“Peak Woke”

President Donald Trump on Friday ordered the installation of signs outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History that warn people that the museum does not accurately reflect American history while pointing them to material that does — a dramatic escalation in his campaign to wrest control of how the nation’s story is told.

The executive order, signed at the end of a week of contentious congressional hearings on the museum, directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to erect temporary signage along the National Park Service-controlled sidewalks and walkways the public uses to reach the museum. The signs would inform visitors of the White House’s criticisms, tell them the museum’s exhibits “should be renovated” and direct them elsewhere “to locations and resources for accurate information regarding America’s history.”

I’m not an American but I’d vote for this.

It is the foremost museum in the United States, a grand repository of 150 million artefacts sometimes nicknamed “America’s Attic”. Founded in 1846 by the British philanthropist James Smithson – who never visited America but admired its democratic ideals – the Smithsonian Institution is dedicated to “the diffusion of knowledge”.

The occasion this month of the mockumentary The Office celebrating the 25th anniversary of its first appearance on television, an anniversary marked by a couple of actual documentaries, will have prompted some to revisit the comedy, or watch it for the first time.

Many who have done so will have inevitably asked themselves the same question: why did television comedy used to be so funny, and why is that not the case anymore? It’s not a conclusion that will be confined to us old timers: it’s said that there is vogue for all things turn-of-the-millennium among generations Y and Z.

Seeking to counter what it called a decade-long “revisionist movement” to “rewrite our Nation’s history,” the Trump administration issued Executive Order 14253 on March 27, 2025, directing federal officials to review Smithsonian exhibits and programs for ideological content.  Pursuant to that order, the White House Domestic Policy Council released a report, “Saving America’s Story,” on America’s 250th anniversary of Independence Day arguing that the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History has strayed from its core public mission: telling America’s story with honesty, seriousness, and civic pride.

COTTONWOOD, Arizona — In something like its current usage, the term “woke” originated a century ago among African Americans in reference to awareness of racial prejudice. More recently, it came to embody modern identitarian progressive ideology — and then quickly became shorthand in the U.S. for leftist excess. Americans’ long exposure to battles over identity and our insistence on treating people as individuals may have granted us strong immunity to a toxic political movement our country spawned. While wokeness is, at its core, an American innovation and export, the movement is in retreat across most of American society.