Executive order on Smithsonian targets funding programs with 'improper ideology'

https://apnews.com/article/trump-smithsonian-executive-order-improper-ideology-558ebfab722f603e94e02a1a4b06ed4d

by petethomas • 1 year ago

72 30 1 year ago

OgsyedIE• 1 year ago

Is there a list of all of the museums that are controlled by the US federal government?

walrus01• 1 year ago

As with many non profits and charities, if you did a detailed look at the revenue of many museums and performing arts centers (Kennedy Center in WA DC for instance), their funding sources are diverse and various.

But there's a few noteworthy ones like the Smithsonian where I would take a wild guess that the federal government might be 65% or more of their operating budget on an annual basis, giving the government a very large lever of influence.

For those which are a 501(c)3 you can go find their annual IRS tax filings and make an attempt at breaking down their different incoming revenue streams.

wrs• 1 year ago

They're not even trying not to sound Russian. And by Russian I mean Soviet Russian.

wombatpm• 1 year ago

Word of the day is : wrongthink.

Wrongthink is doubleplusungood.

Don’t wrongthink.

like_any_other6• 1 year ago

This is not new, only applied to programs instead of staff (which probably means it won't be as effective):

Diversity Statements Required for One-Fifth of Academic Jobs - https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-diversity-...

Life science jobs at Berkeley give precedence to candidates’ diversity and inclusion statements - https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2019/12/31/life-science-jobs-...

FIRE calls on UC Santa Cruz to drop diversity statement mandate for faculty applicants - https://www.thefire.org/news/fire-calls-uc-santa-cruz-drop-d...

Minority professor denied grants because he hires on merit - https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/minority-professor-deni...

MollyGodiva• 1 year ago

The Smithsonian is not in the Executive branch. Trump has no authority there. But that won't stop them from complying and destroying their own museums.

sparrish• 1 year ago

Which of the three branches does the Smithsonian fall under?

16594470913• 1 year ago

None it seems.[0]

The Smithsonian Institution is a trust instrumentality of the United States ... Congress delegated the authority and responsibilities of the United States to the Smithsonian Board of Regents. ... The Smithsonian Institution is considered unique in the Federal establishment. The Smithsonian is not an executive branch agency and does not exercise regulatory powers, except over its own buildings and grounds. ... Thus, courts have held that the Smithsonian is not an agency or authority of the Government...

[0] https://www.si.edu/ogc/legalhistory

rickydroll• 1 year ago

I hope there are archivists at the Smithsonian who will preserve any removed content in a box in a warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant.

bediger4000• 1 year ago

"Improper ideology" is the politically correct term for woke. Irony in its most ferrous form.

UncleEntity5• 1 year ago

Huh, I thought they were talking about those who fought against the Confederacy during the War of Northern Aggression.

archagon2• 1 year ago

From the executive order:

The exhibit further claims that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating “Race is a human invention.”

So I guess "race is a biological reality" is an official stance of this administration. How long until actual segregation makes a return?

...oh, wait: https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/03/18/nx...

like_any_other6• 1 year ago

How would race not be a biological reality? Recently there was an article posted on HN, "Ancient DNA Shows Stone Age Europeans Voyaged by Sea to Africa" [1]. How could they distinguish stone age Europeans from Africans by DNA, if it's all socially constructed? Or how can humans, most of the time, tell someone's race by appearance alone, without knowing anything about their lived experience or upbringing?

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00764-2

hakfoo• 1 year ago

The spectrum is a matter of nature. Drawing lines in it and saying "Group A begins here and B begins there", and more importantly "A gets access to the good schools and country clubs to the exclusion of B" are human constructs.

16594470913• 1 year ago

Or how can humans, most of the time, tell someone's race..

How can you tell someone's race without a formal taxonomy or classification? Different people hold differing options on what classifies people into races based on nothing more than their own cultural stereotyping biases. For example, some American's calling anyone with dark skin African-American even if that person has no ties too, nor has ever in their life been to America.

archagon2• 1 year ago

Or how can humans, most of the time, tell someone's race by appearance alone, without knowing anything about their lived experience or upbringing?

Can they really, though? Most people would identify me as "white," but as a 100% Slavic person from Russia, how much do I actually have in common with "white" people from Italy, or "white" people from Ireland, or "white" people from South Africa, or most "white" Americans? You might have to go back many centuries to find some common ancestry.

Is an olive-skinned person from Greece or southern Italy "white"? Today they are, but they wouldn't have been in the past. It took a while for them to acquire that label: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/colum...

Should a light-skinned person with 1/32 black ancestry be considered black? They certainly would have been in the Jim Crow era, but Susie Guillory Phipps sued over this to change her recorded race to white.

Is "hispanic" a race? In fact, many latinos actually consider themselves white: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/06/16/321819185...

Et cetera. There are certainly genetic differences between populations, but "race" as it's understood in popular culture (based on superficial phenotypical differences) is a muddy, unscientific classification. I'm not a social scientist, so feel free to look up "race is a social construct" to find more authoritative sources. There is a very high degree of academic consensus on the subject.

defrost• 1 year ago

It seems you've confused clade with race.

The ability to measure an edit distance between words doesn't neccesitate a racial theory of spelling any more than the abilty to estimate familial or evolutionary seperation between DNA sample pools implies "race" must exist.

AlecSchueler• 1 year ago

How would race not be a biological reality

Imagine a world where people's sociaal standing was decided by the colour of their hair and we called this their "hace." Fashions, types of jobs, ways of talking, political views, would all be deeply impacted by your hace. It would be hard for us to imagine living without paying attention to someone's hace because it had been such a huge thing in society for so long. We would even point to biology and say that hace wasn't a cultural thing, there really were biological reasons why one person's hair colour was different from another, how could hace not be biological reality?

We live in a world where we do all of this with people's skin colour and we call it race. The colouring has a biological basis but the concept of "race" as a dividing line between peoples is a cultural one.

ginvok• 1 year ago

And so we're getting to the burning books part.

Executive order on Smithsonian targets funding programs with 'improper ideology'

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