Guess what's finally back! That's right, free evac cards. I have put them up on my Payhip as a pay-what-you-want product, including free. This will make it much easier for me to manage orders and anyone who wants to make donations to support the creation of these cards. Right now I have about 300 in stock, so lots to go around.
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Evacuations are stressful and frequently sudden. In such situations it is easy to forget things, no matter how much you may have prepared beforehand. These cards are designed to live in your wallet and function as a quick reference guide and list of items to remember during an evacuation based on how much time you have.
I provide these cards for free as often as I can, so if you want to get them for free, you can do that! You get to pick the price, and $0 is a 100% acceptable answer. However, if you do chose to pay even $1, that money will go towards producing more free cards for others, envelopes, and stamps.
To make sure these cards are available to as many people as possible, please try to limit your order to ten cards at a time. If you would like to discuss a larger order for yourself, your business, your non-profit, your emergency department, or anything else, shoot me an email at [email protected] and we can discuss options!
The long-lost remains of King Alfred the Great have been found buried under a car park, investigators claim.
Alfred died in 899, and his bones were repeatedly moved. He was buried in Winchester Cathedral until 1110, when his remains were moved to Winchester's Hyde Abbey, where they were interred before the high altar between the bodies of his wife and son.
The abbey was demolished after the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539, and the place was left in ruins.
In 1866, during construction of a workhouse on the site, the English antiquarian John Mellor excavated the area, found what he thought were Alfred's bones and had them reburied at nearby St. Bartholemew’s Church.
But in 2013, when archaeologists exhumed and carbon-dated the bones from St. Bartholomew’s churchyard, they proved to date from over 200 years after Alfred’s death - sparking Graham's interest and search.
He said: "Whoever’s bones they were, they weren’t Alfred’s. So, I decided to discover what happened to them.
"The quest has taken me 13 years.”
What stands out to me about the Mitch McConnell thing is just how little anyone around him actually cares for him as a person.
He goes down, ends up in a coma or brain dead, on life support, genuinely never coming back and even if part of him did he would be in agony from his cpr injuries. The best thing is to let him go.
But its not convenient to. His own *wife* runs away to China so they can't *make* her do the right thing and allow him to pass. She doesn't love him enough to override the political posturing. His own family is letting his abused half alive carcass get played with like a political doll while he's trapped in purgatory, as close to undead as one can be.
Not one of his colleagues or even any of his immediate family gives a single shit about him at all beyond what they can use him for. Its so grotesque I almost feel pity.
to give some entirely bizarre context, nigel farage (extreme cunt) has stepped down from his position as MP for clacton (due to a scandal where he received £5 million from a crypto billionaire that could have been laundered) only to run again so that he can prove people like him. and the only person running against him is count binface. who has been a staple of british politics for many years. and now the british press is forced to interview him seriously while he sits there with his binface.
It's fun when the robot character in the sci-fi show gets cut in half because nobody working on this type of media knows anything about robotics and you never know what you're going to find inside. Green printed circuit boards? Meat and viscera, but like in a weird colour? Just a shitload of goo?
I especially like it when the robot appears to have realistic musculature which operates via contraction, suggesting some sort of fluid-driven or shape-memory-based actuation, and then it gets dismembered and a bunch of random gears and sprockets go flying everywhere.
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
i was training a young person at work, and she referred to sexual assault as "SA" out loud, and i immediately was like, "no, it's sexual assault, call it what it is," bc idgaf if the algorithm overlords have taught y'all that you should fear direct language, how tf do any of you expect to ever address real issues with any amount of seriousness if you can't even say the words? imagine an advocate looking a sexual assault survivor in the eyes and asking "did he grape you?" it's absolutely fucking absurd, but these young interns and new hires are coming into an environment where we deal with survivors of all different kinds of abuse, and they're coming with the mindset that the words are as bad as the actions, and that makes them shitty at the job and look juvenile af
i HATE self-censorship for a lot of reasons, but being in crisis work makes it even more frustrating. who are you censoring for? like i am being so fr, WHO are you censoring for? have you even thought it through? people who have been raped know that they have been raped. if someone attempts suicide or is grieving someone who did, saying "sewer slide" isn't going to protect them from any of the feelings. a murder victim's family isn't going to feel better bc you said "unalived" instead of murdered. if anything, it's just extremely invalidating and othering. it's saying "what happened to you is so bad that i won't even say the word," which is NOT trauma-informed care. you are not protecting survivors/victims when you self-censor. the ONLY things you protect when you self-censor are the puritanical ideologies that are being encouraged by rich fascists who want your money and obedience
say the fucking words, guys. just say the goddamn words before i go insane!!!
Ryland Grace and his popularity as a character feels like such an important step in repairing the cultural tsunami left by the long running trope of every genius character needing to be an insufferable asshole to everyone in a ten mile radios about it.
Conversely, Eva Stratt is doing wonders for repairing and inspiring a appreciation for commanding women with dubious moral convictions who are fully willing to bend laws for the greater good without hesitation.
The reason why McConnell is currently ambiguously dead is because KY law was recently amended to state that a vacant senate seat must be filled by a special election, but previously, the duty to fill a vacant senate seat was by appointment of the current governor. The present KY gov is a Democrat, and has the means to challenge the special elections rule in the state supreme court, under the argument that it is unconstitutional to governor's power as outlined in the KY state constitution. So given the risk of a Dem appointee who would become an incumbent to challenge, or a special election race in the middle of the Mamdani Endorsement DemSoc run on congressional seats, McConnell will remain in quantum superposition between life and death until there is no longer a risk of his republican power being challenged.
Which... you know, really is life in the American Fascist Era in a nutshell: a questionably dead or dying racist lich refusing to reliquinsh the ability to make all our lives miserable
Recent scientific reassessments strengthen the case for rapid climate action rather than weaken it.
This year, climate research seemed to hit a rough patch. Scientists preparing the next generation of global climate scenarios scrapped the most extreme pathway that had shaped years of academic research, financial risk analysis, media coverage, and advocacy. A prominent study estimating that climate change would cost the global economy $38 trillion per year by midcentury was retracted by the academic journal Nature, while a new study argued that meaningful estimates of climate change’s economic damages lie beyond our analytical capabilities, prompting a Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined “You Can’t Trust ‘Climate Economics.’”
Many on the right quickly claimed vindication. After the worst-case scenario was retired in May, U.S. President Donald Trump declared on social media that climate research had been “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado, a longtime critic of the misuse of extreme climate scenarios, wrote in the Washington Post: “The climate apocalypse isn’t around the corner after all.”
Beneath the bluster, the critics have a point. Too many climate advocates have treated worst-case scenarios as likely outcomes and too often used apocalyptic language that outran the evidence. Claims such as U.S. President Joe Biden’s 2022 warning that “climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world” overstated the case.
But Europeans sweltering through last week’s deadly heat wave could be forgiven for finding little comfort in that reassessment. Two things can be true at the same time: Some climate rhetoric has outrun the evidence, yet the evidence still points to a far hotter, more dangerous, and more disruptive world well beyond what Europe just endured.
Europe has been baking under record-breaking temperatures. Cities across the continent, where air conditioning is far less common than in the United States, suffered through dangerous combinations of heat and humidity, with hospitals, power systems, transportation networks, and vulnerable populations under severe strain. The Economist estimated that extreme heat such as that Europe experienced last week could cause around 12,000 excess deaths in just three days. Europeans also struggled with soaring energy prices as demand for cooling surged, and some power plants struggled to operate efficiently in the extreme heat.
The reason heat waves are becoming more frequent and severe is well understood: The planet is warming because greenhouse gas concentrations are rising to levels far above those experienced throughout human civilization, largely from the burning of fossil fuels. Europe is warming much faster than the global average, in part because northern latitudes are heating especially rapidly. That means what once counted as exceptional heat is becoming more common, more intense, and more dangerous.
Critics of climate alarmism are right that research and advocacy too often leaned on extreme and unlikely emissions scenarios. For years, an implausibly high-emissions pathway—with assumptions such as a fivefold increase in coal use by 2100—was routinely presented in academic studies, risk reports, and media coverage as a plausible version of the path the world was on.
But the alternative to alarmism is not complacency. The heat gripping Europe is dangerous enough on its own. What makes it even more alarming is that we still do not know how much worse climate change may become, how quickly its effects may compound, or where the thresholds are beyond which societies struggle to adapt.
The same scientific reassessment in May that found the highest-emissions scenario implausible also found that the lowest-emissions scenarios are slipping out of reach. That should give more, not less, cause for concern. On today’s likely trajectory, the world is heading toward roughly 2.5 to 3 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century. At those levels, weeks such as these would no longer be exceptional in much of Europe by later this century; they would become recurring features of summer —and the likely harms at these levels of warming go well beyond more sweltering days.
What may matter most is not what climate outcomes are expected but which cannot be ruled out. Temperatures may rise further and faster than anticipated. Ice sheet instability could commit the world to centuries of rising seas. Stresses on infrastructure, water, agriculture, and public health systems could drive migration, economic disruption, and conflict, falling hardest on the countries least able to adapt. None of these outcomes is certain. But all are plausible enough that no responsible risk manager would ignore them.
That is why a new academic paper that purportedly “breaks climate economics,” according to Pielke, is cause for more concern not less. The two economists who wrote it, Finbar Curtin and Matthew Burgess of the University of Wyoming, do not find that the economic harms of climate change are small but rather that the true scale of those damages is highly uncertain and too difficult to quantify. They argue that economic models that generate a false sense of precision obscure more than they reveal.
The Trump administration has drawn precisely the wrong conclusion from the genuine limits of climate economics. In May 2025, the White House directed agencies to stop factoring climate damage estimates into regulatory analyses, arguing that “the uncertainties in performing monetized impacts quantifications are too great.” It then used that uncertainty to justify weakening the climate regulations those estimates had supported. That gets the logic backward.
Uncertainty about climate damages is not a reason to abandon climate safeguards. It is, as Harvard University economist Martin Weitzman showed, a reason to take them more seriously. When catastrophic outcomes are possible but hard to quantify, conventional cost-benefit analysis that ignores such “tail risks” can systematically understate the case for action. The same features that make future climate outcomes so difficult to model—the possibility of extreme and potentially unbounded harms—are precisely what make them too consequential to ignore.
Governments understand this in other domains. They do not wait for precise damage estimates before preparing for pandemics, maintaining military deterrence, or regulating nuclear reactors. Climate change belongs in the same category. The Paris Agreement’s temperature targets were never the output of a neat optimization model. They were, appropriately, socially negotiated markers of tolerable risk.
Heightened concerns about energy security have also strengthened the case for curbing the use of oil and gas. Recent shocks, including the Strait of Hormuz crisis that sent oil and gas prices sharply higher, have reminded import-dependent economies that reliance on globally traded fuels exposed to geopolitical risks can leave them vulnerable to war, coercion, and price spikes in an increasingly fragmented world. A system that relies more on electricity from domestic sources, including renewable energy and nuclear power, will be less vulnerable to those risks.
The climate apocalypse may not be around the corner. But Europeans got a frightening reminder last week that a hotter, more unstable, and more costly world already is. The lesson of recent reassessments in climate science and economics is not that climate risk was invented or that the case for action has weakened. What has changed is that the best-case outcomes are slipping out of reach, while the full scale of the damages from continued warming remains deeply uncertain. That combination strengthens the case for rapid climate action rather than weakens it.
A scathing report released on the Fourth of July says the National Museum of American History downplays the role of the founders while empha
In a broadside posted to its website just as fireworks celebrating America’s 250th birthday were lighting up skies on Saturday, the White House condemned the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for what it said was a failure to celebrate the nation’s heritage, arguing it had become a political tool intent on denigrating the American story.
The 162-page report, by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, represents a sweeping attack on the museum’s presentation of American history. It is the latest step in the Trump administration’s campaign to pressure the Smithsonian into conforming to what President Trump has described as “patriotic” history.
While the report concludes that the broader Smithsonian Institution — which oversees 21 museums and the National Zoo — “has not met its obligations to the American people,” it places particular blame on the National Museum of American History.
Titled “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” the report accuses the museum of anti-white bias and of minimizing and distorting the nation’s founding. Those actions, the report asserts, have shifted the museum’s mission “from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”
The museum, it says, “no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens.”
The report takes issue with specific exhibits, such as an 1840 statue of George Washington that includes a depiction of Hercules. The work’s accompanying text describes “the perceived courage of the American people.” That language, the report says, “refuses to affirm the exceptional courage of the American people.”
But the report’s “main concerns” involve what is not there.
Visitors today, it says, “will find no major exhibit dedicated to America’s founding era, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, other founding fathers, the Continental Congress, the pilgrims, the Puritans or major moments of the American Revolution.” Instead, it claims, many founders are presented chiefly in terms of their connection to slavery.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Smithsonian, Julissa Marenco, said, “For more than 180 years, the Smithsonian has served the American public with nonpartisan and independent scholarship, and we remain committed to doing so.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The Domestic Policy Council, which wrote the report, is a White House group tasked with developing the president’s domestic agenda and advising him on issues like education and health care. Its leader, Vince Haley, has spearheaded the administration’s commemoration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, including Mr. Trump’s plan to build a 250-foot arch in Washington. Mr. Haley has also been credited with the idea for a patriotic sculpture garden known as the National Garden of American Heroes.
The Smithsonian has long been regarded as independent of the executive branch. But in an effort to have much greater influence on cultural matters in Washington, Mr. Trump has focused on the Smithsonian since March 2025, when he issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
In that order, which calls on Vice President JD Vance to overhaul the Smithsonian with the help of Congress, the president described a “revisionist movement” across the country that “seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”
Mr. Trump has since announced that he was dismissing the director of the institution’s National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, calling her “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI.” (The Smithsonian did not follow through — publicly insisting it controlled personnel matters — but Ms. Sajet resigned, saying in a statement that her decision served the institution’s best interests.)
The White House also issued an ultimatum to turn over Smithsonian records or face potential budget cuts. In response, the Smithsonian’s secretary, Lonnie G. Bunch III, reasserted the institution’s independence but said materials had been submitted in an effort to be “transparent and open.”
Some 62 percent of the Smithsonian’s annual $1 billion budget is derived from federal sources, including funds directly appropriated by Congress. The Trump administration proposed cutting the Smithsonian’s budget by about 12 percent in the 2026 fiscal year, but Congress has maintained the institution’s federal funding.
Saturday’s report summons the specter of a funding withdrawal, citing how the president’s executive order directed Mr. Vance to work with the Office of Management and Budget to “prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy.”
Without specifying the exact remedy, the report says that “the president has a duty and obligation to seek reforms of the Smithsonian.”
The report criticizes the museum for viewing “traditional patriotic narratives” with suspicion or contempt. It says the museum endorses illegal immigration and advocates transgender issues, while it focuses on Christianity as “an instrument of conquest, exclusion or cultural erasure,” rather than its “constructive role” in “shaping the nation and its freedoms.”
It takes particular aim at the museum’s director, Anthea M. Hartig, saying she has advanced “an ideological agenda contradictory to the museum’s founding purpose of fostering patriotism.”
The story the museum tells, the report says, “is not one of ‘the victory of freedom and genius of our country’ but one of regret, tragedy and shame.”
Ms. Hartig did not respond to a request for comment.
The report immediately drew pushback from some in the historical profession, which has sharply criticized Mr. Trump’s efforts to enforce his view of history.
Sarah Weicksel, the executive director of the American Historical Association, the country’s largest group of history scholars, questioned the report’s claims that the museum neglects the nation’s founding and its founders.
“The museum has extraordinary objects that tell the history of the Revolution, including the newly restored Gunboat Philadelphia,” she said, referring to a Revolutionary-era warship. “Visitors also encounter George Washington, his leadership prowess and the American Revolution in ‘The Price of Freedom,’” another exhibition.
But some conservatives commended the report.
“The National Museum of American History is the tip of the iceberg,” said Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation who has called for Mr. Bunch’s dismissal. “It’s not the only museum that erases our history and our heritage — all the other museums do. We have to go back to celebrating our country and its great achievements.”
The report, which contains more than 30 pages of footnotes, also criticizes an exhibition called “Many Voices, One Nation” that it claims tries “to convince visitors that illegal aliens are entitled to citizenship, voting rights and ‘belonging’ in America.”
And it criticizes an exhibition that closed in November 2025, “The Electric Dr. Franklin,” for what it says was too heavy of an emphasis on Benjamin Franklin’s connection to slavery, including his ownership of slaves, and not enough on his work as an abolitionist.
The report comes as the Smithsonian faces potentially significant turnover in its governing Board of Regents, a 17-member panel that includes Democratic and Republican elected officials as well as nine citizens.
Mr. Bunch has led the Smithsonian since 2019, and his relationship with the White House is, at best, strained. He has enjoyed the support of the board in asserting that the Smithsonian is independent.
But the museum is working with a diminished board since the terms of two Smithsonian trustees ended in March. Their replacements have yet to be named as Mr. Trump’s efforts to gain control of the institution have slowed that process.
Over the past few months, the Smithsonian managed to avoid further confrontations with Trump officials, perhaps because it made tweaks like altering some wall text and because the president was focused on matters like the war in Iran.
But the new report makes clear that the White House is fed up with the Smithsonian.
“The serious concerns raised in this report are not about a few exhibits or a few controversial labels,” the report says. “As it stands today, it would benefit most Americans, especially parents bringing their children for a tour, 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.’”
free the nipple has to make a resurgence for a number of reasons but bro look at our upcoming eternity of wet bulb temps youre smoking straight up cock if you think im keeping a shirt on when it hits 105° in new england
everyone tits out with a parasol is such a beautiful world to imagine that the fact it doesnt currently exist fills me with equal parts fire and misery
before my egg cracked, i had noticed that trans people were often pro-accessibility and up-to-date on the needs of disabled people, but i hadn’t seen any inherent connection between the two (other than the obvious minority-looking-out-for-other-minority thing). but now that i’m trans and medically transitioning, and i have to constantly repeat myself while talking to doctors and nurses, and explain things about my own anatomy to medical staff who should already know this, and having every single problem i might have blamed on my “condition” so nothing i say is taken seriously, all of the sudden i have a little sneak peak into the life of someone who has to deal with this all the time. like shit bro, being disabled probably sucks ass, someone should do something about this
Since there is a wave of anti-birth control propaganda, this is your reminder that the birth coontrol pill was responsible for 30% more women graduating with college degrees between 1970-1990
Also a whole lot of people need it to hold down a job or stay in school regardless of reproductive risk: it offers menstrual control. It can be the difference between debilitating, bedbound periods and normal function. It’s medicine. It’s also very cheap to produce and returns soooo many thousands of dollars to the economy for every dollar it costs, so don’t let anyone make a false financial argument about it.
like idk i think at this point im just gonna have to start blocking anyone who's into taylor swift. sorry but if you can't drop her even after she invites ICE agents to her fucking wedding i just don't really think i want you near me. why are you throwing all of your supposed values away for a mid at best pop singer?
Steven J. Demetriou, guest 92 of 93 as photographed by Backgrid
He is the executive chair of Amentum, a company that provides engineering and technology to the USA’s army and nuclear programs. They operate the most test and training ranges of any contractor if their site is to be believed.
It appears they run the East Montana concentration camp, the largest in the USA. While much of the abuse, including sexual and physical abuse, occurred under the camp’s previous contractor, Acquisition Logistics, the ACLU has confirmed Amentum was WORKING AS SUBCONTRACTORS at the East Montana camp during this time. Amentum's current role as sole contractor from March onwards proves no less deadly, with 2 overdoses with the intent to commit suicide from inhumane conditions. Representative Escobar confirmed nothing has changed since Amentum’s takeover. Lawyers representing prisoners report being unable to reach their clients.
The following conditions are BY DESIGN, as "Guards tell people detained at Camp East Montana who complain
about conditions that if they do not like the conditions, they should self-deport." Civil Detention Centers are not supposed to be punitive. This is only a civil detention center on paper. It is a concentration camp.
The ACLU lists: I already linked this but I'm doing it again bc if you read one source, it should be this one.
Medical neglect, including for people with pregnancies, diabetes, cancer, and HIV.
Severe beatings. One man was beaten to death for requesting his asthma medication.
solitary confinement
unclean water
Tuberculosis and Measles outbreaks
Limited to no sunlight
no or limited hygiene products
rotten food, not enough food, no special diets for medical conditions
SEXUAL ASSAULT
No ventilation in a DESERT leading to lung damage
Not enough toilets, overflow often, whole tent smells of urine and feces
No privacy to use said toilet
Threats and beatings for those that refuse to sign deportation papers, sometimes to places they are NOT FROM
No activities, punished for attempting to make art from recycled items like cracker boxes, can only practice own religion at guards' discretion
no dental care. This is likely universal across US concentration camps. Note Emmanuel Damas, the Haitian immigrant that died from a dental infection due to lack of care in another camp
Unable to receive legal representation if not already represented
LOCATED ON FORMER JAPANESE DETENTION CAMP BECAUSE TIME IS A FUCKING CIRCLE
Taylor Swift's guest is directly responsible for these. This is the LARGEST CONCENTRATION CAMP IN THE US, made to hold 5000 people. He's not just any ICE contractor he is the biggest and baddest. At least this will get people talking about just HOW bad this camp is.
Note this camp is in the Chihuahua Desert: This heat wave? Try it in a windowless fucking 108 by 36 ft tent with 72 other people with no soap.
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