Smithsonian Heat
Plus: The mindset behind wokeness, Trump adds to steel and aluminum tariffs, and more...
Trump's take on museums: "The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been," President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social yesterday. "Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen, and I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made."
"We have the 'HOTTEST' Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums," he concludes.
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Though I'm doubtful that the purge will be done in a measured, nuanced way, I share many of his complaints. Here's a good New York Post piece on how New York's museums—the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History—have become co-opted by a rather specific agenda, the exact one you'd expect. More to his specific point: One of the Smithsonian museums made waves when it released an absolutely wild graphic saying that being on time, liking bland foods, and adhering to the scientific method are white, based on the work of Tema Okun and Judith Katz. And presidential portraiture is in no way immune from grossly hagiographic representation, as detailed by Crispin Sartwell in Reason. Whether it's explicit, stupid wokeness or more subtle works of art that serve to bolster state power, there's something for every libertarian to hate if you spend enough time in our nation's museums!
The person actually running the initiative—per the March executive order that presaged this—is a woman named Lindsey Halligan, who seems…not all that bad. "We don't need to overemphasize the negative to teach people that certain aspects of our nation's history may have been bad," she told The Washington Post a few months ago. Doing so "just makes us grow further and further apart." ("If arts funding is to show 'who we are as Americans,' or to narrate our alleged communal experience, it is going to have to respond to the tastes of the American people, which at the moment run to autotuned hip hop and bro country," wrote Sartwell back in 2021, in a piece on how government-funded art always ends up as propaganda for the ruling class.)
Halligan, an avid Smithsonian museumgoer, said she's seen "exhibits that have to do with either another country's history entirely or art and sculpture that describes on the placards next to it that America and sculpture are inherently racist."
Might I suggest a better path forward? Starve the beast.
The Smithsonian, per The Washington Post, "receives about 60 percent of its funding from congressional appropriations and federal grants and contracts, according to fiscal 2023 numbers, but those funds cover operations, infrastructure and maintaining collections. Generally, exhibitions are funded by private donations." Though this isn't really within the purview of the executive, the Trump administration could exert pressure on Congress to stop funding the Smithsonian and make clear that the museums need to shift to being entirely privately funded. Then Bill Ackman and Alex Soros and whoever can duke it out and decide which types of stories about America get told, and taxpayers in Wisconsin who never get to avail themselves of"The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture" can save a buck.
UBI discourse: "Just give people money. It's the simple, brute-force solution to so many problems. In low-income countries, charities are sometimes measured against whether their interventions are better than simply giving people cash. Even in high-income countries like the U.S., when disaster strikes, often the best thing you can do is get money into the hands of affected people immediately. They know whether they should use it to buy gas, rent an Airbnb or fly to their cousin's house one state over," writes Kelsey Piper—former Just Asking Questions guest, former singularly sane person at Vox, and now writing for the new publication The Argument.
So it wasn't that crazy to assume—particularly once promising pilots were released—that the same should be true for addressing chronic poverty in high-income countries. If you give a new mom a few hundred dollars a month or a homeless man one thousand dollars a month, that's gotta show up in the data, right?
Alas.
A few years back we got really serious about studying cash transfers, and rigorous research began in cities all across America. Some programs targeted the homeless, some new mothers and some families living beneath the poverty line.
The long and short of it? No, such transfers didn't really do anything:
On so many important metrics, these people are statistically indistinguishable from those who did not receive this aid.…
The OpenResearch unconditional income study tried $1,000 per month for three years, while the control group got $50 per month. They found that participants worked less—but nothing else improved. Not their health, not their sleep, not their jobs, not their education, and not even time spent with their children. They did experience a reduction in stress at the start of the study, but it quickly went away.
Piper explores not just the results from these studies, but also, interestingly, what could be called a media cover-up: a sort of fishy-looking effort to obscure these results and greet universal basic income (UBI) as more positive and effective than it's been proven to be.
Scenes from New York: Hurricane Erin is making its way up the East Coast, closing beaches to swimmers in New York City today and tomorrow (a human rights violation if you ask me). The great news is that surfers get to take advantage of this wild swell, since the enforcers—NYC Parks and Rec personnel—don't go out in the water and can't catch 'em. Waves as high as 11 to 15 feet are expected on parts of Long Island on Thursday.
QUICK HITS
- "In August 2025, after years of litigation in Portugal, [Wikimedia Foundation] complied with a court order to remove disputed material from Wikipedia and hand over identifying information on eight of its volunteer editors," writes Pirate Wires' Ashley Rindsberg. "The DePaço case is the first time WMF has both removed content and handed over contributor data in a European defamation case."
- We're getting pretty close to breaking 10,000 subscribers on the Just Asking Questions channel, which spun off from Reason's main YouTube a year ago. You should subscribe if you're interested in watching long-form conversations with Rob Henderson (on how elites can't quit peddling, and believing in, socialism); with Deb Fillman (on how K-12 schools both indoctrinate students and fail to teach them how to read); and—forthcoming, tomorrow!—with Megan McArdle (on how bad crime really is in Washington, D.C., what type of policing would actually help, and whether Trump deploying the National Guard is the right move).
- I think this is somewhat underdiscussed:
Sure. Many "wokes" (though surely not all and maybe not "wokism") hate not just the world of slavery but the contemporary world as well. They see its accomplishments as suspect. They are motivated to present it as deeply illegitimate, founded on oppression and injustice. https://t.co/TfpkKK3SRu
— Oliver Traldi (@olivertraldi) August 18, 2025
- Bad news:
On Friday, the Trump administration quietly expanded its steel/aluminum tariffs to cover hundreds of items that aren't aluminum or steel products "by any reasonable understanding of those words" - including dairy products!
Ridiculous stuff. pic.twitter.com/zPM3j4yweo
— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) August 18, 2025
