JD VANCE AS THE SUPREME CENSOR

Equality becomes a mask for its opposite, and all that remains is a tendency towards self-destruction.

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In an executive order signed on March 27, 2025, Trump appointed Vice President JD Vance to lead efforts to stop government spending 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.” This order targets the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum complex:

“Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology. This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”¹

It is crucial to properly situate this direct act of censorship—worthy of comparison to the darkest Stalinist purges directed at “bourgeois cosmopolitanism.” It is not merely a simple regression from the anti-racist and feminist achievements of Political Correctness; rather, it is their symptom—the brutal emergence of what was effectively wrong in what Trumpians designate as the insanity of PC. The constellation that predominated until the rise of the new right-wing populism was best described by Jean-Claude Milner.² He posited that what we call “the West” today functions as a confederation under U.S. hegemony. The U.S. dominates intellectually as well, but paradoxically, this dominance expresses itself in discourses of dissent and protest rather than in discourses of order. Global universities teach us: