicitude for the common man to justify their construction of a welfare state (FDR was a frequent visitor to Monticello, and took a personal interest in the creation of the Jefferson Memorial). Their Republican opponents, naturally enough, fought back with the great man’s criticisms of overweening federal power.
During the ’50s and ’60s, segregationists made what they framed as Jeffersonian arguments for racial hierarchy and “local institutions”; the civil rights movement, more powerfully, appealed to what MLK called the great “promissory note” of the Declaration.
And around the turn of the millennium, the popular image of Jefferson became that of an “American Sphinx” (to filch from Joseph Ellis), the enigmatic embodiment of all the country’s bundled hopes, disappointments, and paradoxes.
Recent years have been harder on Jefferson. His involvement with slavery was brought to the forefront in the 2010s, gradually occluding almost every other element of his legacy. He came in for cancellation during the Great Awokening—schools were renamed, statues toppled, and a damnatio memoriae pronounced.
Today’s Democratic Party seems to have utterly sundered its 200-year connection with him. Republicans, meanwhile, have more use for historical figures with fewer compunctions about the exercise of executive power (Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon are the presidents of choice).
But the high tide of woke is receding, and the right will eventually rediscover the virtues of Jeffersonian restraint. If the past is any guide, Jefferson will be back in vogue sooner or later. He is simply too compelling, too interesting, too fundamental.
Much ink has been spilled to explain this unique appeal. As his political afterlife suggests, much of it stems from the sheer range and diversity of Jefferson’s thought, together with his unparalleled eloquence and talent for expression. Contradictions that would have driven lesser minds into muddled incoherence are by his genius held in productive, fascinating tension.
There is also the attractive richness and multifariousness of Jefferson’s character—his intense sensitivity and sentimentality, his successes in pursuits ranging from lawmaking and diplomacy to architecture and agriculture, his insatiable curiosity concerning essentially every dimension of the human experience. Here was a man who defied easy characterization; who could, as Henry Adams once observed, “be painted only touch by touch, with a fine pencil.”
Then we have his practical record: literally articulating our national creed; defending democracy, civil liberties, and peace against a Federalism that would have destroyed all three; doubling our national territory. Any one of these achievements would have been enough to secure everlasting fame: the three together vault him into the pantheon.
All of this has enabled Jefferson to encompass and represent as much of our national promise as it is possible for one person to embody. On our 250th anniversary, we may still say with one of his early biographers, “If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right.”
The post All Honor to Jefferson appeared first on The American Conservative.
Coddling immigrant criminals comes at a cost.
The response of the British left to the knife attack on two Jews, Moshe Shine, 76, and Shloime Rand, 34, in London’s Golders Green on Wednesday was telling. The leader of the left-wing Green Party, Zack Polanski, retweeted a post on X accusing the police of brutality for “violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head.” Well, a kick in the head is perhaps the least this attacker should have expected after refusing to give up his weapons; in many jurisdictions, he would be dead. Essa Suleiman has now been charged with attempted murder.
The men stabbed in Golders Green were treated by Hatzola, the same Jewish volunteer emergency services organisation whose ambulances were firebombed in April by a group claiming to be Iranian proxies. Last Monday, a street away in this historically peaceful Jewish enclave, there was an arson attack on a memorial to those killed on October 7 and to Iranian protesters. Last month, there was another arson committed against a Jewish-owned shop in Watford. These outrages followed the bloody Islamist terror attack on a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur last October. Two Jews died at the hands of one Jihad Al-Shamie, a British citizen.
The government has now raised the terrorist threat level in the UK to “severe,” which means the security services believe a further attack is “highly likely” in the next six months. The head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, said April 29 that there is “an epidemic of antisemitism across the world and in Britain.” The government’s adviser on terrorism, Jonathan Hall KC, says British Jews are “now thinking they cannot live a normal life”.
No wonder. The Golders Green knife attacker was 45-year-old Essa Suleiman, born in Somalia but described as “British,” as if his ethnic origins were dissolved when he arrived in the UK. Suleiman was known to the authorities, had a history of extreme violence and had been referred to Prevent, the government-sponsored “deradicalization” program. But he developed mental health issues (in the parlance of our times), so he was apparently allowed to walk free.
Britain’s antisemitism epidemic is underpinned by a kind of institutional unwillingness to take it as seriously as Islamophobia, the much-discussed “two-tier justice system.” As the Jewish author and comedian David Baddiel put it in his book of the same name: “Jews Don’t Count.”
Since the Hamas assault on Jewish civilians on October 7, 2023, Jew-hatred has risen measurably in this supposedly tolerant country. The independent Community Security Trust (CST), which monitors anti-Jewish hate crime, recorded 4,103 incidents in 2023 alone, the highest annual total since records began in 1984, with two-thirds occurring after October 7. The CST records include assaults on Jews in the streets, Jews harassed on public transport, threats against synagogues, schools and community centres, antisemitic graffiti and vandalism, abuse on university campuses, and the online glorification of Hamas. Jewish schools in London often resemble armed camps manned by security guards. Many Jews claim to be afraid to walk the streets.
Yet responses to the problem from politicians and public officials have been muted. Polanski has said that fears of antisemitism in Britain are a “perception of unsafety” and not “actual unsafety.” This kind of sophistry is widespread. Celebrities such as the football presenter Gary Lineker and the author Zadie Smith are quick to accuse Israel of “genocide” in Gaza but somehow lose their voices when faced with home-grown racial violence against Jews.
Academics celebrate the gender theorist Judith Butler’s view that the October 7 attacks were “armed resistance” and many Britons agree and believe Israelis are “war criminals” murdering women and children in Gaza indiscriminately. Too many people, especially under-24-year-olds in Britain, think that the Hamas atrocity was an “understandable” response to the oppression of Palestinians in their “homeland” by “settler colonialists,” as if these Jews had some imperial metropolitan homeland to which they could return. The result is not thoughtful criticism of the Israeli government, but widespread indifference or animus toward British Jews.
It is only a couple of years since the Labour MP Diane Abbott declared that racism against Jews was not possible. It is like “prejudice against redheads,” she insisted in a letter to the Guardian, not “real racism”, which is “always against people of colour.” This was after the then leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, was suspended by his own party after the Equality and Human Rights Commission reported that antisemitic racism very definitely did exist and was endemic to what had been the party of government.
And that is why the current hand-wringing by politicians such as Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood over the rise in antisemitic terror rings false. We hear endlessly about institutional racism against Muslims. Islamophobia may soon be made a criminal offence. But institutional antisemitism is arguably the greatest failing of British officialdom. It is a myopic inability to see Jews as anything other than rich, white war criminals. And the result is bleeding on London streets.
The post Two-Tier Justice Comes for British Jews appeared first on The American Conservative.
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