Whitewash in every sense
A week after taking down signs at Independence National Historical Park referencing George Washington’s ownership of slaves, the National Park Service has been ordered to remove signs and displays pertaining to climate change and Native Americans at a handful of national parks in the West.
“The moves are the latest actions by the Trump administration to whitewash and sanitize history at National Park Service sites by removing or changing signage about slavery, climate change, Native Americans, transgender rights, and other issues,” the Sierra Club said Tuesday in a statement.
[How did “transgender rights” get in there? What can such undefined rights have to do with national parks?]
“The Trump administration continues to politicize our national parks by censoring facts to sell a sanitized version of history. Removing signage about slavery, climate change, and Native Americans doesn’t change history,” said Gerry James, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Outdoors for All campaign.
No random mention of “trans rights” – was that just thrown in at the top because it’s Forbidden to not mention trans something?
The administration shortly after taking office a year ago ordered a review of signage and displays in the National Park System to ensure they were in line with President Donald Trump’s bid to ensure that “interpretive materials … ensure accuracy, honesty, and alignment with shared national values,”
Nope nope nope. Not accuracy, not honesty. Vanity, hostility, alignment with trumpian politics.
Signage and displays reportedly targeted in this order include information pertaining to the slowly disappearing glaciers in Glacier National Park in Montana due to climate change and interpretive panels at Grand Canyon National Park explaining how Native Americans were displaced from the area.
Maybe Trump should go pay a long visit in Germany, and while there he should urge Merz to get rid of any and all interpretive panels at the death camps.
The display removed last week from the President’s House at Independence National Historical Park depicted individuals who had been enslaved by George Washington, along with a timeline detailing the history of slavery in America. Washington and John Adams both resided at the site during their presidencies.
John Adams on the other hand did not enslave anyone. The fact that Washington (and Jefferson and others) did is important and of interest. Yes it’s a downer, but it’s a necessary downer.
He might also consider, while he is at it, including Germany into the US. By that stage, he will have grabbed Greenland, Canada, and Venezuela: (think of them as ‘pussies’) so he will be a dab hand at it, so to speak.
And he is also removing mention of the history of women, but no one felt the need to include that in the list of those impacted by the removal of history from the National Park Service. I suspect it would be more likely that there would be plaques relevant to things women did than that there would be plaques for trans, but hey, we can’t say the dirtiest five letter word in the English language, right? Not in this case where it isn’t relevant, no, but not in the cases where it is, either.
He is? Tell us more!
I’m finding more. Jeezus. I seem to have missed this last year.
I’m trying to understand what “Cultural Marxism” is, but there’s a book of essays out on the War on Science, edited by Lawrence Krauss on all the ways that academia has been ruined by DEI and “cancel culture.” One of the essays reminds us of the “Sokal Hoax” and how he proved that post-modernist journals will publish any sort of garbage as long as it’s dense enough that no one will read it. There have been other weak attempts, such as the Grievance Studies hoaxes, all meant to be an inside joke among the right-minded (literally) critics of academia. Here’s a link to Handwiki. https://handwiki.org/wiki/Social:Grievance_Studies_affair
This kind of fuckery is used to paint with a broad brush against academia, and more broadly, as an attack on the ideas of DEI. The War on Science, according to review (I haven’t read it) reads like an apologetics for the right wing as being the True Victims in all this cultural miasma. The reason that I bring it up, is that among the right there is the emergence of the mudsill doctrine that was used to justify chattel slavery, or class warfare in general. Obviously it’s contradictory to the “All men are created equal” phrase in the Declaration of Independence, but quite relevant to the Antebellum South and The Industrial Revelutions reduction of the working class to factory cogs.
And this is the impetus behind all of the actions to destroy remnants of DEI, as I see it. When Miller shouts “You have nothing,” he is referring to the non-white non-privileged classes. And we have the right side intelligentsia cheering this along by using reductio ad absurdum to the progressive attempts to elevate humanity.
I may be jumbling this in order to rush out some complex thinking so that I can get to work, but this is where I always step back and question my position on the trans issue as you had discussed in a previous post. If the guys who don’t think that women belong in academia are on the same side of the trans issue, if the same guys who think that grievance studies are what drive progressive thought, also are against the idea that men can be women by feel and declaration, then why am I on the same “side” as they are?
And so, I have to try to remember to base my positions and understanding on my own critical thinking, such as it is, rather than choosing my position based on my ideology.
What I may need to do is work this out in an essay on my own substack. I’ll get back to you.
“among the right there is the emergence of the mudsill doctrine”
There is?? I didn’t know that.
While I fully agree that the threats coming from Trump and the MAGA movement are the greater evil by a factor of a googol, it doesn’t follow that wokeism, cancel culture, DEI (or what the expression has too often come to mean in practice) etc. aren’t also a problem. I also agree that “cultural Marxism” is fundamentally the wrong way to think about wokeism. I think it makes a lot more sense to trace the ideological roots of wokeism back to postmodernism, which dismissed Marxism as just another oppressive meta-narrative. Judging by the content of Cynical Theories James Lindsay used to agree with this before he became a full-time troll. Last time I checked Helen Pluckrose still did. I never liked Lindsay, but find Pluckrose (like Alan Sokal a leftist btw.) quite persuasive on the topic. If you find them both beyond the pale, you should check out The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk (hardly a MAGA apologist!) which makes many of the same points. As far as cancel culture is concerned, I would recommend The Canceling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott. Despite accusations that Lukianoff’s free speech advocacy group FIRE only care about cancel culture from the Left, they have repeatedly challenged the Trump administration’s assaults on academic freedom and free expression in court and won some important victories.
While I wouldn’t compare wokeism to communism as far as ideological content is concerned, I do think it’s fair to compare the logic of saying that wokeism is just about justice for marginalized identity groups to the logic of saying that Soviet-style communism was just about justice for the working class. Just like “worker’s rights” under communism became a Trojan horse for tons of highly dubious doctrines about dialectical materialism, basics and superstructure, history’s inevitable march towards socialism, the infallibility of the party, the divine nature of the leader etc., “justice for marginalized groups” as well as talk of “equity, diversity, and inclusion” under wokeism is a Trojan horse for tons of highly dubious postmodernist philosophy, social constructivism, standpoint epistemology, identity politics, linguistic determinism etc. that people should be free to accept or reject on its merits without being accused of phobias, hatred, denying the rights of marginalized groups etc.
The Sokal Hoax is where I came in, i.e. where B&W started.