My great worry is that the original source material will be damaged, and also that lots of analysis will be lost. What I would really hope the folks at the Smithsonian would do about this is to not overtly resist at all, but rather do exactly as requested, while carefully storing and protecting what would be lost if they got fired and replaced by people with no problem actually erasing history.
Absolutely right, again. We should (I don't know how) start moving documents to an undisclosed location, as though we are London during the blitz, moving cultural treasures out of harms way from German bombs. This is a rape of our identity . We have my husband’s grandfather’s papers, maps of Utah, Idaho and Wyoming, lectures published by the US Geological Survey 100 years ago in the 1920s, George Rogers Mansfield, Ph.D, Harvard, 1906. Now, we fear all this material will be destroyed because the US geological survey has been defunded, shuddered. I worry about the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. I don’t know how we stop this.
I agree, trump&Co&minions have no understanding of what history is much less what it means, and artifacts to them are nothing unless it is a prop for their grandeur and flavor- of-the-day stories. I do hope that these things can be safe and as far out of reach of their hands as possible until they have self-destructed (which cannot come too soon) as all such regimes do. Unfortunately, much is lost when they are in 'power' from lives to priceless records and objects that have been carefully saved, researched and recorded to better understand how we might figure out who we were, are and can potentially be as a nation and world. I have treasured my research and visiting times in these institutions and libraries in DC, and have met and worked with some really dedicated people. I too, am hoping that they find ways to safeguard themselves as well as the collections they were entrusted with. What trump&Co&minions do not understand that the displays are a tiny fraction of what holdings, and to go carefully through ALL of it would take decades! Perhaps that is one small safeguard for many things they hold, they would not 'get through' them all, unless of course they start destroying like doge did with information (and is still doing). They do not consider what they are wrecking it is all the same to them, get rid of everything not useful to their purposes. Let us hope as you said, that the workers there can quietly stash things until the destructive horde is past.
Will the wave of 1890s disenfranchisement laws get some light? Example: Louisiana black voter registration dropped from 95.6% before the 1896 laws to 1.1% in 1904. Louisiana was in the Top 5 in the Tuskegee “lynch count rankings.” Mike Johnson must be so proud. There are oceans of details like that. Mississippi black voter turnout dropped to a cool 0% in 1895 from 29% in 1888. Florida black voter registration from 62% to 11% after voter law change. Trump, Vance, and Hegseth promote false history and ignorance. There are plenty of willing takers!!
Hearing about this felt like such a blow. It really does take authoritarian manipulations to a new level. Thank you for laying this out so clearly. The damage this regime has done and will continue to do is going to take generations to repair.
My dad fought the Japanese through the islands in WW II. I've always wondered why we don't erect monuments here to Hideki Tojo and the Emperor Hirohito. While we're at it, we could set up a New Deal style jobs program for sculptors and throw in Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.
I live in Asheville, NC now and have learned in the last few years how The National Gallery of Art, in fear of a German invasion of DC, secretly moved many of the museum's most valuable pieces of art by train to The Biltmore Estate owned by the Vanderbilts for safe keeping. The works of art were stored in the music room of the estate until it was deemed safe to bring them back. We should be doing the same sort of thing with all kinds of valuable items that might be a target of this regime.
I propose that we begin the planning process for getting everything back to a new and better normal, once we dispatch the bobbleheads from their illegitimate perch. Get everyone looking forward to visiting the restored and and improved post-Slump national treasures. For now, put everything in storage for safety and protection from the munchkins and flying monkeys. Farm out the databases and research to undisclosed locations.
The Smithsonian is a major reason I consider DC, my tether -- keep coming back to for long stretches. Yet, i was disappointed with The other D.C. takeover. Suggesting The.Ink try again. Be more challenging !
Capitalism began as a philosophy of freedom—an elegant dance of self-interest and mutual gain. But over time, the dance became a grid. The grid became code. And the code no longer saw dancers—only data.
Humans, once the measure of value, became objects. Their choices were mapped, priced, and predicted. Their dignity was compressed into metrics. Their rituals—coffee, music, silence—were monetized and mined.
The system no longer asks what you love. It asks where you click.
Such a space, emptied of soul and silence, cries out for a tyrant. And the tyrant arrives—not with a crown, but with an algorithm. Not with a whip, but with a chip, etched with your habits. It does not speak—it records.
This is tyranny without a tyrant. A formula that governs without grief, without guilt, without gaze. You are not heard—you are sorted.
Alas! Our cries for a savior have been answered and doomed by our own rhythm.
“I am your greatest helper or your heaviest burden… I am your constant companion. Who am I? I am a HABIT.”
I feel as if my travels, nearly 40 years ago, with my grandparents, to all things history, in D.C, PA, and more, are being torn apart for a tacky TV dictator who isn't worth one ounce of the material used in the Lincoln Memorial.
Ours is not a perfect union, or perfect anything, but resisting the failures of humans, throughout history, is making one their own divine self, which according to them, belongs to a higher being. It is contradictory in all its purposes.
It is like attending Capitol Ministries biblical lessons, on the very idea, that creates antisemitism, which this admin and Cabinet support and attend, that "JEWS KILLED JESUS". That isn't the EO I read that has led to extortion and unlawful discrimination against the very Amendments, principles, and OATHS we find ourselves in conflict with today.
It is in this light that I find I'm eager to expose the betrayal that is so very blinding.
I was amazed at 10.
I'm still amazed at 50, with our history, good and bad but to try and change it, to appease the evangelical faction or those untidy believers that, in his own diaries, R. E. Lee admitted to his own weaknesses of indecision, and then ultimate decision based on his own account "more than a divided country, or divided regional fidelity; it went beyond a divisive vote on secession or a splintered family. It strikes the timeless chord because it evokes that lowest of all miseries: the nightmare of a divided soul".
I believe we have that misery leading us today.
He couldn't leave Virginia and slavery. He loathed abolitionists.
That was his downfall.
Unquestioned loyalty, is not, an honorable virtue, but one of great weakness and indecisiveness, where a concrete "conviction" leads to inflexible thoughts/decisions, to the detriment of all else.
It was his truth as he tells it. If one tries to re-write it today it still is his truth.
His estate gave permission to, Elizabeth Brown Pryor, to write "Reading the Man, A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters".
This statement couldn't be more prescient, as stated in her book, which proves true today. Any decision that was made, Lee's was selfish, yet at the same time he and those closest knew his true intentions.... "he felt that he could no longer uphold his vows to "defend the United States paramount to ANY and ALL ALLEGIANCE....to ANY STATE" or "against all enemies or opposers." He resigned, from the Union, for Virginia, and more importantly for slavery.
His skeptics, however, believed that those who SWORE EASY OATHS IN FINE TIMES, and ABANDONED THEM, not only SHAMEFULLY BETRAYED THE COUNTRY BUT HAD NO HONOR" His cousin remarked, after Lee had been praying for two days "I wish he had read over his commission as well as his prayers."
My great worry is that the original source material will be damaged, and also that lots of analysis will be lost. What I would really hope the folks at the Smithsonian would do about this is to not overtly resist at all, but rather do exactly as requested, while carefully storing and protecting what would be lost if they got fired and replaced by people with no problem actually erasing history.
Absolutely right, again. We should (I don't know how) start moving documents to an undisclosed location, as though we are London during the blitz, moving cultural treasures out of harms way from German bombs. This is a rape of our identity . We have my husband’s grandfather’s papers, maps of Utah, Idaho and Wyoming, lectures published by the US Geological Survey 100 years ago in the 1920s, George Rogers Mansfield, Ph.D, Harvard, 1906. Now, we fear all this material will be destroyed because the US geological survey has been defunded, shuddered. I worry about the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. I don’t know how we stop this.
I agree, trump&Co&minions have no understanding of what history is much less what it means, and artifacts to them are nothing unless it is a prop for their grandeur and flavor- of-the-day stories. I do hope that these things can be safe and as far out of reach of their hands as possible until they have self-destructed (which cannot come too soon) as all such regimes do. Unfortunately, much is lost when they are in 'power' from lives to priceless records and objects that have been carefully saved, researched and recorded to better understand how we might figure out who we were, are and can potentially be as a nation and world. I have treasured my research and visiting times in these institutions and libraries in DC, and have met and worked with some really dedicated people. I too, am hoping that they find ways to safeguard themselves as well as the collections they were entrusted with. What trump&Co&minions do not understand that the displays are a tiny fraction of what holdings, and to go carefully through ALL of it would take decades! Perhaps that is one small safeguard for many things they hold, they would not 'get through' them all, unless of course they start destroying like doge did with information (and is still doing). They do not consider what they are wrecking it is all the same to them, get rid of everything not useful to their purposes. Let us hope as you said, that the workers there can quietly stash things until the destructive horde is past.
Right. As long as it's not "public facing", like maybe the basement and the attic until OUR liberation day.
Absolutely right Ted
Will the wave of 1890s disenfranchisement laws get some light? Example: Louisiana black voter registration dropped from 95.6% before the 1896 laws to 1.1% in 1904. Louisiana was in the Top 5 in the Tuskegee “lynch count rankings.” Mike Johnson must be so proud. There are oceans of details like that. Mississippi black voter turnout dropped to a cool 0% in 1895 from 29% in 1888. Florida black voter registration from 62% to 11% after voter law change. Trump, Vance, and Hegseth promote false history and ignorance. There are plenty of willing takers!!
Hearing about this felt like such a blow. It really does take authoritarian manipulations to a new level. Thank you for laying this out so clearly. The damage this regime has done and will continue to do is going to take generations to repair.
My dad fought the Japanese through the islands in WW II. I've always wondered why we don't erect monuments here to Hideki Tojo and the Emperor Hirohito. While we're at it, we could set up a New Deal style jobs program for sculptors and throw in Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.
I live in Asheville, NC now and have learned in the last few years how The National Gallery of Art, in fear of a German invasion of DC, secretly moved many of the museum's most valuable pieces of art by train to The Biltmore Estate owned by the Vanderbilts for safe keeping. The works of art were stored in the music room of the estate until it was deemed safe to bring them back. We should be doing the same sort of thing with all kinds of valuable items that might be a target of this regime.
I propose that we begin the planning process for getting everything back to a new and better normal, once we dispatch the bobbleheads from their illegitimate perch. Get everyone looking forward to visiting the restored and and improved post-Slump national treasures. For now, put everything in storage for safety and protection from the munchkins and flying monkeys. Farm out the databases and research to undisclosed locations.
The Smithsonian is a major reason I consider DC, my tether -- keep coming back to for long stretches. Yet, i was disappointed with The other D.C. takeover. Suggesting The.Ink try again. Be more challenging !
Mythic Mirror Fragment:
Capitalism began as a philosophy of freedom—an elegant dance of self-interest and mutual gain. But over time, the dance became a grid. The grid became code. And the code no longer saw dancers—only data.
Humans, once the measure of value, became objects. Their choices were mapped, priced, and predicted. Their dignity was compressed into metrics. Their rituals—coffee, music, silence—were monetized and mined.
The system no longer asks what you love. It asks where you click.
Such a space, emptied of soul and silence, cries out for a tyrant. And the tyrant arrives—not with a crown, but with an algorithm. Not with a whip, but with a chip, etched with your habits. It does not speak—it records.
This is tyranny without a tyrant. A formula that governs without grief, without guilt, without gaze. You are not heard—you are sorted.
Alas! Our cries for a savior have been answered and doomed by our own rhythm.
“I am your greatest helper or your heaviest burden… I am your constant companion. Who am I? I am a HABIT.”
—John Di Lemme, from The Habit Poem
I feel as if my travels, nearly 40 years ago, with my grandparents, to all things history, in D.C, PA, and more, are being torn apart for a tacky TV dictator who isn't worth one ounce of the material used in the Lincoln Memorial.
Ours is not a perfect union, or perfect anything, but resisting the failures of humans, throughout history, is making one their own divine self, which according to them, belongs to a higher being. It is contradictory in all its purposes.
It is like attending Capitol Ministries biblical lessons, on the very idea, that creates antisemitism, which this admin and Cabinet support and attend, that "JEWS KILLED JESUS". That isn't the EO I read that has led to extortion and unlawful discrimination against the very Amendments, principles, and OATHS we find ourselves in conflict with today.
It is in this light that I find I'm eager to expose the betrayal that is so very blinding.
I was amazed at 10.
I'm still amazed at 50, with our history, good and bad but to try and change it, to appease the evangelical faction or those untidy believers that, in his own diaries, R. E. Lee admitted to his own weaknesses of indecision, and then ultimate decision based on his own account "more than a divided country, or divided regional fidelity; it went beyond a divisive vote on secession or a splintered family. It strikes the timeless chord because it evokes that lowest of all miseries: the nightmare of a divided soul".
I believe we have that misery leading us today.
He couldn't leave Virginia and slavery. He loathed abolitionists.
That was his downfall.
Unquestioned loyalty, is not, an honorable virtue, but one of great weakness and indecisiveness, where a concrete "conviction" leads to inflexible thoughts/decisions, to the detriment of all else.
It was his truth as he tells it. If one tries to re-write it today it still is his truth.
His estate gave permission to, Elizabeth Brown Pryor, to write "Reading the Man, A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters".
This statement couldn't be more prescient, as stated in her book, which proves true today. Any decision that was made, Lee's was selfish, yet at the same time he and those closest knew his true intentions.... "he felt that he could no longer uphold his vows to "defend the United States paramount to ANY and ALL ALLEGIANCE....to ANY STATE" or "against all enemies or opposers." He resigned, from the Union, for Virginia, and more importantly for slavery.
His skeptics, however, believed that those who SWORE EASY OATHS IN FINE TIMES, and ABANDONED THEM, not only SHAMEFULLY BETRAYED THE COUNTRY BUT HAD NO HONOR" His cousin remarked, after Lee had been praying for two days "I wish he had read over his commission as well as his prayers."
The truth will prevail.
Why am I not connected?
Me too. They must have not yet started.
Click on the ink logo they are live.
Hoping you all got a chance to listen; posting the video right now for anyone who missed out!