Listen To This Story

It’s been quite a year for fans of the Confederacy. On his first day in office, Donald Trump pardoned the guy who carried the rebel flag into the Capitol. Then, using a slight of hand, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth re-renamed military bases for prominent confederate traitors. And, just last week, South Carolina announced that it would finally get to dispatch some of its troops to occupy Washington, DC.

But all of these victories for the South might pale in comparison to what Trump proposed on Monday.

The president announced a review of the nation’s museums so that they would teach a brand of history more palatable for him and his supporters.

“The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE,’” he wrote in a social media post. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”

This, of course, has long been a goal of conservatives in general, and Southern conservatives in particular, who have been trying to whitewash and rewrite US history by banning certain books or changing how it is taught in schools.

Previously, this was primarily done in the former renegade states, where the Civil War became the “War of Northern Aggression” and its cause was a struggle for “states rights” instead of the one very specific right to enslave humans.

Now, with Trump in power, the effort can go national.

It is unclear when the president last put a foot in a museum or if he understands their purpose. Based on his social media post, that seems doubtful, because he lamented that there is nothing in the museums about “success,” “brightness” or “the future.”

In fact, museums do shape the future because they help us learn about the past, in part so that we can avoid the mistakes of it.

That, however, is what Republicans have stubbornly refused to do.

They are much more interested in doing exactly the same thing that they accuse progressive of: indoctrinating Americans, and especially students, and getting them to accept their ideology.

Trump admits as much.

“We are not going to allow this [the teaching of “bad history”] to happen, and I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made,” he wrote.

“Progress,” in this case, means purging institutions of higher learning of ideologies Trump and his supporters do not like.

Now, museums are next.

We have a suggestion: Maybe those attorneys could start with the United States Holocaust Museum… they might learn a thing or two about what happens when an authoritarian leader is trying to brainwash an entire country and instill an ideology in its people.