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Culture Should We Build a National Women’s Museum? A centralized museum in Washington is liable to be excessively ideological and historically garbled. On February 10, the House Committee on Natural Resources held a legislative hearing on the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. The Women’s Museum itself was authorized in 2020, but Congress still needs to authorize land to build it. Before Congress acts, lawmakers and the public should weigh in on whether such a museum is wise in principle and consider what it is likely to become in practice.  The Women’s Museum currently exists as a website, with blogs, learning resources, and featured exhibits. Those exhibits appear in other Smithsonian museums. “Forces for Change: Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women’s Activism” is in the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “The First Ladies” is in the National Museum of American History.  What we know about the Women’s Museum so far does not inspire confidence, and waiting for it to be built to have these discussions would be counterproductive. Specifically, the current bill to allocate land does not define “woman,” which raises the likelihood that the museum would include achievements of biological men.  This concern is not speculative. A 2021 blog titled “LGBTQ+ Women Who Made History,” includes the tennis player Renée Richards, who underwent sex reassignment surgery and competed in the U.S. Open. Richards is lauded as “one of the first professional athletes to identify as transgender.” Recent developments at the Smithsonian and in the museum world more broadly do not bode well. There have been a number of issues with ideological bias at the Smithsonian museums. Most infamously, the Museum of African American History portrayed traits such as “objective, rational linear thinking,” and hard work as features of “white culture.” Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch coauthored a report by the American Alliance of Museums that begins, “DEAI is integral to excellence in museum practice. FULL STOP.” The American Alliance of Museums is a notable organization, including 35,000 museums and museum professionals. These trends are downstream of higher education. Curators have degrees in museum studies from majority-liberal institutions. Experts tapped for the Women’s Museum are likely to have credentials in gender studies taught through a Marxist lens.  Bipartisan oversight committees often prove ineffective. Cultural issues receive less sustained attention from conservatives, and some shy away from difficult political battles.  Conservatives also lack a deep, serious bench of scholars on women’s history. We face our own problems with radicals. There are some scholars who take women’s perspectives seriously. But many assume the Sexual Revolutionaries’ premise that there is a logical and straight line from first-wave feminism to today’s ideologies.  As historian Christopher Lasch—whom legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon called “the Man Who Loved Women and Democracy”—wrote, “In the light of the subsequent radicalization of the women’s movement, The Feminine Mystique is usually read (when it is read at all) as the first halting step down the road since traveled by an army of more militant women.” Lasch argued that the deeper issue was how to revive a sense of vocation in a society that had lost a shared sense of purpose. Beyond these practical concerns lie deeper questions about the museum itself. Should we have a “women’s” museum? Is women’s history best told by the federal government? Efforts to depict lesser-known stories are laudable, and those stories are often fascinating. Many women’s lives, more than men’s, were historically lived in private.  The history of American women is rich and varied, with remarkable individuals and community efforts, private sacrifices and public accomplishments, injustices and triumphs. The same is true of the American story.  Mercy Otis Warren wrote plays and poems supporting the patriot cause, authored the only Antifederalist history of the American Revolution, and published an influential pamphlet for a Bill of Rights. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, second only to the Bible in 19th-century sales, forced a nation to confront its conscience about slavery. American women have played a substantial role in civil society and philanthropy and have at times rallied against injustices. The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which saved and still oversees George Washington’s home, demonstrates the spirited character of American women.  In the early 19th century, first-wave feminists—often allied with abolitionists and temperance advocates—highlighted the damage caused by alcohol consumption. In 1830, Americans drank three times as much as they do today, and some husbands were tippling away the family income. But is this “women’s history,” or simply American history? Can the two be cleanly separated? Perhaps we can agree that the Suffrage Movement was women’s history, though men were part of it.  But what about Roe v. Wade or Cosmopolitan magazines? Will women’s history be reduced to the story of the Sexual Revolution, with abortion and transhumanism treated as its central goals? Given the current environment, this outcome seems likely. Reasonable and legitimate attempts to consider demographics or how sex differences matter often devolve into oppressor–oppressed framings. These divisions overlook the shared work of men and women and obscure mutual sacrifice. Do such categories fairly describe an infantry nurse who endured the Depression and raised numerous children? Or her husband, who served in the Second World War and labored in dangerous factory work? Much of the shared, the noble, and the tragic of the human experience is lost with such reductive grids. But it seems likely that the Women’s Museum will be about how women have been wronged in or by America rather than the ways women have contributed to America.  While laws like coverture and the denial of voting rights were serious injustices, the American story is a triumphant one of recognizing the equal dignity of the human person. Declaring “all men are created equal” provided the moral logic for the elimination of slavery and women’s enfranchisement. That trajectory, and the gratitude and patriotism it inspires, is often lost in the rigidity and resentment of postmodernism. There are also other considerations about the construction of the Women’s Museum. History matters, but that doesn’t mean the federal government is the best institution to preserve it. National museums based in DC piece together history that occurred elsewhere. Rather than expanding the number of federal museums centralized in DC, what about encouraging Americans to go to institutions like Molly Brown’s House in Colorado, the places where history really happened? Is there something lost when the efforts to band together and raise the funds to preserve the home of a local hero are taken from communities and subsumed by the national government?  It is quite American for civic associations to take responsibility for preserving the American story and American treasures. Americans used to do such things more, and we have ceded many of these habits of self-government. Beyond that intangible cost, centralization creates the incentive to remove artifacts from local communities and relocate them to Washington. While there is value in having a Museum of American History, such museums are particularly vulnerable to ideological issues. They lack natural limits, so their framing is more reliant on curators. (This is different from places like battlefields, which are historically significant for particular and inherent reasons. It would be quite odd, for example, to have an exhibit on Mark Twain at Mount Vernon.)  The Museum of American History is currently a bit of a hodge-podge, its mission unclear. The Women’s Museum would face the same issues. Further, most Americans, particularly children, only have so much time and attention. Families often have to make a choice about which Smithsonian museums to visit when they come to DC, and hurry through the expansive collections.  Would building a separate women’s history museum actually result in more citizens learning about the women of America? Or would exhibits on women’s history at the Museum of American History garner more attention? For comparison, the Museum of American History receives 2.1 million visitors per year, while the Museum of African American History and Culture receives 1.6 million. Since the Women’s Museum currently features exhibits at the Museum of American History, further integration seems feasible.  America was built by remarkable men and women, and by citizens who have established lives of quiet and shared dignity. But the Women’s Museum is unlikely to paint that landscape with accuracy, nuance, and loveliness. Moreover, the stewardship of history may be better left to localities and states, our efforts more effectively focused on reviving and establishing the civic associations that have governed our heritage. Congress should consider the questions about the project before it’s too late. The post Should We Build a National Women’s Museum? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs The Government’s Dubious Case That Iran Tried to Kill Trump The public deserves to see all the evidence for the consequential claim. (Photo by Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images) Twenty-four years ago, on September 12, 2002, Benjamin Netanyahu came to Congress to pressure American politicians to authorize the use of military force against Israel’s enemies, namely Iraq and Iran, governments which had been marked for regime change since the neocons’ Clean Break Report authored in the 1990s. Though Israel quickly achieved its first goal of having the U.S military topple Saddam Hussein, it was not until last weekend that an American president made the military commitment toward fulfilling Israel’s long-held war aims against Iran, with President Donald Trump bombing Iran and announcing via a video posted on Truth Social his intent to topple its government.  “The lives of American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties,” warned Trump as the Iranian military responded to joint U.S.–Israeli bombing with airstrikes of its own against multiple American bases in the region. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who has never seen a new war he did not instantly want to send other people’s children to go fight in (he does not have children of his own to send to war), echoed the president’s grim assessment, telling The Wall Street Journal, “If there are deaths or injuries in this operation, I can say without hesitation that they sacrificed for a noble cause…” The administration has barely attempted to explain to the American people what that cause is, perhaps because they understand how transparent the true motivation for toppling the Iranian government is to most Americans, who can easily spot the Israeli fingerprints smeared all over this operation. Indeed, Secretary of State Marco Rubio effectively acknowledged as much on Monday when he said, The president made the very wise decision—we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties. With open admissions from senior government officials that the United States is fighting—and Americans are dying and unprotected in the Gulf States—on behalf of Israel, and with the absence of a rational and clear casus belli to affirm to their audiences and voters, a chorus of Trump loyalists have emerged from Congress and corporate media to spread a series of highly propagandistic lies meant to boost morale and provide retroactive justification for an unpopular war that Congress never authorized. One of the most influential of those lies is that the government of Iran attempted to assassinate Trump, an allegation that seems to be taken seriously and considered legitimate by senior administration officials including the president himself. On Monday, Trump told ABC “I got [Khameinei] before he got me. They tried twice … I got him first.” Two days later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth affirmed that narrative, telling reporters at a press conference that “Iran tried to kill President Trump and President Trump got the last laugh.” Yet reporting by journalist Ken Silva suggests there is scant credible evidence tying Tehran to an actual assassination plot. The case centers on Asif Merchant, a Pakistani national who was arrested in July 2024 and whom prosecutors accuse of attempting to hire hitmen on Iran’s behalf. But as Silva has documented, the operation was a tightly controlled FBI sting, executed in a manner that is highly dubious. Department of Justice prosecutors allege that Merchant conceived of the plot himself and was acting at the direction of, or in coordination with, Iranian contacts. In the government’s account, Merchant initiated the plan, disclosed it to a friend, and then attempted to hire what he believed were real hitmen, who were in fact undercover FBI agents. But pretrial proceedings revealed that Merchant had been under FBI surveillance before he even entered the United States, and that the “friend” he allegedly confided in was already a government informant. That would make the federal government not only the architect of the sting operation, but the sole witness to Merchant’s purported expression of criminal intent. Merchant also allegedly struggled to assemble even a $5,000 down payment for the supposed hit, obtaining funds from an associate via the FBI informant and transferring the money to other undercover agents. The Deputy Attorney General reported that Merchant had no known associates in the United States, including no known Iranian co-conspirators domestically. Disturbingly, prosecutors have signaled their intent to invoke the state secrets privilege to block the public and defense teams from having access to evidence that is potentially exculpatory. In other words, there is no evidence publicly available that Merchant formed any plot on his own or that the Iranian government ever sponsored it.  Among the few questioning the narrative that Iran tried to kill Trump is the MAGA luminary Tucker Carlson, who said that the intelligence that supposedly proves the Iranian plot existed “came from Israel.” To his point, it was revealed in a letter from a U.S. attorney assigned to the case that the FBI used Israeli spyware Cellebrite to access the alleged assassin’s phone. Certainly Netanyahu has boosted the narrative of an Iranian plot to kill the U.S. president. And as Carlson helpfully reminded his audience, “this country has certainly been manipulated a lot by Israeli intelligence.”  If the attempted assassination allegation truly is a predicate for war, it is one of the thinnest ones in U.S. history, built on a sting operation the government manufactured and on evidence prosecutors are actively shielding from scrutiny. The post The Government’s Dubious Case That Iran Tried to Kill Trump appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs The Next Iran Is Out of Our Hands The U.S. and Israel have limited control over the political settlement of the war. It no longer matters what might have happened if the U.S. stuck by the Obama nuclear accords, or any other of the what-ifs, all the way back to the CIA overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953. All that matters is what happens next, now. Here are three scenarios, from just OK to really bad. One of the few certainties is that the Middle East clumsily wrought by the U.S. War on Terror is gone. That Middle East eliminated Iraq as a regional power and replaced it with an emboldened Iran. U.S. wars eliminated Iran’s two border enemies, Iraq and Afghanistan, and pulled most of the Gulf States into the U.S. military orbit. At the same time, American reliance on Gulf oil and the Straits of Hormuz faded from the Policy Imperative Number One position it had held since the 1970s. The Middle East formed into two regional power blocs, Iran (backed by a threshold nuclear program) and its proxies in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza, and elsewhere, and the U.S./Israeli/Gulf bloc, backed by the Israeli nuclear program. The Russians and Chinese were not serious players anymore—Russia cut out of Syria and China dependent but powerless with its need for oil. It looked like that was going to be how things played out for some years to come (see the Biden administration). The nuclear question kept things from escalating too far too fast, and Iran’s influence over the terror forces of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis balanced in part the American armada. Then came Trump 2.0. Trump 2.0 unabashedly made it possible for Israel to get as close to destroying Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon as they will ever get. The U.S. and friends neutralized the Houthis. These were all severe brushback pitches against Iranian regional power. Then came the first U.S. and Israeli bombing of some/all/most of the Iranian nuclear program. Now the U.S. has ceased to hold back Israel from overt, direct, undeniable attacks inside the Iranian homeland for fear of starting a major conflict. (Remember “SCUD hunting” and how throughout the Gulf Wars keeping Israel out of the fight was a major U.S. objective?) However much of the Iranian nuclear program may have been destroyed last year, the U.S. and Israel are going after the rest of it now, along with the Iranian navy and probably soon ground elements. Unless Iran has a hidden doomsday nuke, the country as we knew it for the past few decades is no longer a regional power. If it takes more bombs to keep it that way, so be it, they say; the gloves have truly been taken off. Trump talks now of a four- to five-week bombing campaign. At the rate of hundreds of sorties or more a day, what will be left to blow up? Call all that a Mission Accomplished moment. The remaining question is what happens in Iran the day after the dust settles. External bombing does not determine internal political outcomes in complex societies. The best scenario is what we’ll call Islamic Republic 2.0. Iran’s powerful built an internal security apparatus and theocratic structure designed to keep themselves in power. It has a vicious internal spy network, a well-armed Revolutionary Guard, a propaganda operation that preys upon very deep and sincere Islamic feelings among the people, especially the middle and technocratic classes, and will use all those formidable tools to cling to power. The system was designed to support a way of ruling, as in China, not a man, as in Iraq or Syria. It may take a Tiananmen Square incident or three to achieve, which the U.S. will sit back and allow to happen as it did in Beijing (and in Tehran earlier this year). Iran does not live in fear of an Islamic revolution as the Saudis do; they already had theirs in 1979 and thrive on it. Don’t be swayed by CNN clips of random women burning their hijabs; my own visits in Iran with many ranks of people suggested a dissatisfaction with plenty the clerical government does that helps maintain U.S. economic sanctions, but not necessarily a dissatisfaction with the form of government (which includes local and regional elements of democratic elections) itself. Stripped of its nukes and aware of the people’s dissatisfaction, Islamic Republic 2.0 will be forced to negotiate with the U.S. to lessen sanctions. What matters most to Iran is national survival, and some form of diplomacy, albeit at gunpoint, is the only path. A modus vivendi with Israel and America. The decades-long strategy to match Israel as a regional nuclear power has failed. The U.S. will go along to secure the “win” for Trump, and Israel will be satisfied in having ensured its survival. Weird, but everyone sort of wins something for the trouble. If somehow the clerics fail to retain power and before chaos ensues, there exists the possibility of an internally negotiated secular government in Tehran, not quite Islamic Republic 2.0 but not quite a Jeffersonian democracy. The U.S. failed to see it, but this was always the sort-of best resolution for Iraq by say 2005 or so. The clerics retain majority control internally, the civilians assume responsibility for foreign affairs and most of the non-nuclear military, and the U.S. backs off enough of the sanctions to help keep the new system alive and in place for a while to see what happens. It is, however, very unclear Iran has the internal webs of cooperation to pull this off, or whether the Israelis will tolerate such a crapshoot for the country they just defeated. It is mostly a Western fantasy that the Iranian people will rise up and take over the government. There is no nationally organized movement to rush to the barricades like revolutionary Islam in 1979. (MEK and Reza Pahlavi have no real following inside the country.) There is no clear leader to get behind, as with Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979. Ali Khamenei was disliked by many but not hated by most, as with the shah. The only way mobs succeed against armed police and troops is if many of the crowd are willing to die. Thousands in Tehran earlier—and who-knows-how-many in Tiananmen and Johannesburg and the Hungarian Revolution longer ago—were never enough. If the clerics close the universities, that eliminates most of any organizational base that may precariously exist. In sum, why would the Revolutionary Guard allow all this power-sharing, why would Israel trust it, and what institutional mechanism would formalize this division? The worst-case scenario is very bad: chaos. Think Libya 2011, or Iraq during the darkest days, but this time with ballistic missiles and maybe even some fissionable material loose among the competing factions. What if the Revolutionary Guard breaks away from the clerics and clings to the missiles, going all out inside the country and/or against Israel? What if the religious cities of Qom and Mashhad try to break off from a civilian government growing in Tehran? What if the small but always angry Kurdish minority in Western Iran, denied a homeland by the U.S. in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, decides to rise up? What if just all hell breaks loose as the U.S. and Israel destroy the things that keep order, as in Baghdad in 2003 when the entire civil infrastructure was wiped out by the Americans? The cops stop coming to work, the army stays in barracks, and suddenly you have a free-for-all inside a nation of 92 million people that requires—external peace-keeping forces? How it could end up is God’s will, mashallah. Only the most deluded in Washington and Jerusalem think they know which scenario will be the next step in a new Iran. Only the most deluded in Washington and Jerusalem think they will have decisive influence themselves in what happens next. The post The Next Iran Is Out of Our Hands appeared first on The American Conservative.

"There's a way to get there." The post “I’m gonna go there”: Bob Dylan’s ode to the Scottish Highlands first appeared on Far Out Magazine.