Views from Crestmont Drive

• We probably don’t realize how often conservatives are successful at rewriting the past;
• How the military is resistant to change;
• Right-wing figures resist commonsense health advice about wildfire smoke;
• People of faith discover that AI tells them what they want to hear;
• Ronald A. Lindsay on the core of religion: placating the gods;
• Gunter Wand: Brucker’s 3rd.

Conservatives have been trying to preserve the past forever. They’re probably successful more often than we realize. Those of us who do realize this do so by recognizing that their stories are full of holes, or don’t make sense. On the other hand, when attempts to rewrite history are this blatant, they’re not likely to succeed. The cultural weight of documented history has too much momentum to be easily altered.

NY Times, guest essay David W. Blight, yesterday (but in today’s print paper): Trump Is Bending History to His Will. He Will Fail.

On July 4, the White House Domestic Policy Council issued a long-awaited and lengthy report, “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” a frontal assault on the work of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in particular and on the entire Smithsonian Institution. The report asserts that the museum’s leadership has “traded settled truths and basic history for political activism and division.” It condemns the museum for engaging in “anti-white activism,” supporting “illegal aliens” and embracing transgender people.

Historians employ time-honored methods in the use of evidence but, by instinct and training, never accept determined “settled truths.” The Trump White House and its history police want us all to live in their chosen bubble, immune from instability or perceived disorder in their take on American greatness. They have a right to their bubble as individual citizens, but to impose it on the rest of us as policy egregiously breaks the public trust.

The report is not a document about history; it is the product of a racial and political ideology in search of a history that no longer bears scrutiny. People often joke about how Trumpism would like to return us to some version of the 1950s, when America supposedly was “great.” In this report, the administration has done just that. The report would prefer that nothing had ever happened since the ’50s to mar the White House’s polished, superficial, puerile version of America’s past.

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