Preobeying at the National Archives
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Joe Biden’s appointee to head the National Archives is a woman named Colleen Shogan. The museum at the Archives is pretty popular. So Shogan has decided to save herself in case Trump wins by preobeying and stripping the museum of anything that might possibly offend a right-winger.
U.S. Archivist Colleen Shogan and her top advisers at the National Archives and Records Administration, which operates a popular museum on the National Mall, have sought to de-emphasize negative parts of U.S. history. She has ordered the removal of prominent references to such landmark events as the government’s displacement of indigenous tribes and the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II from planned exhibits.
Visitors shouldn’t feel confronted, a senior official told employees, they should feel welcomed. Shogan and her senior advisers also have raised concerns that planned exhibits and educational displays expected to open next year might anger Republican lawmakers—who share control of the agency’s budget—or a potential Trump administration.
She was tapped for the job at a sensitive time for the agency—days before federal agents searched former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in 2022, spurred by the Archives’ discovery that Trump had taken home classified records. Republicans accused the agency of abusing its authority and targeting the former president. GOP lawmakers grilled Shogan about alleged partisan leanings during her confirmation hearings.
Shogan has since overseen a host of changes to exhibits planned in a roughly $40 million makeover of the National Archives Museum, which draws more than a million visitors a year, and the adjacent Discovery Center, which provides education programs for students and families. Longtime employees said Shogan’s directives amounted to censorship.
Shogan’s senior aides ordered that a proposed image of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. be cut from a planned “Step Into History” photo booth in the Discovery Center. The booth will give visitors a chance to take photos of themselves superimposed alongside historic figures. The aides also ordered the removal of labor-union pioneer Dolores Huerta and Minnie Spotted-Wolf, the first Native American woman to join the Marine Corps, from the photo booth, according to current and former employees and agency documents.
The aides proposed using instead images of former President Richard Nixon greeting Elvis Presley and former President Ronald Reagan with baseball player Cal Ripken Jr.
After reviewing plans for an exhibit about the nation’s Westward expansion, Shogan asked one staffer, Why is it so much about Indians? according to current and former employees. Among the records Shogan ordered cut from the exhibit were several treaties signed by Native American tribes ceding their lands to the U.S. government, according to the employees and documents.
For an exhibit about patents that had changed the world, Shogan directed that the patent for the contraceptive pill be replaced. Aides substituted the patent for television. During discussions about what to use instead of the birth-control pill, an aide to Shogan suggested a patent for the bump stock, a device that allows a semiautomatic weapon to operate as a machine gun, according to two former employees.
Shogan and her top advisers told employees to remove Dorothea Lange’s photos of Japanese-American incarceration camps from a planned exhibit because the images were too negative and controversial, according to documents and current and former employees. Shogan’s aides also asked staff to eliminate references about the wartime incarceration from some educational materials, other current and former employees said.
Ellis Brachman, a senior adviser to Shogan, complained to some employees that they were too woke, according to current and former employees.
Why so much about Indians?
Again, this was Joe Biden’s choice. This isn’t some right-winger by habit. She donated to both Obama and Hillary. This is someone who is simply preobeying. Biden should fire her right now.