When President Trump proclaimed that our taxpayer-funded museums are too “woke,” it’s obvious that National Public Radio would stick up for “wokeness.” On Thursday’s Morning Edition, NPR turned to Nikole-Hannah Jones, whose “1619 Project” with The New York Times was excoriated by historians (including left-wingers) as misinformation. Anchor Michel Martin introduced her grandly:

In 2020, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work on The 1619 Project, an initiative that The Times says, quote, "aims to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

This was Trump’s point – that the “reframing” of museums to “center” our national narrative forever on slavery, as if nothing has improved, is a divisive ideological crusade.

Martin began the five-minute softball session: “What do you make of his criticisms of how the Smithsonian handles American history and the history of slavery?”

Hannah-Jones claimed “it's pretty clear that that criticism is baseless -- that if we look at the entire history of the United States, beginning with the very first settlements in Jamestown, slavery endured in this nation longer than freedom.” But the fight isn’t about “banning” slavery from our discussion. It’s about refusing to acknowledge the great progress since the 1960s.

Martin then asked Hannah-Jones about Trump’s claim that the museums don’t have any “brightness” about America, and she made the argument that in 2017, Trump praised the African-American history museum. But hasn’t it changed since 2020, after the George Floyd riots?

Hannah-Jones then cried Fascism: “The museum hasn't changed, so what has changed? And what has changed is, I would argue, that Donald Trump is engaging in what Jason Stanley, in his book How Fascism Works, calls trying to create this mythic past. And this mythic past is a past that was racially pure, and one that is being used to really distract us as our democratic norms are being eroded.”

Conservatives would rebut that wokeness created a mythic present -- that blacks are currently suffering under systemic white supremacy. Leftists think our "democratic norms" are working when they present their views unchallenged in taxpayer-funded museums and taxpayer-funded "public" broadcasting. They dare to call this history "inclusive." This was a five-minute crusade with no rebuttals.

Martin closed by suggesting there’s no coercion in wokeness being imposed (never mind conservative taxpayers paying for leftist propaganda). She said to Hannah-Jones: “You have no authority to require people to absorb this information. I just wonder why you think it is so upsetting to the president and to other people who seem to share his view.” You could actually put them on, and have a debate!

Hannah-Jones closed with the usual pose of moral superiority, repeating that conservatives are the “mythic past” slavery-deniers:

In 2020, our nation was undergoing a racial reckoning, and people were really starting to talk about the way that racism and inequality were structured into our society. People were taking to the streets. And so The 1619 Project, of course, was being viewed through that lens. But I also think what really upset people like Donald Trump and other conservatives was that we were trying to challenge our founding mythology and say that, you know, we are taught that this is a nation founded on freedom. That's true. We were also founded on slavery, and we've only wanted to deal with one of those histories. And I think the fact that so many Americans embraced what we were talking about was very dangerous to people who think that their power relies on us only believing in one idea of America.

For the moment, NPR is still funded by taxpayers. But this is why defunding was just and necessary -- that they serve the Left, and only the Left, and that conservatives are smeared, cartooned, and dismissed without a chance to respond.