Are We In the Years of the Teutonic Plague?

Mar 28, 2025

∙ Paid

Pentecost - Emil Nolde - 1909 — *Pentecost*, by Emil Nolde, declared “degenerate filth” by Hitler

Hello. Donald Trump overwhelms us with a firehose of shit every day; the theory is that he is trying to make no single atrocity stand out — or make one rise so high above the others that the full awfulness of the rest of them gets lost. I’m thinking he succeeded yesterday.

Practically disappearing in the fecal international maelstrom over the Signal/Houthi national security breach is Another Alarming Asininity. Trump issued an executive order saying he would remove '“improper ideology” from Smithsonian museums. JD Vance, Trump said, will oversee the purging of “divisive, race-centered” art and exhibits and deny funding to exhibitions that “degrade shared American values.”

At the risk of violating Godwin’s Law, this is right from Hitler’s playbook. A filthy degenerate, Hitler infamously banned modern art that he considered “degenerate filth.” He liked art that glorified "blood and soil" values, racial purity, militarism, and obedience. Among the banned artists were Kandinsky, Chagall, Escher, Matisse, Munch, Ernst, Picasso and Van Gogh. Elsewhere in the arts, he also had no use for Kafka, Rilke, Camus, Dos Passos and, uh, Edgar Rice Burroughs, who created Tarzan.

One wonders what Messrs. Trump and Vance would do with this, from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art:

Gender Exhibition Section — Mickalene Thomas, Portrait of Mnonja.

Or what would Trump do with the child-size shackles at the Museum of African American History and Culture? They’re pretty race-based.

Are We In the Years of the Teutonic Plague?

This post is for paid subscribers