It is clear by now to all with common sense that teaching children to view the world through the oppressed vs. oppressor paradigm, and to disdain America and its allies, has been a colossal mistake. The sight of students defending Hamas’s slaughter of Jewish civilians in Israel, the public ravishing of women, and the burning of babies has taken care of that.
It is in that light that we must understand last Friday’s vote in the House of Representatives to leave the Smithsonian Latino Museum defunded. Schools and universities are not the only places where adults with ulterior motives immerse students in the moral and emotional fog that gives them license to support the murderers and gang rapists of Hamas. Museums are a locus of “decolonization,” too.
BIDEN STEERS CLEAR OF VIRGINIA BEFORE BELLWETHER ELECTION
So we should celebrate what happened last Friday in the House when the chamber passed the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies appropriations bill by a 213-203 vote . It’s what wasn’t in it that mattered: funding for the “Latino Museum.”
Overnight, the House Rules Committee had rejected an amendment by Rep. Tony Cardenas (D-CA) to strike out from the funding bill Section 459, which “prohibits funding for the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Latino and the operation of the Molina Family Latino Gallery.” That vote was 3-9.
While the Senate has its own bill and conference negotiations are idle, there are many things to praise here. First, when the time does come for negotiations, the Republicans can hold firm and battle both the Senate and the White House. Let Democrats make the case that they support a museum that depicts Hispanics as monolithic victims.
There are other aspects of the bill that should be applauded. A lot of wasteful spending on environmental boondoggles, for example, was absent from the bill, which is good news. But conservatives have now long been alive to how leftists use climate hysteria for a panoply of their agenda, including eroding and eventually dismantling capitalism, representative democracy, and demographic growth.
Not so with understanding how the Left uses museums to revolutionize the country. In that realm, lack of understanding of the issue at hand, or panic about leftists calling them “racists," has rendered many Republicans inoperative. Talk of museum defunding is the curare of the culture wars, the venom that Amazonian fighters put on the arrow tips to paralyze their foes.
No longer. Now defunding the monstrosity that is the Latino Museum is the conservative position. There was no Republican amendment to restore funding last week, even from those who would rather throw in the towel and restore funding.
Those in the Republican conference who “know what time it is” won this round. This is new.
Back in 2020, those who had intended to use the Latino Museum to push the view that Latinos are victims in the oppressor vs. oppressed narrative had convinced Republicans that the museum would do nothing of the sort. No, they said, it would be bipartisan and fair, a platform to highlight the advances of the Hispanic community — a place to celebrate it.
I and others warned for years that this would never be the case . The museum, we warned, would be used to curate grievances against the United States and foment a sense of victimhood among “Latinos.”
And that is exactly what happened when the first exhibit of the Latino Museum opened its doors in 2022 at the Smithsonian National History Museum. The so-called Molina Family Exhibit: Presente! gave a view of Hispanics that saw everything through the Marxist binary of oppressors and their victims.
It celebrated transgender Hispanics and Black Lives Matter, as if these were big parts of the experience of Americans of Hispanic descent. It celebrated Army desertion. It said Cubans fled to America for economic reasons, concealing communist oppression in their homeland.
Then, after Alfonso Aguilar, Joshua Trevino, and I wrote about it last year , the museum’s leaders began to realize they had a PR problem — and with good reason. This year, the Republicans in the Appropriations Committee voted to introduce the defunding language.
It then came out in the press that the museum leadership had canceled a second exhibit showing capitalism to be bad for Hispanics . The two academics whom they had hired to oversee the project were cultural Marxists who went on Democracy Now! and other far-left shows to complain about their project being canceled.
Now that the use of colleges, schools, and museums to indoctrinate future generations into the oppressor vs. oppressed paradigm has been exposed by the Hamas massacre to be a huge mistake, conservatives who know what time it is will fight it. That’s why you didn’t see a Republican amendment restoring funding this week — even by Republican members without a watch.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA
Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author of BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution .
Do Republicans finally know what time it is?
4
0
07.11.2023
It is clear by now to all with common sense that teaching children to view the world through the oppressed vs. oppressor paradigm, and to disdain America and its allies, has been a colossal mistake. The sight of students defending Hamas’s slaughter of Jewish civilians in Israel, the public ravishing of women, and the burning of babies has taken care of that.
It is in that light that we must understand last Friday’s vote in the House of Representatives to leave the Smithsonian Latino Museum defunded. Schools and universities are not the only places where adults with ulterior motives immerse students in the moral and emotional fog that gives them license to support the murderers and gang rapists of Hamas. Museums are a locus of “decolonization,” too.
BIDEN STEERS CLEAR OF VIRGINIA BEFORE BELLWETHER ELECTION
So we should celebrate what happened last Friday in the House when the chamber passed the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies appropriations bill by a 213-203 vote . It’s what wasn’t in it that mattered: funding for the “Latino Museum.”
Overnight, the House Rules Committee had rejected an amendment by Rep. Tony Cardenas (D-CA) to strike out from the funding bill Section 459, which “prohibits funding........
© Washington Examiner
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
