Monday, Washington D.C. began removing its BLM plaza mural. As workers kicked off the six-week demolition, no crowd gathered to watch, a few outlets offered limp coverage, and the scenery stood in stark contrast to 5 years ago, when 200,000 people gathered on the same street and started burning shit. It feels like a glitch in the matrix: BLM supporters would never say the cause is any less “important” today, yet the rapid inflation and deflation of the movement almost suggests a hypnosis has worn off — much like the entire mass hysteria that was 2020. The term psyop is tossed around carelessly today, but that’s what 2020 was, and the thing about collective psychological trauma is it requires collective processing. I’m not sure we’ve processed what happened 5 years ago — or punished those responsible for it. But at least we’re finally cleaning up the garbage.

This week, the Department of Education announced plans to axe half its workforce — around 1,300 employees — while maintaining that federal student aid won’t be impacted “in any way, shape, or form.” If that’s true, it begs the question: what on God’s green earth were these people doing? Predictably, teachers’ unions are panicking. Becky Pringle (real name) of the NEA claims “victims will be our most vulnerable students,” citing impending “soaring” class sizes (caused by these firings how?). The agency is primarily a federal ATM, disbursing pre-allocated funds to schools, with side gigs as “obtrusive regulatory middleman” and “data collector of our abysmal educational outcomes.” If nobody can explain how these firings hurt children, maybe teachers’ unions are just trying to protect their own jobs from (inevitable) scrutiny. The real tragedy here is that these firings won’t do anything — and 40% of our fourth graders (still) can’t read. 

The New York Times reports Trump is staging a hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center, the grand old institution of American arts. He's named himself chairman (naturally), fired Biden’s appointees to the board (the horror!), and empowered former modeling agency owner Paolo Zampolli — who wants to partner with Elon to blast art into space, host Valentino fashion shows, create a marina on the Potomac, and open a Cipriani at the center. Incredibly, people (Democrats) are mad. But are they mad because the takeover will destroy a storied institution, or are they mad because the new team might succeed? Not since William F. Buckley has the right stepped into culture. But at this point everyone knows it’s upstream of politics, and Trump is nothing if not a showman. Now, if he resists the overly-political ghettoized art most often attempted by Republicans (unlikely, no offense), this could be his smartest move to date.

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