On March 27, Trump issued an executive order authorizing the cleansing of the Smithsonian Museums and other federal sites of anything that detracts from American greatness and patriotism.
Trump makes clear that he doesn’t want anything displayed that implies that racism exists. He specifically targets the 21 museums of Smithsonian Institute. He wants all exhibits to remind the public of America’s greatness. Any exhibits that don’t, he says, should be removed.
The executive order says, in part:
It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing. Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.
The executive order assigns to Vice-President JD Vance the job of cleansing the Smithsonian museums and all federal parks and cultural institutions of all derogatory content about our history. In doing this, Vance will be assisted by one Lindsey Halligan, Esq.
Who is Lindsey Halligan, the woman who will determine which parts of the nation’s story should be told? If you open the link, you will see that she is a beautiful woman with long blond hair. But that’s not all.
The first question is: What is improper ideology, exactly?
The second: Who is Lindsey Halligan, Esq.?
We have her on the phone, actually. She’s calling from the White House.
“I would say that improper ideology would be weaponizing history,” Halligan says. “We don’t need to overemphasize the negative to teach people that certain aspects of our nation’s history may have been bad.” That overemphasis “just makes us grow further and further apart.”
As for the second question: Halligan, 35, is a Trump attorney who seems to have tasked herself as a sort of commissioner — or expurgator, according to critics — of a premier cultural institution.
After moving to D.C. just before the inauguration to continue working for Trump as a special assistant and senior associate staff secretary, Halligan visited local cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian museums of Natural History, American History and American Art. She didn’t like everything she saw. Some exhibits, in her view, did not reflect the America she knows and loves.
“And so I talked to the president about it,” Halligan says, “and suggested an executive order, and he gave me his blessing, and here we are.”
Here we are: A former Fox News host is leading the Pentagon. A vaccine skeptic is running the Department of Health and Human Services. A former professional wrestling executive is head of the Department of Education.
And Lindsey Halligan, Esq., could turn a major cultural institution upside down.
How did she arrive at this point? Halligan grew up in Broomfield, Colorado, and went to a private Catholic high school, Holy Family, where she excelled at softball and basketball. Her parents worked in the audiology industry. Halligan’s sister, Gavin, a family-law attorney in Colorado, ran for a state House seat as a Republican in 2016 in a blue district and lost.
Halligan attended Regis University, a Jesuit university in Denver, where she studied politics and broadcast journalism. She was always interested in history, she says — particularly the Civil War and the westward expansion of the country.
She competed in the Miss Colorado USA pageant, making the semifinals in 2009 and earning third runner-up in 2010, according to photos and records of the events. This was back when Trump co-owned the organization that puts on the Miss Universe pageant, for which Miss Colorado USA is a preliminary event.
Surrounded by education leaders from around the state, California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond reacts to President-elect Donald Trump’s education agenda at a news conference in Sacramento on Nov. 8, 2024.
Credit: California Department of Education
California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond vowed on Friday to fight President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to abolish the U.S. Department of Education, which he said represented a “clear threat to what our students need to have a good education and a great life.”
“We cannot be caught flatfooted,” Thurmond said, during a news conference.
Thurmond made his pronouncement in Sacramento on Friday while flanked by legislators and education and labor leaders holding up signs saying “Education Is For Everyone” and “Protect All Students.”
Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump has vowed to abolish the department, a long-standing and so far unfulfilled pledge made by Republican leaders dating back to former President Ronald Reagan.
Thurmond said there are concerns that abolishing the department would put at risk some $8 billion that California receives in federal funds for programs serving students with disabilities and those attending low-income schools, both public and private.
“We will not allow that to happen,” he said. “The law will not allow that to happen.”
He observed, for example, that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, known as IDEA, guarantees students in special education programs a “free and appropriate education,” and to receive a range of special education services in an individualized education program drawn up for every special education student.
Thurmond said Trump’s plan to defund the Department of Education would also harm students whose civil rights are violated and investigated through the Office of Civil Rights, including victims of racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, hate and bias toward LGBTQ students.
“To tear down and abolish an organization that provides protections for our students is a threat to the well-being of our students and our families and of Americans,” Thurmond said.
It was also not clear what would happen to student financial aid that the department administers, Thurmond said.
The first line of defense in the fight against Trump’s education plan is the Congress, Thurmond said. He said his department is reaching out to legislators to affirm their commitment to public education — an issue that he says surpasses partisan labels.
“Let me be clear,” Thurmond said. “This is not a partisan issue. This is an issue of continuing to assure that students have access to the resources that they are entitled to under the law. And we will continue to do that, and we will work with the members of Congress to ask them to stand and support our students.”
But Thurmond said that the California Department of Education is also preparing for a worst-case scenario: large-scale cuts to federal funding. In that case, he said, he is working with the California Legislature on a backup plan.
“If it comes to it, as a contingency, we are prepared to introduce legislation that would backfill funding for special education programs, Title I programs and programs that are similar in its scope,” Thurmond said. Title I money supplements state and local education funding for low-income students.
Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, the chair of the Assembly Education Committee, said that the state is prepared to stand up for all the students who are targeted by Trump’s policy proposals and rhetoric. He pointed to the threat of deportations of undocumented immigrants that would hurt large numbers of children of immigrants, as well as threats to other student populations.
“It is the job of every teacher, every school board member, every principal, every elected representative in the state of California who believes in public education, it is time for us to stand up to protect all of these kids,” he said. “When we are facing a bully who is targeting our most vulnerable students, we all need to stand up.”
“We need to get ready now for what is going to start on Jan. 20,” Muratsuchi said, referring to Trump’s second inauguration.
In the wake of Trump’s attacks on immigrants, Cruz-Gonzalez said it is important to remind school staff of those protections so that students and families will continue to feel safe and protected when they attend school.
“It’s not enough to know that we have laws on the books,” Cruz-Gonzalez said. “We have to work together in coalition and ensure our superintendents, our school board members and our teachers know what to do to protect these rights.”
The right to public education is the “cornerstone of democracy,” said Chinua Rhodes, school board member at Sacramento City Unified School District.
“This is not just a political battle, it is a moral one,” Rhodes said. “Our schools should not abandon the most needy.”
In 1994, I was the press secretary for the U.S. Department of Education when Republicans took over Congress and threatened to shut us down. My then boss, Secretary Dick Riley, would joke in almost every speech he gave that each morning his wife would open the newspaper and say, “Hey! looks like they’re trying to fire you again!” He regularly talked about it because it quickly became clear to us that people deeply believed in the Education Department’s mission and that the threats against us were bad politics.
I was thinking of this when I watched Donald Trump’s 10-point plan for education. I was struck by its contradictory nature of wanting to dismantle federal involvement in schools, while simultaneously trying to dictate curriculum and impose ideological policies. The department was established in 1979 to ensure resources were being spent on our nation’s poorest children.
Now, three decades after my time at the department, the same battle is resurfacing with a new twist. At its heart, what Trump’s really proposing is a hollowing out of the department’s founding mission — not a true decentralization of power to states, but a reimagining of federal oversight as a tool for ideological control instead of a protection for our nation’s most vulnerable.
But here’s the paradox: Without a Department of Education and federal resources, there’s less leverage to enforce his ideological agenda. As a result, we may be in a bizarre quandary of having to choose between these two opposite visions. Given the choice between a Department of Education that no longer champions equity and no department at all, perhaps it’s time to consider the latter.
The plan, as I understand it, is to move higher ed funding (Pell Grants and student loans) and education research to other agencies while providing equity-driven K-12 federal funds as block grants to be spent however states want.
In California, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) ensures that schools serving students with the greatest needs — low-income students, English learners and foster youth — receive additional resources. With LCFF, we’ve built a system that both works and meets this moment (though we may also need to codify our clear commitment to special education). As someone who has spent decades in education policy, I don’t say this lightly — in fact, it breaks my heart. But this moment calls for different thinking. The U.S. Department of Education has been a force for good in countless lives. But it should not stand if it’s dictated by ideological agendas. Quality education for all children must remain our North Star in California, because when we center our most vulnerable students, we all succeed.
•••
Rick Miller is the CEO of CORE Districts, a collaboration of nine large California urban districts. He previously served as press secretary for the U.S. Department of Education and as deputy state superintendent at the California Department of Education.
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Under the misguided policies of Trump and Hegseth, censorship and book banning have been widespread, especially by the Defense Department. Hegseth is eager to please Trump and has stripped recognition from anyone of distinction who is female and/or non-white. Even a photograph of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb, was taken down–because of its name. The Navajo Code Talkers were put into storage. The first women to achieve military feats and honors were mothballed. The U.S. Naval Academy removed almost 400 books from its library because of DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) themes.
Ryan Holiday was invited to lecture at the Naval Academy a few weeks ago, as he had in the past. Shortly before he was to speak, he was asked not to mention the books that had been removed from the Academy’s library. When he refused, his speech was canceled.
Question: if the men and women of the U.S. Navy are brave enough to risk their lives, aren’t they brave enough to read a book about race and gender?
For the past four years, I have been delivering a series of lectures on the virtues of Stoicism to midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and I was supposed to continue this on April 14 to the entire sophomore class on the theme of wisdom.
Roughly an hour before my talk was to begin, I received a call: Would I refrain from any mention in my remarks of the recent removal of 381 supposedly controversial books from the Nimitz library on campus? My slides had been sent up the chain of command at the school, which was now, as it was explained to me, extremely worried about reprisals if my talk appeared to flout Executive Order 14151(“Ending Radical and Wasteful Government D.E.I. Programs and Preferencing”).
When I declined, my lecture — as well as a planned speech before the Navy football team, with which my books on Stoicism are popular — was canceled. (The academy “made a schedule change that aligns with its mission of preparing midshipmen for careers of service,” a Navy spokesperson told Times Opinion. “The Naval Academy is an apolitical institution.”)
Had I been allowed to go ahead, this is the story I was going to tell the class:
In the fall of 1961, a young naval officer named James Stockdale, a graduate of the Naval Academy and future Medal of Honor recipient who went on to be a vice admiral, began a course at Stanford he had eagerly anticipated on Marxist theory. “We read no criticisms of Marxism,” he recounted later, “only primary sources. All year we read the works of Marx and Lenin.”
It might seem unusual that the Navy would send Stockdale, then a 36-year-old fighter pilot, to get a master’s degree in the social sciences, but he knew why he was there. Writing home to his parents that year, he reminded them of a lesson they had instilled in him, “You really can’t do well competing against something you don’t understand as well as something you can.”
At the time, Marxism was not just an abstract academic subject, but the ideological foundation of America’s greatest geopolitical enemy. The stakes were high. The Soviets were pushing a vision of global Communism and the conflict in Vietnam was flashing hot, the North Vietnamese fueled by a ruthless mix of dogma and revolutionary zeal. “Marxism” was, like today, also a culture war boogeyman used by politicians and demagogues.
Just a few short years after completing his studies, in September 1965, Stockdale was shot down over Thanh Hoa in North Vietnam, and as he parachuted into what he knew would be imprisonment and possibly death, his mind turned to the philosophy of Epictetus, which he had been introduced to by a professor at Stanford.
He would spend the next seven years in various states of solitary confinement and enduring brutal torture. His captors, sensing perhaps his knowledge as a pilot of the “Gulf of Tonkin incident,” a manufactured confrontation with North Vietnamese forces that led to greater U.S. involvement in Vietnam, sought desperately to break him. Stockdale drew on the Stoicism of Epictetus, but he also leveraged his knowledge of the practices and the mind-set of his oppressors.
“In Hanoi, I understood more about Marxist theory than my interrogator did,” Stockdale explained. “I was able to say to that interrogator, ‘That’s not what Lenin said; you’re a deviationist.’”
In his writings and speeches after his return from the prison known as the Hanoi Hilton, Stockdale often referred to what he called “extortion environments,” which he used to describe his experience as a captive. He and his fellow P.O.W.s were asked to answer simple questions or perform seemingly innocuous tasks, like appear in videos, and if they declined, there would be consequences.
No one at the Naval Academy intimated any consequences for me, of course, but it felt extortionary all the same. I had to choose between my message or my continued welcome at an institution it has been one of the honors of my life to speak at.
As an author, I believe deeply in the power of books. As a bookstore owner in Texas, I have spoken up about book banning many timesalready. More important was the topic of my address: the virtue of wisdom.
As I explained repeatedly to my hosts, I had no interest in embarrassing anyone or discussing politics directly. I understand the immense pressures they are under, especially the military employees, and I did not want to cause them trouble. I did, however, feel it was essential to make the point that the pursuit of wisdom is impossible without engaging with (and challenging) uncomfortable ideas.
Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, used a military metaphor to make this very argument. We ought to read, he said, “like a spy in the enemy’s camp.” This is what Stockdale was doing when he studied Marxism on the Navy’s dime. It is what Seneca was doing when he read and liberally quoted from Epicurus, the head of a rival philosophical school.
The current administration is by no means unique in its desire to suppress ideas it doesn’t like or thinks dangerous. As I intended to explain to the midshipmen, there was considerable political pressure in the 1950s over what books were carried in the libraries of federal installations. Asked if he would ban communist books from American embassies, Eisenhower resisted.
“Generally speaking,” he told a reporter from The New York Herald Tribuneat a news conference shortly after his inauguration, “my idea is that censorship and hiding solves nothing.” He explained that he wished more Americans had read Hitler and Stalin in the previous years, because it might have helped anticipate the oncoming threats. He concluded, “Let’s educate ourselves if we are going to run a free government.”
The men and women at the Naval Academy will go on to lead combat missions, to command aircraft carriers, to pilot nuclear-armed submarines and run enormous organizations. We will soon entrust them with incredible responsibilities and power. But we fear they’ll be hoodwinked or brainwashed by certain books?
Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was not one of the books removed from the Naval Academy library, and as heinous as that book is, it should be accessible to scholars and students of history. However, this makes the removal of Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” inexplicable. Whatever one thinks of D.E.I., we are not talking about the writings of external enemies here, but in many cases, art, serious scholarship and legitimate criticism of America’s past. One of the removed books is about Black soldiers in World War II, another is about how women killed in the Holocaust are portrayed, another is a reimagining of Kafka called “The Last White Man.” No one at any public institution should have to fear losing their job for pushing back on such an obvious overreach, let alone those tasked with defending our freedom. Yet here we are.
The decision by the academy’s leaders to not protest the original order — which I believe flies in the face of basic academic freedoms and common sense — has put them in the now even stickier position of trying to suppress criticism of that decision. “Compromises pile up when you’re in a pressure situation in the hands of a skilled extortionist,” Stockdale reminds us. I felt I could not, in good conscience, lecture these future leaders and warriors on the virtue of courage and doing the right thing, as I did in 2023 and 2024, and fold when asked not to mention such an egregious and fundamentally anti-wisdom course of action.
In many moments, many understandable moments, Stockdale had an opportunity to do the expedient thing as a P.O.W. He could have compromised. He could have obeyed. It would have saved him considerable pain, prevented the injuries that deprived him of full use of his leg for the rest of his life and perhaps even returned him home sooner to his family. He chose not to do that. He rejected the extortionary choice and stood on principle.
David Sanger wrote an article in the New York Times about Trump’s “Experiment in Recklessness.” His plan is no plan at all. His approach is no more than “burn-it-down-first,” figure what to do later. His article appeared on Wednesday, before Trump announced a 90-day pause in his incomprehensible plan to tax every nation–even uninhabited islands–but exempt Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and Cuba. Even desperately impoverished Lesotho–where the average pay is $5 a day–was subject to Trump’s tariffs.
Our government is run by a cabal of people who are either evil or stupid or both. Probably both. People will die and are dying now because of their actions. Government agencies are being ripped apart. A generation of scientists has been ousted from important jobs in the government and in universities, where their federal grants have been terminated. All federal efforts to address climate change have been cancelled.
Where Trump goes, chaos , destruction and death go with him.
Sanger writes:
As the breadth of the Trump revolution has spread across Washington in recent weeks, its most defining feature is a burn-it-down-first, figure-out-the-consequences-later recklessness. The costs of that approach are now becoming clear.
Administration officials knew the markets would dive and other nations would retaliate when President Trump announced his long-promised “reciprocal” tariffs. But when pressed, several senior officials conceded that they had spent only a few days considering how the economic earthquake might have second-order effects.
And officials have yet to describe the strategy for managing a global system of astounding complexity after the initial shock wears off, other than endless threats and negotiations between the leader of the world’s largest economy and everyone else.
Take the seemingly unmanaged escalation with China, the world’s second largest economy, and the only superpower capable of challenging the United States economically, technologically and militarily. By American and Chinese accounts, there was no substantive conversation between Mr. Trump and China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, or engagement among their senior aides, before the countries plunged toward a trade war.
Last Wednesday, Mr. Trump’s hastily devised formula for figuring out country-by-country tariffs came up with a 34 percent tax on all Chinese goods, everything from car parts to iPhones to much of what is on the shelves at Walmart and on Amazon’s app.
When Mr. Xi, predictably, matched that figure, Mr. Trump issued an ultimatum for him to reverse the decision in 24 hours — waving a red flag in front of a leader who would never want to appear to be backing down to Washington. On Wednesday, the tariff went to 104 percent, with no visible strategy for de-escalation.
If Mr. Trump does get into a trade war with China, he shouldn’t look for much help from America’s traditional allies — Japan, South Korea or the European Union — who together with the United States account for nearly half of the world economy. All of them were equally shocked, and while each is negotiating with Mr. Trump, they seem in no mood to help him manage China.
“Donald Trump has launched a global economic war without any allies,” the economist Josh Lipsky of the Atlantic Council wrote on Tuesday. “That is why — unlike previous economic crises in this century — there is no one coming to save the global economy if the situation starts to unravel.”
The global trading system is only one example of the Trump administration tearing something apart, only to reveal it has no plan for how to replace it.
State Department officials knew that eliminating the U.S. Agency for International Development, the nation’s premier aid agency, would inevitably cost lives. But when a devastating earthquake struck central Myanmar late last month and took down buildings as far away as Bangkok, officials scrambled to provide even a modicum of help — only to discover that the network of positioned aid, and the people and aircraft to distribute it, had been dismantled.
Having dismantled a system that had responded to major calamities before, they settled on sending a survey team of three employees to examine the wreckage and make recommendations. All three were terminated from their jobs even while they stood amid the ruins in the ancient city of Mandalay, Myanmar, trying to revive an American capability that the Department of Government Efficiency — really no department at all — had crippled.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was unapologetic about the paltry American response when he talked to reporters on Friday: “There are a lot of other rich countries, they should also pitch in and help,” he said. “We’re going to continue to do our part, but it’s going to be balanced with all of the other interests we have as a country.”
Similarly, there was no plan for retrieving a Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to a notoriously dangerous Salvadoran prison, a move a judge called “wholly lawless” and an issue the Supreme Court is expected to take up in the next few days. A Justice Department lawyer in the case was placed on administrative leave, apparently for conceding that the man never should have been sent to the prison.
Mr. Trump has appeared mostly unmoved as the knock-on effects of his policies take shape. He has shrugged off the loss of $5 trillion in the value of the American markets in recent days. Aboard Air Force One on Sunday night, he said: “Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”
To finish reading the article, click here. It should be a gift article.
Friends, we are in a whole lot of trouble. Trump is not a businessman. He played one on TV. He is a performer. He is in way over his head. He called Elon Musk a “genius.” Musk called Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro “a moron.” Trump allowed Musk to tear almost every federal agency apart, destroying vital programs and firing essential personnel.
We have to push back as hard as we can. Trump and his minions have retreated on some of their stupid actions (like purging Harriet Tubman and the Jnderground Railroad of its role in helping slaves escape). Little victories like this should encourage wider protests against the chaos that Trump has unleashed. Is he doing it for Putin’s benefit? Does he suffer from dementia?
