Tiny Doses
Entartung
Tens of thousands of people showed up at the Munich arcades on a hot summer day in 1937 to see degenerate art (Entartete Kunst). Perhaps they were hoping to see titillating obscenities bordering on pornography. They would have been disappointed. Instead, they saw 650 modernist pieces culled from 112 artists whose work no longer suited the ideology of the regime. Art movements ranged from Impressionism to Expressionism — Dada and Surrealism to Fauvism and Cubism. In the regime’s eyes, these movements dared to challenge the Aryan ideal.
Wall plaques told visitors what to see:
Nature as seen by sick minds
Insolent mockery of the Divine
An insult to German womanhood
The ideal — cretin and whore
The day before the arcade opened, Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler dedicated a rival exhibition with a radio speech. “Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, Impressionism, and so on, have nothing to do with our German people,” he declared. Then he made his contempt for modernist upstarts plain:
“…that flood of slime and refuse… such artworks will no longer find their way to the German people!… Deformed cripples… women who can only have a repulsive effect… men who see the shapes of our people today only as degenerate… the hour of his elimination will come sooner or later.”
Hitler’s show of classical art at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) was filled with racially pure Aryan idealization. It drew about 600,000 people. More than two million flocked to see degenerate art at the Munich arcade — climbing to three million once the show went on the road. Max Beckmann didn’t wait to see the crowds. He left Germany with his wife the day after Hitler’s speech. He never returned to Germany. Others would follow in his footsteps.
Hitler’s art purge was one step of many. By 1937 the regime had already boycotted Jewish shops, burned books and enacted the Nuremberg race laws. Eventually Reich Chancellor Hitler would turn his relentless war of purification on people themselves with unspeakable annihilation and racial cleansing according to blood and soil.
Victor Klemperer, a Dresden professor of languages and a Jew who survived the Nazi years, kept exhaustive diaries and wrote a book on how Nazi language worked.
“Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic.
They are consumed without being noticed.”
Degeneracy
The first thing a visitor sees approaching the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History on the National Mall is Infinity. It’s an abstract sculpture by José de Rivera commissioned by the federal government in 1967. The thin stainless steel Möbius ribbon with graceful arches turns on its axis every six minutes to represent the endless march of time.
Donald Trump has made his contempt for the sculpture plain. On Truth Social in September, he wrote:
“That strange modernist sculpture tells visitors nothing about America,
inspires no one, and honors none of our Great American Heroes.”
He wants to tear down Infinity and replace it with a 30-foot “George Washington Colossus.”
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Trump’s contempt for the museum is just as plain. On the nation’s 250th birthday, the White House Domestic Policy Council released a report on the museum. The 162-page document is titled Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage. Among its prescriptions:
“It would benefit most Americans if the Smithsonian’s flagship history museum had a label at every entrance that reads: ‘Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.’”
To amplify the message, the White House Rapid Response account on X said the museum had become “a vehicle for Radical Left propaganda and degeneracy.”
A year earlier, on Truth Social, Trump posted:
“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 — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness,
nothing about the Future.”
In the same post he says he told his lawyers to “go through the Museums” and “start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities.” After visiting three Smithsonian museums, the fact-checking site PolitiFact, gave the post its lowest rating — ”Pants on Fire.”
Trump doubled down. In addition to removing Infinity, he wants a five-year Washington exhibition and a second Washington statue, 11 feet tall, inside the museum.
In September, Lonnie Bunch, the Smithsonian’s first Black secretary and the founding director of its National Museum of African American History and Culture, announced he would retire at the end of the year. He said Trump’s criticism played no part in his decision. Five days earlier, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum had written to two senators that visitors “should be aware of Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch’s history of invidious discrimination and anti-white animus.”
The assault on the Smithsonian is one step of many. In a March 2025 executive order, the administration declared the Smithsonian under “a divisive, race-centered ideology.” The White House published a list of exhibits and artworks it considered ideological or unpatriotic, including works touching on disabilities, gay pride, immigration, and Benjamin Franklin’s ties to slavery. Beyond the museum, it ordered national park signs and displays on slavery and massacres taken down. At Fort Pulaski, Georgia, a photograph of a formerly enslaved man’s scarred back was ordered removed. At Grand Teton National Park, a sign saying “the U.S. Army killed over 170 Piegan Blackfeet, including many women, elders and children” came down in January 2026.
Earlier in October, veteran newsman Ted Koppel interviewed Steve Bannon on CBS News Sunday Morning. Bannon is a former Trump chief strategist. While discussing the upcoming midterm elections, Bannon told Koppel:
“There’s no retreat, and there’s no substitute for victory.
Let’s fight like hell.”
On January 6, 2021, Trump told the crowd at the Ellipse:
“We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell,
you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Koppel summed it up:
“If Steve Bannon says we can’t afford to lose…
it means we gotta do whatever it takes to win this fight.”
Bannon answered:
“Exactly.”
