How did the Left capture all the cultural institutions? The way Ernest Hemingway said a man goes bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.” We even have a textbook example to study: the process that led to the Latino Museum.
Conservatives who boast they are fighting the Long March Through the Institutions and yet keep acquiescing to the Left’s takeover of the culture would do well to educate themselves on the issue.
FREE SPEECH HYPOCRISY ACCELERATES THE NATIONAL DIVORCE
Last week, I published a Heritage Foundation study that gives chapter and verse on how the March occurred. Understanding the history will help stop us from rolling over to every one of the Left’s bad cultural projects.
The argument has been made that the museum will be built anyway, even if it is a cathedral to victimhood, so all we can do is try to make it a little bit less woke. That’s how the Left wins its battles.
Congresspeople stop shy of scratching a museum that hasn’t yet been built because they don’t recognize what is happening, even as they promise to help the Trump administration dismantle a Department of Education already in place.
Not a single brick has been laid for the museum known as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino. Yet its masters have already demonstrated that, if built, it will traffic heavily in the destructive woke ideology.
The one exhibition that the Latino Museum has shown the public, which opened in the basement of the National Museum of American History in 2022 and has just closed, celebrated transgenderism, army deserters, and Black Lives Matter, and displayed Americans with Spanish surnames as victims of American oppression. The outcry was such that the museum canceled a planned second exhibition that was going to celebrate gangs from the 1960s and cast capitalism in a poor light.
A review of the history makes it amply clear that it couldn’t have been any other way. Museum leaders and their powerful lobbyists promise that the museum will be patriotic at every turn, but those promises have been written in sand. The museum has to be an incubator of grievances against the United States.
The museum is the brainchild of La Raza, one of the most leftist organizations to ever pull strings behind the scenes in Washington. Peddling victimhood was in the museum’s DNA from conception.
In Spanish, La Raza means the “Race,” and this group has gone through several name changes since it was founded in 1968 with seed money from the Ford Foundation, though its mission has never wavered. For six decades, it has been committed to adversarial Chicano politics and has worked to balkanize America and spread victimhood culture.
At one point, the group was called the Southwest Council of La Raza. Then, when it wanted to pretend that it represented not just Mexican Americans but that it had a national constituency that included also Cuban Americans and Puerto Ricans, it changed its name to the National Council of La Raza. Then, tired of people like me pointing out that its name made clear it was a race hustle, it changed its name to UnidosUS.
Potato, potahto. It’s still a race hustle, though a curious one, as it lacks a race.
La Raza, you see, not only played a key role in shepherding the idea of a Latino Museum but also was the main force behind the creation of the Hispanic category in the first place.
Its strategy has been to transform America into a majority-minority country, at first simply by changing how people were counted, and then enshrining the new identity in a museum. It was by definition subversive of America’s assimilationist ethos, as it segregated people into groups rather than allowing newcomers to join the melting pot.
In her very good 2014 book Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American, the progressive Berkeley professor Cristina Mora painstakingly explains how the Census Bureau had resisted the creation of the panethnic community. “For census officials, this omission reflected a consistent empirical finding: Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans and Cuban Americans overwhelmingly considered themselves to be separate groups.”
As a census official put it, “they didn’t really” identify with one another, and more tellingly, “didn’t really know what Hispanics meant.”
In other words, the Left and its lobbyists today are insisting on building a museum on the National Mall for a fictitious group that didn’t even exist four or five decades ago. Here’s why: the museum is needed to retroactively build “memory.”
As Mora had predicted, “A sort of collective amnesia sets in as organizations begin to refer to the category’s long history and develop narratives about the rich cultural basis of the classification.”
But the Left didn’t just play a passive role in ensuring mass delusion. It even changed the historical record. “Activists also historicized the notion of panethnicity in the United States by, for example, pointing to the Mexican Americans who fought in the Civil War and contending that ‘Hispanics,’ not simply Mexican Americans had played a key role” in the nation’s history.
This is exactly the function that the museum is expected to carry out, perpetuating a sense of history, culture, and identity about a group that is a bureaucratic artifice. There is no Latino music, cuisine, history, or culture, but we must erect a museum to enshrine it all.
For by dint of effort and single-mindedness, La Raza got its category. In 1977, the Office of Management and Budget threw in the towel and issued Policy Directive No. 15, which established what some demographers have called in jest “the ethno-racial pentagon” of whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans that we live with to this day. The Census Bureau followed through and slapped it on the decennial Census for the first time in 1980.
But it was the bonding agent that supposedly held “Hispanics” together that dooms the Latino Museum to be a cathedral of grievances.
Hispanics are from different races, different religions, speak different languages, and have different arts, music, and diets. So what the activists insisted they had in common was belonging to a subordinate status. Victimhood, I kid you not, spoke an ethnicity into being.
Public Law 94-311 of 1976, the first and only law in U.S. history that identifies an ethnic group, specifically stated that what Hispanics have in common is being the target of bigotry. It enjoined the government to collect data on these “Americans of Spanish origin” because they “suffer from racial, social, economic, and political discrimination.”
The animating idea at La Raza and the other activist groups, then as now, was to wrongly analogize the real suffering of black Americans to the members of the new category. La Raza even held off adding Cuban Americans to the category until it could find an organization that “accepted a disadvantaged minority status.” Accepting a subordinate position was baked in as a precondition to inclusion in the category.
That all this relies on poor history all around, and may be an extremely offensive stereotype, is as immaterial to those who sought separation, division, and set-asides as today’s museum is.
And La Raza played as significant a role in creating the museum as it did in creating the category and retroactively historicizing its existence.
The idea of a Latino museum first surfaced in a former President Bill Clinton-era task force that published a report in 1994, only 14 years after the Census officialized the category. Raul Yzaguirre, founder and second president of La Raza, chaired the task force, and Mari Carmen Aponte, a member of La Raza’s governing board, cochaired it.
The report used the same mau-mauing techniques that had worked so well two decades earlier. It accused the Smithsonian of systemic exclusion and asserted that such marginalization could only result from racism.
The shaming worked, as it nearly always does, which is why it’s such a powerful weapon in the arsenal used in the Long March Through the Institutions. Former President George W. Bush agreed to a commission to look into the museum in 2008, and in 2011, under former President Barack Obama, the commission recommended the museum. The activists hired powerful lobbyists who urged Congress to tuck the amendment creating the museum into the late 2020 Omnibus monstrosity. President Donald Trump had no other choice but to sign it into law.
Trump, whose instincts on the culture wars have been very good, has now asked Congress to stop funding the Latino Museum. Yet, appropriators in both houses recently decided to keep funding it, even when they know what it is doomed to be.
SUPREME COURT POISED TO SHAKE UP MIDTERM ELECTIONS
The Left’s capture of our cultural institutions is now pretty complete, whether you look at K-12 education, universities, teachers’ unions, museums, etc. At first, it was gradual; then it accelerated in the past two decades.
But it can be stopped — if Congress understands what is happening.