America’s Strategic Assault on Art, Academia, and the Imagination That Sustains Peace
September 29, 2025
The United States once stood as a beacon of cultural audacity—a place where dissent could be beautiful, and beauty and innovation could challenge the present order of things. Its museums, universities, and artists helped inspire a worldwide imagination rooted in creative freedom and innovation.
But today, under the Trump regime’s second term, those dynamic qualities are being systematically dismantled. Just read this.
As Trump goes after the arts, many museums remain silent | CNN
As CNN reports, the administration has launched an aggressive campaign to “eradicate improper ideology” from federally funded museums. Exhibitions involving race, gender, and identity are being censored or cancelled.
Amy Sherald’s reimagining of the Statue of Liberty as a Black, trans woman was pulled from the Smithsonian after curators objected to its symbolism. Sherald warned that “history shows us what happens when governments demand loyalty from cultural institutions”—a chilling echo of regimes past.
This is not merely a cultural skirmish. It is a strategic silencing. And it is inseparable from the logic of militarism.
Militarism does not come only with uniforms, tanks, and constant war planning and fighting. It begins with uniformity. It demands loyalty, punishes ambiguity, and flattens complexity. It thrives on control—of borders, of bodies, of thought. And in its kakistocratic urge to dominate, it targets the spaces where alternative visions might emerge: the arts, universities, independent media, and also replaces broad public debate with deceptive, reality-defying narratives.
The Trump administration’s assault on the arts is part of a broader campaign to reshape American identity into a narrow patriotic spectacle. Grants worth tens of millions have been rescinded. The administration has declared many DEI programs—short for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—as “illegal,” targeting them across both government and cultural sectors.
These initiatives, designed to broaden representation and ensure access for historically marginalised communities, have become flashpoints in a broader campaign to mainstream American identity into a narrow, militarised narrative. It undermines every concept of democracy.
Museum directors, fearing financial collapse or loss of tax-exempt status, remain largely silent. According to CNN, one-third of U.S. museums have had federal grants cancelled, and many have begun self-censoring exhibitions to avoid federal assaults.
This impulse—to destroy one’s finest values in order to build ideological uniformity—is the hallmark of declining empires. It is not a sign of strength, but of weakness. Like an ailing individual who cannot tolerate other voices because they threaten the fragile illusion of control, this regime rearranges the cultural deck chairs on the Titanic – while the ship of democratic imagination sinks. They seem not to even see it.
Peace is not the absence of war. It is the presence of possibility. And possibility cannot survive in a climate of fear, where every brushstroke or syllabus is judged by its loyalty to power.
Museums that self-censor become instruments of propaganda, not of public memory. Universities that scrub their websites of diversity programs cease to be spaces of inquiry. And when artists are forced to choose between funding and freedom, society loses its pulse, its decency and future.
This erosion of cultural autonomy accelerates authoritarianism. It replaces dialogue with dogma. It narrows identity. It rewrites history. And it is self-destructive.
As Cesáreo Moreno of the National Museum of Mexican Art warns in this article, “If you don’t look at the ugly things as well as the beautiful things… then you are getting a one-sided, incorrect history, and there will be ramifications for that”.
The ramifications are already here. The administration’s censorship is not just reactive—it is preemptive. It seeks to prevent the emergence of alternative narratives before they can even be imagined. This is how militarism operates: not just through violence, but through erasure of self-reflection and meaning: “Everything according to us!”
And so we must name the more profound truth: that peace and cultural freedom are inseparable. Because both require the courage to imagine alternatives. To ask uncomfortable questions. To embrace contradiction. And to refuse the tyranny of politically correct mainstreaming.
The Trump regime’s campaign against the arts is not just a political maneuver. It is an attack on ambiguity, on nuance, on the very idea that truth might be contested rather than imposed. It is an attempt to replace democratic imagination with militarist uniformity.
But the fact that museums are being targeted is proof that they matter. As Scott Stulen of the Seattle Art Museum puts it, “The fact that they are trying to change didactics in a museum… is indicative that those things are important, and they’re an important part of our culture”.
Let us respond not just with outrage, but with imagination. With exhibitions that provoke. With essays that question. With manifestos that refuse to flatter power.
Because when cultural institutions are forced to glorify the state, they cease to reflect society and begin to control it. And every act of censorship is a prelude to deeper violence: against memory, against meaning, against the future freedom.
Authoritarianism doesn’t arrive only with tanks. It arrives with silence—curated, funded, and enforced. It is an aspect of fearology.
And so we must resist it not only just with facts, but with intensified creative productivity. With the kind of art that asks: What if things could be otherwise?
When Empires Fall and Militarism Arrives, Cultural Freedom Must Be Reduced added by JO on
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