The entire staff of the Institute for Museum and Library Services was recently put on administrative leave. The Institute is an independent federal agency with an annual budget of $266 million it doles out to museums and libraries. Sounds wholesome, doesn’t it?
Think again.
You may never have heard of the IMLS, but you probably know about its more outlandish spending, such as Drag Queen Story Hour. For the uninitiated, that’s when public libraries invite men dressed as women to read books to children and toddlers.
This activity is sponsored by the American Library Association, which receives financial support from the IMLS. The ALA is the notoriously woke organization that stripped Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from a prestigious book award because her characterization of indigenous people doesn’t conform with progressive ideology. The ALA promotes Drag Queen Story Hour but has no problem advising librarians to bar religious publishers from discussing their books in public libraries.
The IMLS does equal damage to museums. Its “Museums Empowered” program provides money for museums to “use the transformative power of professional development and training to generate systemic change within museums of all types and sizes.” The Museums Empowered grant report ranks diversity, equity, and inclusion projects No. 2 on its list of four priorities for successful grant applicants. According to the IMLS, DEI-focused projects “will increase cultural competency among museum staff and support relevancy of museum programs through learning activities that strengthen their ability to connect with the communities they serve.”
Translation into plain English: Museum staff must undergo indoctrination sessions in critical race theory and antiracism training to change museums into tools of woke propaganda. Hiring should favor women and racial minorities and exclude white males. Art museum exhibits should feature artists from so-called “marginalized communities” and avoid the work of white male artists.
In woke lingo, it’s called “decentering” or “deacquisitioning,” removing from display or selling off, artworks by white male artists and instead featuring work by minority and female artists. For history museums, it means advancing the nostrum through exhibits and interpretative displays that America is a systemically racist country and that white people are privileged oppressors of their fellow citizens.
In 1980, former Harper’s editor Michael Mooney published The Ministry of Culture: Connections Among Art, Money & Politics. Mooney warned of the possibility of an alliance of cultural and corporate elites to use federal agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the IMLS to radically transform American culture.
President Donald Trump has made great progress in ridding government agencies of DEI. Ridding cultural institutions of DEI ideologues will be much tougher.
Take the National Geographic Society. Its CEO is Jill Tiefenthaler, a seasoned cultural warrior and previous president of Colorado College in Colorado Springs. In a 2022 interview, she bragged about hiring Shannon Bartlett, the society’s first chief DEI officer, and denounced National Geographic for being “an organization that had a colonial past.”
“A lot of our history,” Tiefenthaler said, “was the white male explorer off ‘discovering’ places that actually had been discovered by many others before. So how do we reckon with that past and also pivot toward a future where not only are we bringing representation of women into the picture, which hasn’t always been true in the past, but also our [black, indigenous, and people of color] populations and our international explorers?”
Tiefenthaler’s historical revisionism is audacious. The “colonialists” who formed the National Geographic Society in 1888 included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, and Gardiner Greene Hubbard, founder of AT&T. This was the generation of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs who wired America with the telegraph and created the first trans-Atlantic cable lines. Thirty-three of them gathered at the Cosmos Club in Washington to form it. Tiefenthaler should know that Washington is the capital of a country that rebelled against a distant monarchy, making the American Revolution modern history’s first successful anticolonial uprising.
As president of Colorado College, Tiefenthaler denounced America as systemically racist. “There is no denying,” she said in a statement issued by the college, “that white supremacy is embedded throughout our society.” After the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center was taken over by Colorado College in 2017, Tiefenthaler transformed it into an antiracist institution.
National Geographic and Disney have a joint venture called National Geographic Partners LLC. Disney owns the majority stake in the partnership, an unusual blend of corporate for-profit activity and a nonprofit organization. As the recent remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs reveals, Disney remains a woke corporation. Any doubt that National Geographic’s employees are progressives and Democrats should be dispelled by a quick glance at their 2024 campaign contributions.
In its storied 137-year history, the National Geographic Society has gone from an age when risk-taking explorers faced real danger and hardship to an organization of social and political activists who denounce their own traditions. Tiefenthaler describes her modern “explorers” as “change-makers” and “storytellers” and is proud that 60% are no longer Americans.
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Buttressed by a tax code that permits nonprofit groups and corporations such as Disney, whose value exceeds $150 billion, to form joint ventures, our country’s cultural institutions will be much tougher to rehabilitate than ridding the government of DEI programs.
This is precisely what Mooney warned against in The Ministry of Culture.
John B. Roberts II is an author, artist, and former executive producer of The McLaughlin Group. His website is www.jbrobertsauthor.com.