October is National Arts n Humanities Month, a time normally reserved for celebrating the creative and intellectual currents that enrich our nation. But this year, the month began not with a celebration, but with a shutdown, the latest and most jarring blow in the Trump Administration’s long-running war against American culture.
In August 2017, I and 15 of my colleagues on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities made a not so difficult choice. In the wake of President Trump’s shocking refusal to unequivocally condemn the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, we resigned. We wrote to the president that his support for hate groups and the false equivalencies he pushed could not stand. “Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values,” our letter stated. “Your values are not American values.”
We took that step because to remain silent would have made us complicit in his hateful rhetoric. We warned that his pattern of attacking art, the humanities, and the free press was pushing our country “further away from the freedoms we are guaranteed.” We feared what was to come.
We were not wrong. What we witnessed then was a preview. What America is experiencing now is the feature presentation, a systematic, full-frontal assault on our nation’s cultural and intellectual life. This deliberate strategy is outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” and is designed to replace our diverse culture with a single, government-approved ideology.
The first wave of this assault is a strategy of erasure through fiscal starvation. The administration has moved to eliminate federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)—the very backbone of our nation’s cultural infrastructure. Active grants have been cruelly rescinded, leaving community theaters, local museums, facing sudden funding gaps…
