Okay, even though I’m everywhere and always a cautious optimist, I’ll admit that we’ve had some bad news stories lately.
For some reason we are still dragging our feet on blasting the IRGC forward into the Stone Age. Some truly creepy leftists have decent chances to win Senate seats from a bunch of red states in November. A frightening percentage of American women have apparently lost their minds, and are celebrating and bragging about legislation that allows abortion right up until the baby’s head crowns, and – on a related note – are hailing as a heroine a disturbed woman who meticulously planned and carried out the strangulation of her three small children.
Sadly, such things are par for the course in this vale of tears. The “crooked timber of humanity” and all that.
But as always, there are good things happening, too. Our border is effectively closed, over 5 million fewer people are on SNAP benefits since the beginning of this year (and nobody’s starving, because most of those 5 mil were ineligible in the first place, plus everybody is a little bit healthier, without our tax dollars buying them their SNAP-breakfast: Captain Crunch washed down with Coke), and football season is upon us.
Plus, my magical body is making great progress at absorbing the piece of my spine that broke off between C6 and C7 in February. (See my columns from March and April for the wonderful story.)
Oh, and also, Smithsonian head honcho Lonnie Bunch is retiring, after leading that organization into the valley of woke nonsense and America trashing. This after the Domestic Policy Council released an exhaustive report in July, detailing the amount of aforementioned nonsense and trashing that our tax dollars have subsidized at the Smithsonian.
You may remember when the Smithsonian’s director Anthea Hartig appeared before Congress that month, to try to defend the museum’s indefensible actions, including the “mass action toolkit.” This document included (among other things) a list of everything in America that constitutes “white supremacy.”
Spoiler alert: it would have been much easier to list everything that the leftist wokies believe is NOT white supremacy: Malcolm X, BLM, and the music of Marvin Gaye.
Anyway, Hartig didn’t know it, but she was walking into a dramatic re-enactment of “The Empress’ New Clothes” fable. Because one of her questioners was Brandon Gill.
By the way, speaking of good news stories: Brandon Gill. That guy is a stone-cold killer in a Q&A format. He looks a little like Clark Kent, and he’s got a very low-key delivery. He reminds me of a righteous interrogator version of Hannibal Lecter: he’ll rip the heart out of some lying sleazebag, while his pulse never goes over 85.
He always does his homework, and his deadpan method is to ask if his victim believes some absurd notion. When the hapless dope says, “No, of course not,” Gill comes back with, “That’s strange, because in a speech you delivered on August 9th, 2012 in Memphis TN at the Hilton on 2nd Avenue, at 2:13 p.m. Central Time, you said, and I quote, “Absurd notion you just said that you don’t believe.”
So it was a thing of beauty to watch him give Anthea Hartig the full Gill Treatment™, i.e. he rhetorically took her apart at the joints. When he asked if it was important to be polite, she looked confused, and said, “Excuse me?” He repeated the question, and she replied, “Yes sir.”
Then he pointed out that the mass action toolkit identified politeness as “a defining characteristic of white supremacy culture.” Then the quiet question: “Ma’am, are you a white supremacist?” She looked down, then tried to dance away, saying, “I’m not exactly familiar with that passage of the mass action toolkit, which is not something we developed.”
It went on and on that way. He asked if she agreed that “objectivity” is also a core white supremacy tenet, and when she denied it, he asked why her document promoted it. She flat out said, “It’s not our toolkit,” and he pointed out that the Smithsonian under her leadership had been promoting it for quite some time.
As much fun as it was to watch Gill defenestrate knuckleheads, the vision of America presented by the Smithsonian is not as black-and-white as partisan bickering suggests. The Smithsonian has many great exhibits, and does tell the story of America’s virtues and flaws. But the larger point is that in the 1950s (to pick one time period) the darker parts of our history were given shorter shrift than they should have been.
But in the last half-century – and picking up speed during the last several decades – our left has swung the pendulum way too far in the other direction. And the hyper-critical double-standards applied to America – exaggerating our flaws while minimizing our virtues, and doing the opposite for all other cultures – is a toxic trend that now represents mainstream thought in academia, along with institutions like the Smithsonian.
Which brings me to a point I’ve raised before: the endlessly hypocritical and annoying recent custom of the “land acknowledgment.” Regular readers may remember that at the beginning of my oldest daughter’s graduation ceremony when she got her Masters in Nursing from U Mass Amherst, the first speaker started out with, “As we get started, I want to acknowledge that we are now on the ancestral lands of the Jigamash and the Hekawi tribes…” (“I’ll take fake Indian tribes and F-Troop deep pulls for 500, Alex.”)
Before I could leap to my feet and yell, “Boo! Give back the land, you virtue-signaling jackass! BOOOO!!” my HAATDP wife (Hot As A Two-Dollar Pistol) (Duh) clamped her seemingly dainty hand on my lower thigh as if momentarily possessed by the grip strength of the Incredible Hulk. So I wisely cleared my throat and stayed where I was.
Anyway, the leadership at the Smithsonian and most of academia are big fans of the land acknowledgment. Unexpectedly!
And they’re not subtle about it. In fact, the NEA developed a guide for land acknowledgements (UNEXPECTEDLY!) that left no doubt as to where their allegiance lies. “Don’t sugarcoat the past. Use terms like ‘genocide,’ ‘ethnic cleansing,’ ‘stolen land’ … to reflect actions taken by colonizers.”
The issue arose during Hartig’s questioning, this time from TN congressman Tim Burchett, who played video clips of Hartig repeatedly giving land acknowledgments at various museum events. Those included verbiage like her gratitude for “the opportunity to work and live in their territories” and her thanks to the “first peoples on whose land we gather today.”
Does anyone else find the present tense there to be strange? She’s not referencing territories or lands that WERE ONCE theirs; she’s saying that those lands are theirs now. Which is a little incoherent, since she’s a rich white lady speaking at an institution named after a white British scientist, in the capitol of a nation where around .002% of the population are actual Indians.
And no, that doesn’t count Liz Warren, who is about as Indian as the offspring of Edgar Winter and Tilda Swinton. (#neverstopmocking)
Burchett followed the video clips with the obvious question: “I’m wondering have you ever planned on donating any of your personal property or any of the property of the Smithsonian to any of these tribes?”
To which Hartig replied, “Hamanah hamanah hamanah…Can I please pull up my pants now?”
Okay, what she really said was, “I don’t believe that is pertinent to the conversation, sir.”
Because of course she didn’t. But still, the point was still clear. She’d already been depantsed, and that was before the Gillinator™ had even stepped up to the podium, with the ominous Sergio Leone soundtrack from a Spaghetti western playing in the chambers.
I really like John Fonte’s take, in his article in The Federalist about the Smithsonian and stolen land.
He points out that the Lakota Sioux sued our government in 1980 at SCOTUS and won compensation for the Black Hills, which they turned down, because they want the land back instead. Which is rich, since the Lakota arrived in the Black Hills around the time we were becoming a nation in 1776.
Annndddd…they killed a bunch of Cheyenne and Crow Indians, and stole the Black Hills from its true “rightful, indigenous owners.”
Except that the Cheyenne had stolen that land from the Kiowa before them.
When we remember that the Indians of this time didn’t have written languages, it’s a little surprising that we know which tribes stole which land from which other tribes at all. Even so, we know that the Sioux were at least the second iteration of colonizing thieves amongst the native peoples whom we’ve come to call by the official collective noun of “the Liz Warren Communities.”
(Pull out your tom-toms and recite the chant with me: #wemustneverstopmockingher.)
And it’s pretty certain that if we had any written records, we would find out that the Kiowa slaughtered their way to stealing the Black Hills from some tribe before them, who stole them from some tribe before them. And so on.
It’s turtles in headdresses, all the way down.
So again, there is some good news happening amidst all of the current sturm und drang. Lonnie Bunch is retiring, Anthea Hartig took an educational tongue lashing pour encourager les autres, and four seats on the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents are expected to open up this year, so we might be able to correct that fine institution’s wayward drift.
If anyone in the administration is reading this, I hereby volunteer to take Lonnie Bunch’s place. I’ve got some ideas about bringing some balance to the joint, starting with a shout-out to the fine Scotch-Irish and German folks who brought the Simpsons’ bloodline to this great nation. The end of that acknowledgement? “You’re welcome.”
Oh, and in the tradition of renaming the Gulf of America and Lake Dontario, I will preside over the restoration of the newly rechristened…Simpsonian Institution.
Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!
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Martin Simpson 