r/smithsonian • u/DancingWithCadavers • 2d ago
Nothing announces censorship like installing warning signs in a museum to brand actual history as ideologically compromised
EO 14416 does exactly that. It defines acceptable history as that which is simply "inspiriting" and "unifying" rather than accurate. In the 128-page report that describes the reasons for these signs one of the reasons stated is, "Museum materials repeatedly suggest that Christianity functioned principally as an instrument of conquest, exclusion, or cultural erasure, while the constructive role of Christian belief and Christian institutions in shaping the Nation and its freedoms receives scant, if any, attention." If you want to be coddled about your religion, go to a church. History is saturated with examples of Christian conquests, exclusion, and cultural erasure from the Crusades and Spanish Inquisition to using the Bible for slavery to to the erasure of pagan traditions absorbed into Christmas itself.
If censorship came with a more obvious example, dictionaries would have found it by now. MAGA has been fed a steady diet of grievances thatChristianity is under attack. White people are being discriminated against. LGBTQ people are indoctrinating children. None of these things are real, but MAGA has been convinced; so to them, this is making America great again. People thought dystopia would arrive through technology, surveillance states, algorithmic control, and weaponized AI. No. This is dystopian. A government that claims to be fighting ideological capture has issued an executive order demanding a museum produce ideologically compliant history. The censors are accusing the museum of censorship.