Censorship, Dissent and the Theocratic State

Grant Kester

1.The Poisoned Chalice 

“For God, for Country, and for Yale… in that order”.

William F. Buckley, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (1951)[1]

As I was writing this essay, UC Berkeley announced that it had submitted the names of approximately 160 faculty, students and staff with a “potential connection to reports of alleged incidents of antisemitism and discrimination” to the United States Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR).[2] Given the dramatic and unprecedented politicization of the federal government that has unfolded over the past nine months, this was clearly not a simple procedural formality. Rather, it was a deliberate act of subordination, intended to signal institutional obedience, and complicity, in the hope of fending off the withdrawal of federal research funding. These names were provided not in response to a legal subpoena, court order or warrant, but simply because UC’s leaders chose compliance over principled resistance. UCSD followed suit shortly thereafter, although the total number of names turned over to federal investigators has yet to be revealed.[3] This comes on the heels of Trump’s attempt to extort $1 billion dollars from UCLA over a series of antisemitic incidents associated with the Gaza encampment protests during Spring 2024. The UCLA encampment is most notoriously associated with an event in which a group of almost 100 off campus pro-Israel activists violently assaulted the Gaza protestors for several hours with clubs, pipes, chemical agents, fireworks and projectiles while campus police stood by, resulting in the hospitalization of 25 of the encampment students. The following day, police descended on the encampment and forcibly removed the protestors, resulting in several more injuries.[4] Predictably enough, the Department of Justice ignored that incident entirely and focused its attention on reports of antisemitic violence on the campus around the same time, and the fact that some Jewish students claimed that they were prevented from accessing certain areas of the campus during the protest.[5]

These incidents follow a now familiar pattern in which the Trump administration uses exaggerated or cherry picked examples to claim that there is pervasive and systemic antisemitism on college campuses, in order to normalize governmental attacks on the fundamental principle of free speech and open inquiry in the academy (previous targets have included Columbia, Harvard, and Brown universities). UCB and UCSD have yet to release any details regarding the actual crimes or incidents they are investigating, but, as the UCLA example suggests, one of the primary vectors is likely the protests against the genocide in Gaza that took place on many college campuses last spring.[6] While there have likely been scattered incidents of actual antisemitic hate speech during these protests, at this point it is self-evident that the federal investigations are simply intended to provide a moral pretext for a draconian assault on critical thinking and dissent in higher education more generally. On my own campus, I can recall past incidents in which a Klan hood was placed on a statue of Theodore Geisel (“Dr. Seuss”), a noose was found hanging in the campus library, and a white fraternity hosted an openly racist “Compton Cookout” in “honor” of Black History month, replete with an invitation that noted that the fraternity brothers would be “serving 40’s, Kegs of Natty, dat Purple Drank—which consists of sugar, water, and the color purple, chicken, coolade, and of course Watermelon.” It also encouraged white women to dress as “ghetto chicks,” who “usually have gold teeth, start fights [and] wear cheap clothes. . .”[7] Curiously enough, while the events at UCSD did lead the campus to introduce some localized changes (the creation of a Black Resource Center and a Raza Resource Center, the requirement of a single DEI course for undergrads and a new Vice Chancellor position), none of these incidents resulted in the federal government threatening to withhold a half billion dollars in research funding, eliminate virtually all programs related to diversity on our campus, and impose federal “monitors” to ensure that these demands would be met, as they did with UCLA.[8]

Actual antisemitic hate speech on college campuses should, of course, be prosecuted, but at this point there is little danger that the federal government is going to minimize its threat, even as it turns a blind eye to its dramatic proliferation among Trump’s own base.[9] Rather, the very elasticity of the concept of “antisemitic hate speech” under Trump (which now includes any speech that is critical of the Israel, as a country engaged in genocide against Palestinians) means that the administration has dramatically enlarged, and fundamentally distorted, the meaning of this term. It has done so for two, related, reasons. First, it has done so as part of a broader strategic mission to dismantle the critical independence of higher education in the United States. “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country,” as Vice President J.D. Vance proclaimed during a 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference. Vance titled his talk “The Universities are the Enemy,” deliberately evoking Richard Nixon’s infamous use of that phrase during a conversation with Henry Kissinger in 1972.[10] And second, Trump’s weaponization of “antisemitism” as a form of partisan warfare is intended to demonstrate his eagerness to normalize Israel’s open embrace of anti-Arab racism and blatant authoritarianism under Netanyahu, which offers an appealing template for his own vision of the American Presidency. It has been, after all, figures like Netanyahu who have most aggressively promoted the use of accusations of “antisemitism” as a tool to invalidate legitimate critiques of the Israeli government’s conduct in Gaza. As a result, the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education are structured through a specious ideological syllogism which collapses individual ethnic or religious identity (which merits legal protection) into the collective identity of a nuclear-armed nation state, currently engaged in genocide. In this manner, any criticism of Israel can be criminalized by the state with the same moral authority as the state would rely on to prosecute an attack on individual religious expression, providing a virtual carte blanche for Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

This is the decisive elision that is concealed by Trump’s ostensible alarm over antisemitism. If this were simply a question of several incidents of antisemitic hate speech or even physical violence, that could have easily been addressed within the existing system of legal and judicial oversight. A thorough and impartial investigation could be conducted and individual perpetrators brought to justice. Instead, what we have witnessed is a profound restructuring of the fundamental norms by which the federal government relates to higher education. If universities are hotbeds of antisemitism, then they are also “hotbeds” of racist hate speech, sexual assault and anti-trans violence, but none of these seem to be especially concerning to the Trump administration. Sadly, all of these things can and do happen regularly on campuses across the country, just as they do in country clubs, shopping malls, gyms and churches. To prioritize a single category and site of hostile conduct, that is assumed to eclipse all others in gravity and scale, and to then use it to justify such a radical assault on American traditions of academic independence and free speech is reprehensible. It becomes even more so when you consider the fact that Trump won re-election in part through the enthusiastic support of neo-Nazis. As Dalton Henry Stout, the leader of the Aryan Freedom Network (AFN), has claimed, Trump’s election “awakened a lot of people to the issues we’ve been raising for years. . . He’s the best thing that’s happened to us.”[11] AFN, the Base, Blood Tribe, and many other neo-Nazi groups in the U.S. have celebrated the “breathing room” that the Trump administration has allowed them, after the vigorous prosecution of far-right extremism under the Biden administration.[12] Far from prosecuting these groups Trump has gutted existing programs dedicated to investigating far right extremism, and even quashed a report by his own Department of Justice that revealed that far right violence is by far the largest source of domestic terrorism in the U.S. today.[13]

Any honest assessment of Trump’s ostensible compassion for the broader Jewish community has to include a recognition that he has hosted avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes and Nazi sympathizer Timothy Hale-Cusanellis at Mar a Lago on multiple occasions, expressed his open admiration for Adolph Hitler (“Hitler did some good things…”), posted a meme of himself as white supremacist icon Pepe the Frog, and re-energized extremist neo-Nazi groups across the United States, while dramatically increasing funding for the prosecution of the “radical left,” which poses a negligible threat according to the government’s own statistics.[14] Trump has, moreover, stocked his administration with several Nazi or Nazi-adjacent staff members and advisors. The White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, Paul Ingrassia, “has ties to multiple figures widely known for promoting antisemitism,” Ed Martin, who Trump appointed to lead the Office of the Special Counsel, has praised Nazi sympathizer and January 6 rioter Timothy Hale-Cusanellis. Trump himself invited Hale-Cusanellis to his 2025 inauguration.[15] And Elon Musk, who Trump appointed to lead the disastrous DOGE initiative, has openly endorsed Germany’s far right AfD party (Alternative für Deutschland) whose leaders have downplayed the Holocaust and employed Nazi slogans in their campaign flyers.[16] This is the poisoned chalice that Trump offers those who have legitimate concerns about antisemitism in American higher education. The descent of the United States into a corrupt, neo-fascist dictatorship is a steep price to pay for indemnifying Israel from any international pressure to end the genocide in Gaza. Those who support this gesture, whether due to naivete or opportunism, will have to reckon, along with the rest of us, with the long-term consequences of handing over power to a regime whose own base includes violently antisemitic white nationalists who seek to turn the U.S. into a theocratic Christian ethnostate.[17]

What is most telling are the demands that the Trump administration sought to extort by freezing federal research funding over alleged incidents of antisemitism. In addition to a $1 billion dollar settlement, they required UCLA to “drastically overhaul campus practices on hiring, admissions, sports, scholarships, discrimination and gender identity.”[18] As reported by MSNBC “the proposed deal reportedly would require UCLA to issue a public statement vowing not to recognize transgender people’s identities” while also ensuring that “anti-Western” or “anti-American” students were denied admission, the end to all “race or ethnicity-based scholarships” and the “release [of] annual demographic data on hires as well as prospective and admitted students, broken down by “race, color, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests.” The almost total disconnection between Trump’s demands (attacks on gender equality, “anti-western” or “woke” thinking, etc.) and the ostensible precipitating cause (antisemitic hate speech) is striking. It’s especially notable that the Trump administration’s response to incidents in which students were ostensibly targeted on the basis of their cultural or ethnic identity is to entirely eliminate any program or funding dedicated to supporting cultural or ethnic diversity on campus.

As these examples indicate, it’s clear that combatting actual antisemitism on college campuses is a peripheral concern for the Trump administration. Rather, weaponized accusations of antisemitism simply serve to provide a moral alibi for their attack on dissent in academia more generally. If the Department of Justice announced that they were going to prosecute anyone who questioned or criticized Trump’s policies they would risk alerting low information voters to their creeping authoritarian ambitions. This is a typical right wing strategy; to appropriate “liberal” policies or values, but to then hollow them out and use their purely symbolic vocabulary as a cover for actions that undermine the very principles of the policy being invoked. In this respect they are relying on a discourse of plausible deniability that has been a mainstay of the Republican party since since Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” when he sought to defuse the electoral impact of “those damn negro and Puerto Rican groups” in the northeast and west coast by signaling his opposition to civil rights to white, segregationist voters through appeals to “law and order”.[19]

By invoking antisemitism, Trump, or his handlers, have also sought to exploit schisms within the broader academic and Jewish communities. As with any other transcendent signifier, one of the primary functions of monotheistic religious identities (“Jewish,” “Christian,” “Muslim,” etc.) is to impose a fictive ontological coherence on forms of experience and ways of being that are intrinsically diverse and often inchoate. Thus, the concept of Jewishness assumes that there is a single, monolithic Jewish identity, but this has never been the case. The founding of Israel itself offers ample proof of this, in the deep divisions that emerged within the international Jewish community regarding the creation of a Zionist state. Zionism was founded on the basis of a fundamental division within Judaism itself between “true” and “false” Jews (“No true Jew can be an anti-Zionist,” as Theodore Herzl famously declared).[20] And, as Thomas Suárez has revealed through his extensive research into British and U.S. archives, the primary targets of early Zionist violence leading up to the founding of Israel (by terrorist groups such as Irgun, Lehi and others) were often non-Zionist Jews who were critical of the underlying racism of the Zionist project.[21] Chaim Weizmann, who would later become the first President of Israel, wrote as early as 1918 that “there is a fundamental qualitative difference between Jew and Arab”).[22] German Jews, who had fled to Palestine to escape the Nazis, were especially sensitive to the racist implications of Zionism, and could face physical violence or have their businesses destroyed. In the January 1943 issue of the Tel Aviv journal Orient the editors warned of the “Yishuv Nazis” (Yishuv is a Hebrew term for “settlement”) and their “super Zionism”.[23] And Wolfgang Yourgrau, the publisher of Orient warned of the “totalitarian monster” that was taking over Jewish settlements in Palestine.[24] The offices of Orient were later firebombed and Yourgrau’s co-publisher Arnold Zweig, was physically assaulted.[25] This discursive system continues to infuse the Israeli far right, which has gained tremendous power over the past decade, under Netanyahu’s leadership. His governing coalition includes three neo-Kahanist parties, including Otzma Yehudit (“Jewish Power”), which advocates the forcible deportation of Arabs. Meir Kahane, for his part, famously called for a violent confrontation with liberal and secular Jews (“born by accident Jews”) to ensure that Israel would become a purely theocratic state.[26]

There have always been a range of differences and differentiations within the Jewish “community,” just as there are with any sovereign form of identity. This same pattern is evident in other religious traditions as well, as evidenced by the dramatic split that was engineered between socially progressive Protestant denominations and conservative evangelical denominations during the 1970s and ‘80s.[27] It’s also apparent in the division between fundamentalist Islamic sects (such as the Twelver Shi’ism that dominates contemporary Iran) and more progressive Muslim traditions, associated with the Islamic revivalist movement of the nineteenth century or the “Red Shi’ism” that emerged in Iran during the 1970s, only to be ruthlessly crushed by Khomeini following the Revolution. These same schisms are being exposed today, with the crisis in Gaza and the growing authoritarianism of the Israeli state. We are witnessing a concerted attempt by one faction under the broader umbrella of Judaism (associated with a colonialist and racist form of Zionism) to annex the concept of “Jewishness” in its entirety via weaponized charges of antisemitism, in order to marginalize other versions of what Judaism might be or might yet become. This is precisely the process that is unfolding in the United States, where a majority of diasporic Jews oppose the Netanyahu regime. These divisions are evident in the “Not in My Name” movement and groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace. Judith Butler, a UC Berkeley faculty member whose name was turned over to the United States Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights in the incident sited at the beginning of this essay, serves on the group’s groups Advisory Board.

2. Storming Babylon

We are called to be His disciples and to bring His presence into our workplaces, our homes, our schools, our government, our media, our arts, and our religion. Let us embrace our call to invade Babylon and strategically bring the Kingdom of God into every aspect of society. . . The Church must be represented in each sphere if the power of darkness is to be broken. It is the Church alone that has spiritual authority to come against the gates of hell.[28]

Lance Wallnau, Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate (Shippensberg, PA: Destiny Image Publisher, 2013)

Conflicts over the nature of Jewish identity find their corollary in debates unfolding in the U.S. today over what it means to be “American,” in the wake of Trump’s second term. Under Trump’s leadership, the identity of our country is increasingly being defined by a cadre of far right extremists and white supremacists, fundamentalist evangelicals and conservative billionaires. This coalition has unified around a central cultural-ideological armature, which imagines the U.S. as an intrinsically white and “Christian” nation, under the direction of an oligarchic elite. In a sadly familiar schema, those “inside” this identity structure are rewarded with a comforting sense of solidarity, which elides the very real differences that exist between them, only by armoring their collective self-hood against the contamination posed by those who exist on the “outside”. This frankly theocratic vision of America is predicated on farcically tendentious misreadings of key historical texts. In particular, its advocates effectively invert the significance of the First Amendment (the establishment clause), which was intended by the founders to prevent the imposition of an official state religion (exemplified, in their experience, by the onerous powers of the Church of England and its attack on religious dissent). Thus, the prohibition that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” was rooted in what James Madison, in Federalist No. 10, described as the destabilizing effects of religious fervor. “A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points,” as he writes, has “divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”[29] The result of an official state religion, he feared, would precisely be to outlaw all other forms of religious practice and lead to dissent and violent repression (it’s worth bearing in mind the founder’s awareness of the devastating consequences of the Thirty Years War only a century before, when several million people died in battles between Catholics and Protestants). This accounts for the central role played by the separation of church and state in the founding of the United States (a “wall of separation between church and state,” as Jefferson famously termed it in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association). [30]

Christian Nationalist activists in the U.S. have sought to distort this history (along with the broader tradition of the separation of church and state) and instead claim that the First Amendment actually encourages the establishment of a state religion (effectively arguing for the “freedom” of a single religion to dominate public life via government mandate).[31] On the basis of this perverse logic, a whole range of organizations, such as the New Apostolic Reformation, the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, the Oak Initiative, Turning Point USA, the Society for American Civic Renewal and the Truth and Liberty Coalition, have sought, since the 1980s, to remake the United States as a theocratic nation in which white Christians impose their vision of morality on society as whole (through the principle of “Christian Dominionism” or “Christian Nationalism”). These organizations are funded, in turn, by a cohort of wealthy Christian businessmen, through shadowy organizations such as the Council for National Policy and the Ziklag Group. One of the foundational figures for this theocratic vision of America was R.J. Rushdoony, an Armenian-American minister who came to prominence as part of Ronald Reagan’s deliberate cultivation of evangelical Christians during the 1980s. Rushdoony’s “Christian Reconstructionist” theology, like that of the broader “Dominionist” movement that he helped launch, was profoundly anti-democratic in nature (“Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies” as he wrote).[32] In fact, in The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), which outlines his meandering and overwrought version of Christian theology, he openly repudiates the Declaration of Independence, arguing: “All men are NOT created equal before God; the facts of heaven and hell, election and reprobation make clear that they are not equal.”[33] Rushdoony goes on to draw the logical conclusion of his anti-democratic ethos, arguing that “Biblical Law” makes it clear “that some people are by nature slaves and will always be so,” a situation which necessitates that their masters treat them in a “godly manner” even as the slave “recognizes his position and accepts it with grace.”[34]

Rushdoony’s shockingly benign view of slavery is not entirely surprising, given that one of his central theological influences was the white supremacist minister and Confederate chaplain Robert Lewis Dabney. In an 1867 speech Dabney, anticipating Rushdoony’s subsequent comments, describes “an insuperable difference of race, made by God and not by man, and of character and social condition [which] makes it plainly impossible for a black man to teach and rule white Christians to edification. . .” “Now,” he continues, “who that knows the negro does not know that his is a subservient race; that he is made to follow, and not to lead; that his temperament, idiosyncrasy and social relation make him untrustworthy as a depository of power?”.[35] And in an 1851 letter, published by the Richmond Enquirer, Dabney defended slavery in the following terms:

. . . in considering these supposed evils of slavery, we must remember that the real evil is the presence of three millions of half-civilized foreigners among us; and of this gigantic evil, domestic slavery is the potent and blessed cure. This foreign and semi-barbarous population was placed here by no agency of ours. . . It would have been a curse that would have paralyzed the industry, corrupted the morals, and crushed the development of any nation, thus to have an ignorant, pagan, lazy, uncivilized people intermixed with us, and spread abroad like the frogs of Egypt. The remedy is slavery. And let us ask, what has slavery done to rescue the South and the Africans in these portentous circumstances? It has civilized and christianized the Africans, and has made them, in the view of all who are practically acquainted with their condition, the most comfortable peasantry in the world.[36]

Rushdoony himself, so confident in his belief in a biblically mandated hierarchy between black and white, slave and master, lamented the Northern victory in the Civil War as a “defeat for Christian orthodoxy”.^[37] In fact, he was so enamored with Dabney’s work that he republished and distributed his writings through his Chalcedon Foundation in California.

This message will be replicated by countless far right ideologues over the ensuing decades, including Paul Weyrich, who played a key role in mobilizing evangelical voters angered by the denial of tax-exempt status to Bob Jones University, a southern segregationist school, by the IRS in 1976. Weyrich realized just how odious it would appear to the larger American populace for white southern Christians to parade their moral outrage over the fact that their openly racist educational institutions would have to pay taxes. This was, needless to say, an unpopular position with many Americans, who continued to view the deliberate exclusion of African Americans from publicly subsidized institutions as decidedly un-Christian. His genius was to replace segregation with abortion as a locus of discontent. Attacking abortion, while still a vexed issue, was less morally repugnant to many than defending segregation. Weyrich’s real goal, of course, was to erode the regulatory power of the federal government on behalf of his wealthy Republican benefactors and manufactured abortion outrage was simply an expedient way to galvanize conservative Christian voters towards this end. If it were possible to secure a Supreme Court ruling that would prevent the government from protecting a woman’s right to abortion it would help to subvert the principle of federal oversight more generally, including around issues of public education, integration and, importantly, corporate conduct. Weyrich was also cognizant that both of these positions, criminalizing abortion and defending segregation, were deeply unpopular with the majority of Americans. As a result, his goal was to unify the conservative Christian vote, while also doing everything possible to suppress the ability of the broader public to vote (something which was come to fruition with spurious attacks on “voting fraud” launched by Republicans over the past decade). As Weyrich famously noted in 1980:

Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome—good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.[38]

The anti-abortion struggle didn’t simply provide a moral alibi for racist educators eager for tax breaks, it also helped validate a parallel hierarchy, equally central to the Christian Nationalist project, around the necessary subjugation of women to the patriarchal “lordship” of men over women (wives must “submit to their husbands as to the Lord”).[39] For Christian Nationalists women’s primary function is as breeders dedicated to birthing a steady stream of babies in order to expand the base of white Christian followers (a key postulate of the “Quiverfull” movement).[40] This is evident in the landscape of contemporary Christian social media, which is littered with white supremacist “Tradwives” and the baroquely performative masculinity of figures like Gavin MacInnis, the Proud Boy’s founder, or Charlie Kirk, the patron saint of white, male grievance. When we look at their highly stylized self-fashioning, it’s as if aliens from another planet were trying to transform themselves into human avatars based on the garbled transmissions of television shows from the 1950s. In this manner the medieval great chain of being is reborn in the age of memes and social media.

While Rushdoony was willing to wait for the gradual diffusion of his inspirational beliefs through the office of compliant ministers and religious “thought leaders,” the subsequent generation of Christian nationalists, exemplified by figures such as Charles Peter Wagner (founder of the New Apostolic Reformation) were far less patient. Developing a productive rapprochement with Republican party operatives in the Heritage Foundation, and later the Trump administration, they called for Christians (or those they deemed sufficiently proper Christians) to take control of the key institutional and ideological structures of American society. We might think of this as constituting a kind of Christian Nationalist Blanquism (or perhaps Leninism), and they operated in a strikingly similar conspiratorial manner. The so-called “Seven Mountains Mandate” was first introduced by Loren Cunningham, Bill Bright and Francis Schaeffer, who argued that Christians are “commissioned by God” to monopolize not simply “religion” as such, but also “family,” “education,” “media,” “arts and entertainment,” “business,” and “government”. By “taking dominion” over the entire social order they believed they could accelerate the second coming of Jesus, and the subsequent “end times” script outlined in the Book of Revelations. This radical post-millennial outlook remained largely on the fringes of mainstream Christianity until 2013, when Lance Wallnau and Bill Johnson published Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate, which became a key text for what was known as the New Apostolic Reformation or NAR. Now conservative Christians could abandon their potlucks, food drives and pastoral homilies about helping the poor and needy and reinvent themselves as visionary apostles, waging holy war against the forces of darkness, and reforming a “demonic” secular society in their own image. While this may sound like the elevator pitch for a WB show from the early 2000s, it proved to be incredibly engaging to some churchgoers, with over 40% of American Christians subscribing to the Seven Mountains Mandate according to a 2024 Denison University poll.[41]

The ”theology” at the root of these beliefs, much like the “history” used to justify the concept of Dominionism more generally, can be called that in name only.[42] Even by the standards of evangelical theology, whose primary rhetorical function is simply to assert the individual writer’s privileged access to the transcendent truth of god’s will, Seven Mountain’s “theory” is largely a patchwork of questionable assumptions, tortured misreadings of historical texts and frankly ludicrous inductive leaps. However, these arguments don’t have to be intellectually coherent; they simply have to tell a compelling story, in which the reader can imagine themselves as the protagonist in an epic, cosmic struggle between good and evil. The primary function of the Seven Mountains Mandate is to provide a simulacrum of theological reasoning. It’s true goal is to offer its followers a permission giving structure, ostensibly rooted in Biblical exegesis, to justify their fear of difference, as well as their appetite for domination and self-righteous moral superiority. Its deeper, strategic goal, is to enroll these people as ground troops in a form of spiritual warfare whose ultimate driver is an oligarchic thirst for power. I would imagine that its intoxicating for white evangelical men who might otherwise be consigned to regaling small congregations in the rural south with tales of fire and brimstone for their imagined sins, to fantasize that they have somehow been endowed by God himself with a “Commission” to root out the devil and lead a vanguard of spiritual warriors to retake the nation. Were it not for their opportunistic alliance with the conservative billionaires who have propped up the Republican party over the past few decades, they would have remained in their natal condition; religious cranks, such as we have always had to tolerate in a free society, each of whom is equally convinced that he possess privileged access to the will of an all-powerful deity; whose borrowed omniscience then justifies their own freedom to treat everyone else like cattle. Donald Trump’s mobilization of hate-based solidarity and entitled grievance among white voters, has allowed them (and their opportunistic co-conspirators) to fulfill every fantasy they could imagine; not just overturning Roe v. Wade, but systematically dismantling the foundational pillars of liberal democracy (freedom of the press, secular public education, freedom of speech, etc.).

For a relatively small minority of the country to accomplish this, even as religious affiliation has continued to decline precipitously over the past three decades, is evidence of the level of deliberate planning and premeditation that has led up to the current moment (dating back to Reagan’s courting of evangelicals and the emergence of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in the 1980s). It is evidence, as well, of just how central the Republican party and its donor class has been in encouraging it. The super wealthy get tax breaks, facilitated by the gutting of social programs, Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, student loans, workplace protections and corporate oversight, and the white Christian working class get to keep everyone in line, like an American version of Iran’s Gasht-e Ershad. With Trump’s second term this complex set of alliances within the Republican party has achieved a kind of apotheosis. Numerous members of the current Trump administration and congressional leadership are adherents of the Seven Mountain Mandate. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, has openly demanded that the U.S. should have a “biblically sanctioned government,” and in 2024 J.D. Vance aligned himself with the Mandate when he spoke at an event hosted by Lance Wallnau, co-author of Invading Babylon and one of the movement’s foundational figures.[43]

We are now in a better position to understand the particular interest that the Trump administration has taken in higher education, as outlined in the first section of this essay. Education is, of course, one of the seven “mountains” of culture that conservative Christians hope to dominate. As Rushdoony himself wrote in 1973:

To control the future requires the control of education and of the child. Hence, for Christians to tolerate statist education, or to allow their children to be trained thereby, means to renounce power in society, to renounce their children, and to deny Christ’s Lordship over all of life.[44]

Only a few weeks ago the Trump apparatchik, Steven Bannon, during a memorial for Charlie Kirk, equated school teachers with literal “terrorists”: “look, from kindergarten all the way up, they are essentially, you know, a third of the teachers are terrorists that are trying to form them. . .”[45] As with J.D. Vance’s claim that “the universities are the enemy,” the goal is to transform the entire educational apparatus, from grade school through college, into a propaganda tool for far-right messaging and Christian Nationalist dogma, in order to “train up” a “quiverfull” of impressionable young “spiritual warriors”.[46] What is most terrifying to Trump and his supporters are people who can think, critically and independently, and who are willing to question or challenge his actions and the broader authority of the incipient theocratic state. This is why Christian Nationalists seek to entirely dismantle the traditions of western pedagogy; to reduce all doubt, all ambiguity and all complexity in a miasma of biblical certitude and unquestioning obedience to god, and more importantly, to god’s self-appointed earthly agents. In their assessment, the entirety of modern philosophy over the past three centuries, since the liberation of secular thought from the shackles of Christian orthodoxy in the Enlightenment, is simply a misguided aberration. Rather, for Christian Nationalists, western thought reaches its summation in the tortured neo-Calvinist apologetics of Cornelius Van Til and the openly racist Confederate theology of William Dabney, which so inspired Rushdoony.[47] In this view, the dialectical progression of modern western history, of slavery and freedom, spirituality and secularism, domination and resistance, superstition and science, is little more than a barbaric aberration, which we must now shed in order to return to the true verities of divine revelation and godly leaders. In place of Kant’s famous injunction, Sapre Aude, or “dare to think,” they demand, like the Jesuits before them: “Soli Deo Gloria” (To God alone be Glory).[48]

3. Goodbye to All That

The important point is that the becoming-institutional of the avant-garde does not doom all subsequent art to court buffoonery.

Hal Foster, “What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?,” OCTOBER 70 (Fall 1994)[49]

While Christian Nationalists include “arts and entertainment” among the seven mountains they hope to conquer, by “arts” they are primarily referring to popular culture (Hollywood cinema, pop music, etc.) rather than what we might think of as the traditional fine arts. Their professed goal is to “take back” culture in general from a “demonic” secular society. The kinds of art that typically appear in the institutional art world (museums and galleries, concert halls and theaters) are a secondary concern, precisely because they are so marginal in contemporary society and have so little real impact. Certainly, there are scattered examples of conventional fine art genres associated with Christian Nationalism; for example the garish, realist paintings of Jon McNaughton, a Mormon who features Donald Trump and Christian Nationalist themes in many of his canvases (George Washington praying, Donald Trump in the Oval Office surrounded by armoured angels).[50] The tragicomic contrast between these cartoonish illustrations and the millennia of art and architecture associated with historical religious patronage, suggests that art, as such, is fundamentally antithetical to the curdled, Christian Nationalist sensibility. This is even more evident in the contrast between works by figures like McNaughton and the traditions of modernism which have evolved over the past two centuries. Where the most advanced tendencies in modernist art have been committed to complexity, to the opening up of the self to the other, to challenging unearned deity, and to the generative powers of the body and somatic experience, McNaughton’s canvases are more closely aligned with the crudest forms of socialist realist propaganda. Moreover, the actual track record of fundamentalist Christian “entertainment” (movies, music) is not encouraging, in terms of attracting a mass audience. Most Americans have little interest in endless reruns of Little House on the Prairie, egregious Christian “rap” music, or sophomoric Kirk Cameron movies about an apocalypse in which the majority of us burn for eternity in fiery damnation. Of course taking back science for Christianity poses its own unique challenges (how, precisely, do people who believe dinosaurs and humans co-existed 10,000 years ago propose to “take back” science?)[51]

At the end of the day, the entire Seven Mountains ethos is less a realistic plan of action, than it is a wish image for a small but vocal minority of religious zealots, who seem genuinely perplexed that the bulk of the population sees them as stunningly small minded and sanctimonious, and who are convinced that this incomprehension could be overcome if only they could find the proper messaging format to communicate their “good news”. The more proximate danger isn’t that Christian Nationalist propaganda will infiltrate the entirety of American science, popular culture or art, but rather, their proximity to the highest levels of governmental power, via the Trump administration and the open complicity of the far right ideologues on the Supreme Court. This is where the gravest threat lies; once you control the court system, the executive branch and the legislative branch, and you can use a paramilitary force to repress dissent (which is already occurring on the streets of Portland and Chicago) you no longer have to “win” some putative culture war via the long march of Christian propaganda, you simply impose theocracy at the point of a sword.

The relationship of the institutional art world to this hegemonic matrix of cultural, political and economic domination is more complex and more highly mediated. While conservatives can attempt to organize boycotts of Cracker Barrel or Bud Light when they violate some far right dogma, the art world doesn’t have a popular audience to begin with that could be mobilized one way or the other. The art world also enjoys some natural immunity to right wing attack since it is almost entirely dependent on the market, which is second only to god as a subject of veneration for Christian Nationalists (as compared to institutions, like universities, that rely on federal and state funding). Thus, the primum mobile of the U.S. art world (aside from a handful of spaces that receive some limited public support) are the financial interests of a relatively small number of extremely wealthy people; the kind of people who buy art and populate museum boards. For many of these individuals, their relationship to contemporary art is primarily transactional. They provide funds by purchasing works, endowing museums and otherwise distributing some portion of their wealth (with or without the commensurate tax breaks), and in return they are allowed to identify themselves with an extremely privileged subculture, largely incomprehensible to the general public because of its presumed refinement and complexity. This no doubt accords with their self-image as a kind of proto-aristocratic class, endowed by god or destiny with a superior intelligence. The allure of contemporary art, specifically, is its aura of transgression, which allows donors to advertise greater sophistication that simply buying another yacht or summer home. Rather than appearing even more crassly materialistic, they can consume art and imagine themselves as refined and cosmopolitan, like Florentine princes, even as the artworks themselves accrue value more rapidly than gold, making them even richer in return.

This is, of course, precisely the same class of people who benefit most fully from the upward re-distribution of wealth (from the working class and middle class to the super rich) that is the underlying driver of Trump’s broader cultural warfare, and the tactical alliance of Christian Nationalists and the GOP. In many cases, these individuals have a direct economic interest in perpetuating the forms of political and economic repression that have fueled Trumps’ rise to power. Thus, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s board members have included Warren Kanders, a notorious defense contractor, Pamella DeVos, sister in law of the far right ideologue Betsy DeVos, whose family has been integral to the systematic dismantling of public education in America, Nancy Carrington Crown, whose family fortune comes in large part from General Dynamics, which have been contracted by the Trump administration to build child detention centers and border surveillance systems, and Kenneth C. Griffin, a hedge fund manager who has contributed widely to Republican candidates and conservative PACs and holds a majority share in CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), a private prison company that has, among other things, built family detention facilities for Trump’s paramilitary attacks on American immigrants.[52]

For these patrons, artists are something like a court pet, to be feted and indulged as embodiments of an ideal of form of entrepreneurial creativity and rebelliousness that they imagine mirrors their own. Some degree of symbolic transgression or event dissent is accepted, and even expected, precisely because their patronage of art that seemingly challenges their class interests, or personal beliefs, serves to demonstrate their own enlightened tolerance. Artists will be tolerated, however, only so long as they play their assigned role in this theatre of flattery and projection. Like Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House, they are allowed to perform an ideal of critical subjectivity so long as they refuse to venture beyond the realm of symbolically encoded forms of dissent. The moment that any of these symbolic gestures are placed in a dialogical relationship with broader social or political movements that might pose an actual threat to the economic privilege of the donor class they become, in the famous words of Guggenheim director Thomas Messer, “an alien substance that had entered the art museum organism.”[53] Messer was writing here about several Hans Haacke projects that were slated to be displayed at the Guggenheim as part of a 1971 exhibition curated by Edward Fry. The works included Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System as of May 1, 1971 (1971), which documented the real estate holdings of Harry Shapolsky, one of the city’s most notorious slumlords, as well as some of Haacke’s Gallery Goer surveys, including one that addressed New York governor Nelson Rockefeller’s support of Richard Nixon’s conduct of the war in Vietnam.

In a subsequent interview in Studio International, responding to the controversy caused by his cancellation of Haacke’s exhibit, Messer defended his actions in terms that remain remarkably contemporary. In Messer’s view Haacke’s work is no longer entitled to the “immunity” provided by the art museum because it has sacrificed the very ontological condition of art itself. Rather than possessing a “self-contained creative objective,” Haacke’s work is responsive instead to an “ulterior motive” in its relationship to “social or political causes”. Art can enjoy the protection of the institutional art world, only so long as it addresses the broader social world “by indirection”. Thus, while art is capable of projecting “a generalized, exemplary force,” which operates in a “metaphoric and symbolic manner,” the moment the artist references “a known, specific topical situation,” it ceases to be art (a claim that might be greeted with some skepticism by Courbet, Daumier, Catlett, Siqueiros, Höch or Grosz). Messer offers the painter Mondrian as an example, arguing that Mondrian provides the viewer with an “anonymous blueprint” rather than a direct indictment, expressing a “vitality and strength from within. . . to radiate various consequences”.[54] Needless to say, the “various consequences” remain unnamed.

The idea that art’s critical power can only be actualized through creative engagement with qualities or conditions “from within” art itself is, of course, a central pillar of the myriad forms of aesthetic autonomy that have come into fashion over the past two centuries.[55] This broader belief system is the byproduct of a historical transformation in which art surrendered its previously central ideological role in society (valorizing dominant forms of power) to emerging forms of mass culture, only to take on a new, more marginal, role as an agent of critique capable of attacking the bourgeois social order and discerning its flaws from a position of absolute exteriority. In this manner, its patronage was transferred from an aristocratic or clerical class structure to a bourgeois class structure, with a commensurate transformation in the rhetorical and ideological construction of art. It’s obviously not the case that modern art refused to venerate dominant forms of power; rather, it simply internalized and mirrored a capacity for critical self-reflection that was central to the emergent bourgeois psyche. It also reflected underlying schisms within the bourgeoisie itself, between more progressive and more regressive class factions. In this manner art continued to perform a validating function, as the expanding market for contemporary art allowed a subsection of the bourgeoisie (wealthy collectors and patrons) to reassert its quasi-aristocratic superiority over the broader social order through its consumption of luxury commodities whose very acquisition implies a heightened level of intellectual acuity. Thus, the “exteriority” of modern art, or the art world, has only ever been a rhetorical fiction, rather than a meaningful reflection of how art actually functions in the world.

The concept of artistic autonomy has been staged in various ways over the decades. In its traditional formulation, the very principle of artistic non-utility (posed against the demands of what Messer would term “extra artistic activities”) is clearly grounded in a form of utility, as art imagines itself symbolically protesting against forces of instrumentalization that are characteristic of bourgeois society as a whole. For Adorno it involved art investigating its own ostensibly innate formal or technical conditions via mimetic experimentation (transforming itself thereby “into the historical voice of repressed nature”).[56] Later, for figures such as Hal Foster, it entailed art’s ability to reflect critically on the very process of cooptation that has subsumed previous iterations of the avant-garde (here the individual artist simultaneously assumes the generic critical failure of contemporary art, and believes that they are uniquely able to transcend it). Foster’s analysis provided an influential theoretical framework for what were termed “institutional critique” practices during the 1990s, which evolved out of the interventions of figures like Haacke and others in the 1960s and ‘70s. In exchange for the “immunity” offered by the museum and gallery, artists are allowed a degree of expressive freedom, so long as it is limited to critiquing ideological or formal operations that are “immanent” to art itself (Foster’s examples include figures such as Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren and Andrea Fraser)

This was the implicit social contract behind Foster’s concept of “neo-avant-garde” art, introduced in his 1994 essay, “What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant Garde”. It was, in part, the very failure of Haacke’s interventions, the fact that the “alien substance” of his work, his ostensibly incendiary critiques, were soon enough brought into the permanent collections of the “museum organism” that led Foster to develop an alternative rationale to justify art’s critical power.[57] There was no real point in Haacke attempting to relate his work to ostensibly “external” political debates. By that standard it could only ever fail, because the potential for meaningful political change (to which Haacke’s work might have contributed directly or indirectly) is foreclosed (our moment is “bereft of this sense of imminent revolution” as Foster expressed it).[58] All that remains is for artists to critique, not the “external” world, but the very mechanisms of ideological capture by which the institutional art world appropriates previously transgressive artistic innovations (what Foster terms “a creative analysis of the limitations” of past avant-garde practices).[59] In the face of the rampant and ever increasing commodification of contemporary art, Foster held out hope that art, however enmeshed in the gears of capitalist accumulation, could nonetheless preserve some vestigial critical element, even if it was only ever intelligible to a small segment of the art and academic worlds. In this sense art for Foster possessed a latent, talismanic quality, like Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of critical theory as a “message in a bottle,” intended for some future historical moment when real revolutionary change might be conceivable.[60]

This assumes, of course, in a quaintly idealist manner, that the art world actually is, in fact, a world “apart”; that the obvious economic dependence of the institutional art world on the “outside world” of capitalist domination has absolutely no effect on the subjective ideological freedom of the artworks produced under its patronage. That is, it assumes that symbolic gestures intended to critique the immanent conditions of the institutional art world are immune to, and uncorrupted by, any pressures exerted by the materialist economic forces (funding, donors) that allow those gestures to flourish. It assumes, as well, that we can somehow distill out a pure and undiluted form of autonomous critical intelligence from the equally “immanent” forces of wealth that permeate the institutional art world. And finally, it projects the potential for meaningful political and social change into an indefinite future. In this view, as Rodrigo Nunes has argued:

. . . there can be revolution yesterday (in heroic past defeats) and tomorrow (in the promise of a pure event); ­there might even be revolution elsewhere, among distant ­others whom we invest with the authority of subjects supposed to know; but never revolution ­here, never revolution ­today.[61]

This is a perspective, needless to say, that is antithetical to the spirit of FIELD. This set of assumptions is regularly tested, of course. During the Culture Wars of the 1990s artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano became the targets of a concerted right wing and Christian fundamentalist attack by figures such as Jesse Helms, Jerry Falwell and Alfonse D’Amato. Even though their practices were primarily oriented towards the private art market, the fact that some exhibitions of their work received a small portion of public funding was sufficient to justify an all-out assault on the principle of public arts funding in general, via the National Endowment for the Arts and state arts councils. This had been a long-term goal of the far right, precisely because NEA funding gave a public, collective imprimatur to forms of cultural expression that challenged the logic of both the market and of fundamentalist Christianity. In fact, the NEA was founded in the belief that the art market (like any other) imposes its own biases and constraints, and that public funding can provide greater expressive and creative freedom by releasing artists from the implicit pressure to orient their work primarily towards the tastes, economic interests and values of the extremely rich. The NEA was also rooted in the populist ethos of the Great Society and the New Deal, which are anathema to conservatives in the U.S., for whom capitalism remains sacrosanct.

4. Implausible Deniability

This marking is a record of the world scored with grief.
This marking is an attempt to hold a life with the labor of this attention.
This marking is a partial and ongoing inventory of the time of this grieving.

Noel Maghathe, Fadl Fakhouri, and Fargo Tbakhi, score for No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance (2024)

By 1994 Jesse Helms and his allies in the Evangelical movement were successful in forcing the NEA to dismantle its fellowship programs for individual artists. Their ultimate goal, however, to eliminate the NEA entirely, eluded them. It would be left to Donald Trump to realize that particular far right fantasy. As I write this, the Trump administration has retroactively cancelled hundreds of NEA grants and called for the Endowment as a whole to be abolished in its 2026 budget request.[62] This would mark the final culmination of the campaign Helms began during the late 1980s, and the realization of a long-term ambition of Christian Nationalists at war with the “secular” state. The pretextual nature of those earlier attacks has been replicated today, as we enter a second generation of Culture Wars. Where “obscenity,” “blasphemy” and the fear of black and queer sexuality were the catalysts for the first-generation Culture Wars, “antisemitism” has emerged as a new locus of tactical outrage, as we’ve already seen with the right-wing assault on higher education.[63] This same logic has been transposed to the institutional art world, as evidenced by a recent incident at the Whitney Museum of American Art (WMAA), in which the museum’s director, Scott Rothkopf, censored an exhibition planned by participants in the museum’s famed Independent Study Program (discussed in greater detail in Leila Abdelrazaq’s essay in this issue). The exhibition, titled a grammar of attention, was curated by ISP Fellows Bea Ortega Botas, Kennedy Hollins Jones, Tamara Khasanova, and Ntshadi Mofokeng. It was to have included a performance work, titled No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance, by artists Noel Maghathe, Fadl Fakhouri, and Fargo Tbakhi. The performance entailed the reading of a set of written scores that, according to a statement by the artists, were “grounded in the struggle for Palestinian freedom, while making space to mourn those who have been martyred in that struggle.” A previous version of the performance was presented at St. Marks Church in the Bowery, in New York in 2024, as part of a collaboration between the magazine Jewish Currents and the Poetry Project. A preamble to that initial version included a series of requirements for audience members to follow, including the imperative for those who believe in Israel or America “in any incarnation” to leave.[64] Another injunction encouraged audience members to leave if “it’s important to them that the artists condemn violence”.

The version of the performance planned for the ISP exhibition didn’t include this preamble; a fact which the Whitneys’ leadership was fully aware of. Nevertheless, they used this passage as an excuse to cancel the entire performance, claiming that the artists had violated the WMAA’s “zero tolerance policy” for discrimination or harassment. “In no instance,” they wrote, “. . . would we find it acceptable to single out members of our community based on their belief system and ask them to leave an exhibition or performance.” Perhaps cognizant of the spurious nature of this objection, the Whitney went on to claim: “This decision was not about the topics discussed, but because their presentation violated the standards agreed to by all members of our community, including ISP participants.” This explanation obviously strains credulity. It’s self-evident that Rothkopf, likely supported by his board, had decided on a “zero tolerance policy” for any projects that referenced the genocide in Gaza.[65] In pursuit of this goal, they retroactively censored a performance, from the past, that had nothing to do with the Whitney, rather than the actual performance they were scheduled to host. Even if the preamble from the previous iteration of the performance were presented at the Whitney their claim that the performance “valorized specific acts of violence” or targeted individuals is preposterous. It is central to a conventional understanding of art (the kind of understanding on which the institutional legitimacy of museums like the Whitney depends) that the works they present are defined by their metaphorical (rather than literal) quality. I am reminded of this, for example, when I visit an exhibition of Barbara Kruger’s work and find myself assailed by various rhetorical admonitions (“You Invest in the Divinity of the Masterpiece,” “You Construct Intricate Rituals Which Allow You to Touch the Skin of Other Men,” “Your Body is a Battleground,” etc.). Performance artists have, for decades, engaged in transgressive actions that play at the boundary of literal and metaphoric meaning (Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, Vito Acconci’s Claim, etc.) but these were always framed with an understanding of their fundamentally undecidable nature. It is precisely the rhetorical quality of the No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom performance that the Whitney refused to respect or acknowledge, assuming that any spoken poetic text must, by necessity, be understood as a deliberately performative utterance, in Austin’s terms, intended to coerce and compel action.

Following Rothkopf’s censorship of the performance, the ISP Associate Director, Sara Nadal-Melsió, wrote a public letter protesting the cancellation and expressing her support for the ISP student curators. She then made multiple requests for meetings with the museum’s leadership to clarify the nature of the exhibit and performance and encourage the museum to reverse their decision. Her e-mails went unanswered, and on June 2^nd. she was summoned to the office of the museum’s Deputy Director and “summarily terminated” (presumably as punishment for her open letter). Shortly thereafter, the museum made the remarkable decision to “pause” the Independent Study Program entirely, cancelling admissions for the coming year. They justified this decision on the basis of a “leadership gap” that they themselves created by firing Nadal-Melsió. This is a telling choice. Even in a worst-case scenario, in which the museum leadership chose to censor a performance, what possible justification could there be to then fire the program’s de facto Director, simply for defending her students, and to suspend the ISP in its entirety? One possibility is that the Whitney leadership had already perceived the ISP as dangerously independent from the museum’s oversight before the exhibit, and simply used this fabricated “scandal” as an excuse to eliminate it, or at the very least, to dismantle it and reassemble it in a form more to their liking and under their direct control. This reflects a parallel to the scalar transposition employed by the Trump administration in its attacks on higher education; you use a singular incident, exaggerated in importance or severity, to justify your real goal, the wholesale destruction and reconstruction of a given institutional system. In each case there is an effort to leverage some minimal moral justification for actions that are, on the face of it, disproportionate and unjustified, in an attempt to preserve the credibility of a given bureaucratic apparatus. Rather than suppressing legitimate dissent, they are heroically defending the interests of the disempowered against malevolent outside forces.

Why, then, did the ISP pose such a threat that it had to be suspended? Surely, a single performance that, had the museum’s director not called cancelled it, would have likely passed unnoticed in the plethora of cultural events occurring in New York City at any given moment, didn’t justify the decision to terminate a program with such a distinguished history as a center for critical thinking in the arts. Perhaps there was some fear among the WMAA’s leadership that the ISP, especially under its new, de facto Director, would generate programming that might damage the Whitney brand and, perhaps, openly critique the incipient authoritarianism of the Trump administration? This is where the immanent power of wealthy museum board members plays a central role. Their assessment of the current political reality, their tolerance for risk, their estimation of the value of art as an instrument of critical thinking and even transgression, is very likely quite different from that of many of the ISP’s participants. This entire set of actions is especially disconcerting because the ISP program is widely seen in the broader art world as one of the most significant and enduring features of the Whitney’s institutional profile. It only earned this reputation due to its relative independence over the past fifty years from the museum’s more traditional curatorial apparatus.

Nadal-Melsió, a Catalan theorist, writer and curator with a distinguished record of research, was hired in 2024 as the program’s first Associate Director, to help carry the program forward when its existing director was demoted to the somewhat ambiguous status of “Director At Large”. She was hired, according to the Whitney’s press release, to take “the ISP in directions necessary to maintain the relevance, enthusiasm, curiosity, and experimentalism that are the fundamental attributes of the ISP.”[66] Arguably, her role was also to help the program reinvent itself in an age of profound change in the norms of art, education and cultural politics more generally, and to bring the ISP into alignment with the Whitney’s own Strategic Plan, which calls on the museum to be “experimental, responsive, and risk-taking”. By all accounts she succeeded admirably, re-thinking almost every aspect of the program’s pedagogy and institutional structure and making it more inclusive and more responsive to the interests of the students, based on her experience at other alternative educational institutions, such as the innovative SOMA Summer program in Mexico City. In her effort to reinvent the ISP as a “risk taking” experimental learning community, Nadal-Melsió dramatically expanded the number and diversity of visiting speakers and performers and added new workshops, communal meals, assemblies and site visits, with a decidedly more outward looking orientation, in recognition of the increasingly globalized nature of the art world itself. Is it possible that this particular vision is what frightened the Whitney’s leadership? This was certainly the sentiment of some of the programs participants. According to Sara Richter, who attended the ISP in 2023-24, “The museum does not fear the ISP—at least not what it has, for the last thirty years, been. They fear what the ISP could become should it fulfill the promises of its history, and should it continue under the leadership of people like Sara, who are committed to taking risks, and to producing real political solidarity in art and culture.”[67] It’s likely that the museum’s leadership, and those faculty who chose subordination over resistance, will attempt to re-launch the program, with the requisite safeguards in place to ensure that any real critical independence is foreclosed, and any actual “risk taking” forbidden. Perhaps another version of the ISP, more appropriate to this moment, can take root somewhere else, but it seems unlikely to flourish at the Whitney under its current leadership.

It may seem like a long road from Jesse Helms fulminating about a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph of “two males of different races [in an erotic pose] on a marble-top table,” to the Whitney’s censorship of a performance that condemned the genocide in Gaza, but it’s not as far as one might think.[68] In fact, there has been a close, strategic alliance between evangelical Christians and militant Zionists for many years; each using the other to leverage their own distinct vision of a theocratic state. For Christians, the culmination of their biblical redemption story comes with the “return” of the Jews to Jerusalem, and the maintenance of their control over Israel. This event triggers the apocalyptic “end times” prophecy that they take from Book of Revelations. Of course, that particular apocalypse ends with all the unconverted Jews consigned to a fiery damnation, but that is a secondary concern for Israelis. They are happy to indulge this fantasy and befriend people who eagerly anticipate them burning in some future hell, if it provides a solid base of support for Zionism from a key voting bloc in the most militarily powerful country on the planet.[69] Of course Christian Nationalists constitute only one of a mosaic of forces that are leading the United States into authoritarianism. They are allied with, and overlap with, a motley crew of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and techno fascists, all working, consciously or not, at the behest of a select group of conservative billionaires, and their employees in the Republican Party. In each case Republicans are searching for a set of cultural technologies to mobilize their voters through fear, binding them together around a single, monolithic identity (Christian, White, American, Jewish) that reduces the majority of the country’s population to the category of abject Other. There is a certain hollow irony in all this, given that Nadal-Melsió’s own research has focused precisely on these “sovereign” forms of identity.[70]

As I’ve noted above, one of the central strategies of this creeping theocratic take over is a process of pretextual scandalization designed to fabricate a state of emergency that justifies the suspension of norms. This is, of course, a venerable authoritarian strategy. Just as we saw with the examples at the University of California cited earlier, a single incident of ostensible antisemitism at the Whitney was used to justify a much larger goal: the dismantling of an alternative educational program that is one of the central pillars of the museum’s broader reputation in the field. In past years, or in another context, this act of censorship might have occasioned a full throated and unified response from the Whitney’s curatorial staff and the ISP alumni and faculty network. Instead, there was silence from the Whitney staff, possibly due to fear of reprisals, and, aside from some letters of support, the response from alumni and faculty was relatively muted. Of course, any program with the longevity of the ISP is likely to have alumni with a range of perspectives, but due to its function as a kind of finishing school for art world professionals, many of them are quite well established in field. This ambivalent response, then, might be seen as providing a rough cross section of art world sentiment in the U.S. In that respect, it suggests significant schisms within the institutional art world itself; schisms that will only increase with the ongoing erosion of civil rights and free expression under the Trump regime. For now, one of the major art museums in New York has sent a message to artists and curators across the country that they are openly and unapologetically willing to repress dissent. This is the permission-giving structure provided by the rise of Trump.

In his “Neo Avant-Garde” essay Hal Foster worried that contemporary art might be reduced to “court buffoonery” due to the immense appropriative power of the market.[71] Although Foster referenced this as a fearful premonition, it has always struck me as a reasonably accurate description of the majority of work produced in the institutional art world. This is not entirely a bad thing, of course, since the buffoon or jester preserved some capacity to parody or critique dominant forms of power. That moment, however, has passed. What is emerging in its place is an overtly authoritarian regime in which critique as such is forbidden, and in which artists who displease the ruler, or the party, are subject to censorship, banishment, or worse. Notwithstanding the wishful thinking of generations of art historians and theorists, the institutional art world is no more “autonomous” than any other sphere of society, nor does it possess a privileged relationship to critique or criticality. It is, and always has been, simply one site among many in our society, in which resistance and criticality might be staged with greater or lesser success, and in which repression and domination are just as likely. In the art world, as in academia, individuals will increasingly be called upon to choose; compliance or dissent, looking the other way or speaking out. Certainly, speaking out now carries real and profound consequences (unemployment, loss of healthcare, doxing and threats of violence or death).[72] I can attest that this question has already been forced on me and many of my colleagues as we decide what topics we can teach and what level of risk we are willing to face in order to teach them. In these dark times we must care for each other and do our best to survive and to sustain those forms of critique and prefigurative experience that are the bedrock of our collective intellectual heritage. Whether that can occur through preservation or actualization remains to be seen.

Grant Kester is the Founding Editor of FIELD and Professor of Art History at UCSD.

Notes

[1] Frontispiece, William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom,’ (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company, 1951)

https://archive.org/details/godmanatyale0000unse/page/n5/mode/2up

Buckley’s book marks an important shift in post-WWII conservatism in the U.S., which helped lay the groundwork for the increasing radicalization of the Republican Party that has come to fruition today. Buckley shared a commitment to a quasi-theocratic notion of authority, and a keen distaste for democracy and reason. Like the Christian Nationalists, he tended to view secular education as a plague that has corrupted the American psyche. Instead, he advocated a return to orthodox Christianity. He also provided intellectual validation for southern segregationists through his writing for National Review, where he praised southern whites as “the advanced race” (see below). For more on Buckley’s role in the modern Republican party see: Matthew Dallek, Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right (New York: Perseus Books, 2023) and Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

“The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes-the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. . . . National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct. . . . It is more important for the community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.”

William F. Buckley, “Why the South Must Prevail,” National Review, volume 4 (August 24, 1957), pp.1480-149

[2] Sam Levin, “UC Berkeley Shares 160 Names with Trump Administration in ‘McCarthy Era’ Move,” The Guardian (September 12, 2025)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/12/uc-berkeley-trump-administration-antisemitism

Also see Kaweed Kaleem and Daniel Miller, “UC, CSU released troves of personal employee information to the feds. Now the backlash,” Los Angeles Times (October 13, 2025).

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-10-13/trump-uc-csu-employee-data

[3] News Writing Staff, “UC Gives Personal Information of UCSD Students, Staff and Faculty to Federal Government,” The Guardian (UCSD) (October 6, 2025)

https://ucsdguardian.org/2025/10/06/uc-gives-personal-information-of-ucsd-students-staff-and-faculty-to-federal-government/

[4] Atmika Ayer, “UC’s President had a Plan to Deescalate Protests. How Did we Get a Night of Violence at UCLA?,” Cal Matters (May 1, 2024)

https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2024/05/uc-campus-protests/

See: Michael Burke, “Pro-Palestinian students sue UCLA over attack on encampment last year,” Ed Source (March 21, 2025).

https://edsource.org/updates/pro-palestinian-students-sue-ucla-over-attack-on-encampment-last-year

The following day, according to the lawsuit, police descended on the encampment and forcibly removed protesters, more than 200 of whom were arrested. “Police hurled flashbangs, shot powerful kinetic impact projectiles at peoples’ heads and faces, and used excessive physical force against and falsely arrested students, faculty, and concerned community members. Protesters were dragged, beaten, and body slammed by cops during this hours-long raid on the encampment,” the lawsuit states.

[5] As noted, there were no consequences from the Department of Justice for the off campus counter-protestors who assaulted the encampment students. For a first hand report of these attacks see: “Statement of Members of the Department of History in Response to the Attack on the Encampment on 30 April 2024,” UCLA Department of History (May 1, 2024)

https://history.ucla.edu/2024/05/01/statement-of-members-of-the-ucla-department-of-history-faculty-in-response-to-the-attack-on-the-encampment-on-30-april-2024/

For video footage of the attacks see: “Counter-protesters attack UCLA pro-Palestinian camp,” BBC News (May 1, 2024)

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-68935876

Also see: Blake Ellis, Melanie Hicken, et. al, “Unmasking counterprotesters who attacked UCLA’s pro-Palestine encampment,” CNN (May 16, 2024).

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/us/ucla-student-protests-counterprotesters-invs

The UC Office of the President (UCOP) refused to make the Trump administration’s demands public. In response, the UCLA Faculty Association and the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) filed a lawsuit to force UCOP to release a detailed description of the Trump administration’s demands (“Resolution Agreement Between the United States and UCLA”). The lawsuit was successful, and you can see a copy of the original agreement here: https://uclafa.org/

[6] On the charges of genocide in Gaza see: Lorenzo Tondo, “Israel committing genocide in Gaza world’s top scholars on the crime say,” The Guardian (September 1, 2025)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/01/israel-committing-genocide-in-gaza-worlds-top-scholars-on-the-say

The world’s leading genocide scholars’ association has backed a resolution stating that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of the crime. Out of the International Association of Genocide Scholars’s (IAGS) 500 members, 28% took part in the vote. Of those who voted, 86% supported the resolution. The resolution states that “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in article II of the United Nations convention for the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide (1948).” The three-page resolution passed by the body calls on Israel to “immediately cease all acts that constitute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza, including deliberate attacks against and killing of civilians including children; starvation; deprivation of humanitarian aid, water, fuel, and other items essential to the survival of the population; sexual and reproductive violence; and forced displacement of the population.”

Stéphanie Le Bars, “Amos Goldberg: ‘What is happening in Gaza is a genocide because Gaza does not exist anymore,” Le Monde (October 15, 2025).

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/10/29/amos-goldberg-what-is-happening-in-gaza-is-a-genocide-because-gaza-does-not-exist-anymore_6730881_23.html

Steve Inskeep, “Historian Omer Bartov on why he believes Israel is committing genocide in Gaza,” NPR Morning Edition (July 17, 2025)

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/17/nx-s1-5468953/historian-omer-bartov-on-why-he-believes-israel-is-committing-genocide-in-gaza

David Gritten and Imogen Foulkes, “Israel has committed genocide in Gaza UN commission of inquiry says,” BBC (September 16, 2025)

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8641wv0n4go

[7] This was part of a spate of hate speech across the UC system in 2010 that included the vandalizing of the UC Davis LGBT Resource Center, and graffiti featuring a noose with the phrase “UCSD Lynching” in a UC Santa Cruz bathroom.

Gabe Schneider, “The Compton Cookout: A Day Party to be Remembered (or Not),” The Triton (UCSD), (February 15, 2017).

https://triton.news/2017/02/compton-cookout-day-party-remembered-not/

[8] It’s worth noting here that, notwithstanding UCSD’s efforts, the percentage of black students on campus remains virtually unchanged fifteen years later (from 1.8% in 2010 to 1.81% in 2025).

https://www.collegetuitioncompare.com/edu/110680/university-of-california-san-diego/enrollment/

[9] For the most recent example of this see: Sarah Fortinsky, “Who are the Young Republicans in explosive group chat?,” The Hill (October 15, 2025)

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5556867-young-republican-scandal-politico-who-involved/

The former chair of the New York State Young Republicans, Giunta “was the most prominent voice in the chat spreading racist messages—often encouraged or ‘liked’ by other members,” Politico reported. “I love Hitler,” Giunta reportedly said in one of the exposed text messages, in an exchange about appealing to delegates as the “most right wing person.” He also made comments about sending opponents to the “gas chamber” if they don’t support his nomination for chair of the Young Republican National Federation, Politico reported.

[10] Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, “‘The universities are the enemy’: why the right detests the American campus,” The Guardian (May 6, 2025)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/06/maga-republicans-us-universities

[11] Aram Roson and Jim Urquhart, “American Nazis: The Aryan Freedom Network is Riding High in the Trump Era,” Reuters Special Report (August 8, 2025)

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/american-nazis-aryan-freedom-network-is-riding-high-trump-era-2025-08-08/

[12] Ben Makuch, “Energized neo-Nazis feel their moment has come as Trump changes everything,” The Guardian (January 26, 2025)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/26/neo-nazis-trump-extremism

[13] Joseph Gedeon, “US justice department removes study finding far-right extremists commit ‘far more’ violence,” The Guardian (September 17, 2025).

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/17/justice-department-study-far-right-extremist-violence

Steven Chermak, et. al. What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism (January 4, 2024). See the censored report here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250911012550/https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/what-nij-research-tells-us-about-domestic-terrorism

[14] Kris Inman, “Trump administration cuts to terrorism prevention departments could leave Americans exposed,” The Conversation (August 10, 2025).

https://theconversation.com/trump-administration-cuts-to-terrorism-prevention-departments-could-leave-americans-exposed-261630#:~:text=What%20the%20US%20has%20lost,design%20and%20manage%20such%20responses.

[15] See, for example: Dan Merica, “Trump said Hitler ‘did some good things’ and wanted generals like the Nazis, former chief of staff Kelly claims,” PBS News (October 23, 2024)

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-said-hitler-did-some-good-things-and-wanted-generals-like-the-nazis-former-chief-of-staff-kelly-claims

Tom Dreisbach, “Trump’s Bedminster club hosted an alleged Nazi sympathizer who stormed the Capitol,” NPR All Things Considered (September 12, 2024)

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/12/nx-s1-5107435/trump-capitol-riot-antisemitic-bedminster

Kinsey Crowley, “Trump and Pepe the Frog: 2016 campaign turned meme political. Then it became a hate symbol,” Yahoo News (May 29, 2025)

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-pepe-frog-2016-campaign-200533653.html

Tom Dreisbach, “Multiple Trump White House officials have ties to antisemitic extremists,” NPR All Things Considered (May 14, 2025)

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/14/nx-s1-5387299/trump-white-house-antisemitism

[16] Rachel Treisman, “Elon Musk faces criticism for encouraging Germans to move beyond ‘past guilt’,” NPR World (January 27, 2025)

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/27/nx-s1-5276084/elon-musk-german-far-right-afd-holocaust

[17] Ben Makuch, “Energized neo-Nazis feel their moment has come as Trump changes everything,” The Guardian (January 26, 2025)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/26/neo-nazis-trump-extremism

Ben Makuch, “Neo-Nazi and far right groups seize on Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric,” The Guardian (September 8, 2024)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/08/trump-immigration-neo-nazi-far-right

Tess Owen, “Neo-Nazis Are on the March Across America,” Wired (November 26, 2024)

https://www.wired.com/story/neo-nazi-demonstrations-trump/

[18] Ja’han Jones, “Trump admin reportedly issues absurd settlement demands to UCLA,” MSNBC (September 17, 2025)

https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/trump-ucla-settlement-antisemitism-columbia-berkeley-rcna231950

In addition to a $1 billion fine, which California Gov. Gavin Newsom has previously called “extortion,” the proposed deal reportedly would require UCLA to issue a public statement vowing not to recognize transgender people’s identities. The Times also reported that the administration is demanding that UCLA should:

• • Ensure that “anti-Western” or “anti-American” students aren’t admitted.
  • End any race- or ethnicity-based scholarships.
  • Release annual demographic data on hires as well as prospective and admitted students, broken down by “race, color, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests.”

And then there’s the reported requirement that the government be granted access to “all UCLA staff, employees, facilities, documents, and data related to the agreement” that’s not protected by attorney-client privilege. That could be an opening for the Trump administration—which has frequently conflated pro-Palestinian activism with antisemitism—to target staff as it has elsewhere in the University of California system.

[19] William Appleman Williams, ‘Excelsior’, New York Review of Books (February 24, 1972), p.8.

[20] Derek Jonathan Penslar, Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (New Haven CT: Yale University Press 2020), p.114.

[21] Thomas Suárez, Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2023).

[22] The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, edited by M.W. Weisgal (Jerusalem: Israel University Press, 1977), p. 210.

[23] Thomas Suárez, Palestine Hijacked, p.93.

[24] Ibid, p.93.

[25] A year earlier, immigrant journalist Robert Weltsch, speaking in Tel Aviv (in 1942), bemoaned “this small group of fascist Zionists in Jerusalem, London and America. . . who poison our youth.” Other non-Zionist jews were even less fortunate, and could face torture or assassination. Ibid., p.75.

[26] Adam and Gedaliah Afterman, “Meir Kahane and Contemporary Jewish Theology of Revenge,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 98, #2 (2015), pp.192-217.

[27] See, for example, Sheldon Culver and John Dorhauer, Steeplejacking: How the Christian Right is Hijacking Mainstream Religion (Brooklyn, NY: LG Publishing, 2007).

[28] Lance Wallnau, Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate (Destiny Image Publisher: Shippensberg, PA: 2013), pp.17, 67.

[29] The Federalist Papers: No. 10: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp

[30] “Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists” (1802).

See: https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre.html

[31] The result has been a growing body of Christian pseudo-history that offers shamelessly fabricated and Christianized versions of key figures from America’s past. For a particularly risible example see David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson (New York: Thomas Nelson, 2012). Barton’s book was so shoddily researched that even a Christian publisher (Thomas Nelson) was forced to cease publication.

Elise Hu, “Publisher Pulls Controversial Thomas Jefferson Book, Citing Loss of Confidence,” NPR Must Reads (August 9, 2012)

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/08/09/158510648/publisher-pulls-controversial-thomas-jefferson-book-citing-loss-of-confidence

[32] John Muether, “The Theonomic Attraction,” Theonomy: A Reformed Critique, edited by William S. Barker and W. Robert Godfrey (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academie, 1990) p.254. In Thy Kingdom Come, Studies in Daniel and Revelation, Rushdoony writes “Evil men seek to make all things evil; men who are failures demand a universal failure. Democracy is the great love of the failures and cowards of life.” Rousas John Rushdoony, They Kingdom Come: Studies in Daniel and Revelation (Vallectio, CA: Chalcedon Foundation, 1970, 1998), p.39.

[33] Rousas John Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law, Volume 1 (Vallecito, CA: Chalcedon Foundation, 2012), p.570. Rushdoony is responding, of course, to the famed Preamble of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

[34] Rousas John Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law, Volume 1 (Vallecito, CA: Chalcedon Foundation, 2012), p.282.

[35] “Speech of Robert L. Dabney in the Synod of Virginia Against the Ecclesiastical Equality of Negro Preachers in Our Church and Their Right to Rule Over White Christians” (November 9, 1867) Original posted by Daniel Kleven, βιβλιοσκώληξ (Bookworm), pp.201, 203-204.

https://biblioskolex.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/dabney-ecclesiastical_relation_of_negroes.pdf

[36] Daniel Kleven, “Nine of Eleven Letters by Chorepiscopus [Robert Lewis Dabney] to the Richmond Enquirer, on ‘The Moral Character of Slavery’” (1851) βιβλιοσκώληξ (Bookworm) (October 30, 2021)

https://biblioskolex.wordpress.com/2021/10/30/nine-of-eleven-letters-by-chorepiscopus-robert-lewis-dabney-to-the-richmond-enquirer-on-the-moral-character-of-slavery-1851/

[37] Edward H. Sebesta, Euan Hague, “The US Civil War as a Theological War: Neo-Confederacy, Christian Nationalism and Theology,” in Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction, edited by Euan Hague, Heidi Beirich and Edward H. Sebasta (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2008), pp.57-58.

[38] For a recording of the original speech see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GBAsFwPglw

[39] “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22) is the verse usually cited.

[40] See Kathryn Joyce, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2009).

[41] Paul A. Djupe, “Belief in the 7 Mountain Mandate Appears to be Growing in the Last Year,” Religion in Public blog (May 13, 2024).

https://religioninpublic.blog/2024/05/13/belief-in-the-7-mountain-mandate-appears-to-be-growing-in-the-last-year/

[42] Notwithstanding the absurd fantasy of the “west” promulgated by groups such as the Proud Boys, Europe is obviously not some cultural isolate of Nordic purity. Rather, the identity of the west is, by its very nature, profoundly dialogical. Europe is defined by millennia of migration and immigration, culture exchange and colonization, trade and warfare, assimilation and synthesis, conflict and reconciliation, between west and east, north and south. It is this syncretic and interdependent nature that they seek to deny.

[43] David Corn, “Mike Johnson Urged a Religious Test for Politicians,” Our Land: A Newsletter from David Corn (October 31, 2023).

https://link.motherjones.com/public/33196514

Amanda Becker, “Vance attends town hall hosted by anti-LGBTQ+ Christian nationalist pastor,” The 19^th. (September 28, 2024).

https://19thnews.org/2024/09/jd-vance-lance-wallnau-town-hall/

[44] R. J. Rushdoony, The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1981), p.158.

[45] Erkki Forster, “Steve Bannon Says, ‘Teachers Are Terrorists’ in Unhinged Tribute,” Yahoo News/Daily Beast (September 21, 2025).

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/steve-bannon-says-teachers-terrorists-224539360.html

[46] Jenna Tracy, “My childhood in a cult is hard to imagine—but my survival is truly unbelievable,” The Guardian (June 1, 2015)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/01/childhood-in-cult-hard-imagine-survival-truly-unbelievable

Jennifer Wooten, “Raising Spiritual Warriors: Unleashing the Power of Prayer in Your Children,” Sacred Stance (June 22, 2023)

“Remember, moms, our children may appear as our sweet, cuddly littles to us, but in God’s eyes, they are chosen vessels, called to be warriors in the spiritual battle.”

https://sacredstance.com/blogs/blogs/raising-spiritual-warriors-unleashing-the-power-of-prayer-in-your-children

Chris Surber, “Shaping Your Child Into a Spiritual Warrior,” Christian Broadcasting Network (undated)

https://cbn.com/article/spiritual-warfare/shaping-your-child-spiritual-warrior

[47] Michael J. McVicar, Christian Reconstructionism: R.J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

[48] The hunger for a quasi-divine monarch who will rescue society from its perceived moral decline, so central to the Seven Mountains Mandate, finds its parallel in the concept of “Red Caesarism” that has emerged in conjunction with Trump’s second term. Red Caesarism is an oddly archaic intellectual fantasy associated with techno-fascist “thinkers” like Curtis Yarvin and Michael Anton. It argues that society is heading towards imminent collapse and the only thing that will save it is the arrival of a quasi-mystical modern-day “Caesar,” with Trump serving as a kind of Dollar Store version of Hegel’s Napoleon (the “world spirit on horseback”). Instead of carrying human society forward, the Red Caesar will simply wipe away all the existing corrupting in a river of blood, allowing a new and unblemished social order to arise on its ashes. Given the picayune and frankly imbecilic nature of this “theory” one could be forgiven for thinking it was the inspiration of a twelve year old gamer. The fact that that these ideas are being taken seriously at the highest levels of the GOP is an indication of the intellectual bankruptcy and sheer opportunism of the Republican Party today.

Jason Wilson, “‘Red Caesarism’ is rightwing code–and some Republicans are listening,” The Guardian (October 1, 2023).

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/01/red-caesar-authoritarianism-republicans-extreme-right

[49] Hal Foster, “What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?,” OCTOBER 70 (Fall 1994), p.23

[50] https://jonmcnaughton.com/

[51] For some of the more ludicrous examples of efforts to claim “scientific” legitimacy for literalist interpretations of the Bible see public attractions such as the “Ark Encounter” (in Kentucky) and the various Creationist “Museums” that have sprung up over the past decade or so.

• https://arkencounter.com/
• https://creationsd.org/
• https://creationmuseum.org/

[52] See Zachary Small, “A Closer Look Into the Whitney Museum’s Board,” Hyperallergic (May 7, 2019)

https://hyperallergic.com/486055/a-closer-look-into-the-whitney-museums-board/

Rhea Nayyar, “Protest Targets Whitney Museum Board Ties After Canceled Performance,” Hyperallergic (May 27, 2025)

https://hyperallergic.com/1015804/protest-targets-whitney-museum-board-ties-after-canceled-performance/

[53] Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business, edited by Brian Wallis (New York: The New Museum/MIT Press, 1986) p.96.

[54] See: “Gurgles around the Guggenheim,” Studio International 181, no.934 (June 1971), pp.246-250, and Barbara Reise, “Which Is in Fact What Happened,” interview with Thomas Messer, Studio International 181, no. 935 (July-August 1971), pp. 34–37.

“But I would say that in the motivation again what is acceptable is the general illustration of a system. What is for the purposes of this discussion inacceptable (sic.) is that it is aimed at a specific situation. In other words, it no longer has a self-contained creative objective, but is something with an ulterior motive.” (July-August 1971, p.37).

“Mondrian was merely concerned with an anonymous blueprint which had vitality and strength from within   itself to radiate various consequences” (July-August 1971, p.27).

“I did explain that by trustee directive this museum was not to engaged in extra-artistic activities or sponsors social or political causes but was to accept the limitations inherent in the nature of an art museum” (June 1971, p.249).

“. . under our Charter we are pursuing [a]esthetic and educational objectives that are self-sufficient and without ulterior motive. On those grounds, the trustees have established policies that exclude active engagement toward social and political ends.” (June 1971, p.248)

“It is well understood, in this connection, that art may have social and political consequences but these, we believe, are furthered by indirection and by the generalized, exemplary force that works of art may exert upon the environment, not, as you propose, by using political means to achieve political ends” (June 1971, p.249).

“I would say that at the point at which the intention and the result of a work is no longer general, summary, metaphoric and symbolic, by the point it addresses itself to a known specific topical situation, its status as a work of art—or at least its immunity as a work of art—is in question.” (July-August 1971, p.36).

[55] See Grant Kester, The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023) and Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024).

[56] Theodore Adorno, Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p.245-246.

[57] In this respect, the fate of Haacke’s work simply mirrors the rapid assimilation of Duchamp’s Fountain over a half century before.

See: Aruna D’Souza, “What Can We Learn from Institutional Critique?,” Art in America (October 29, 2019).

https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/hans-haacke-new-museum-retrospective-institutional-critique-63666/

Perhaps the most telling of these acquisitions [of Haacke’s work] is that of Shapolsky, et al., which was purchased in 2007 by the Whitney with the help of funds from Fundació Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Haacke’s critique of the real estate investor was last shown at the Whitney as part of “America Is Hard to See” (2015), the inaugural exhibition at the museum’s building in the Meatpacking District—the opening of which contributed to a major real estate boom in the neighborhood. It would be fair to wonder, given this strange game of “musical Haackes”—whereby pieces critiquing one institution are purchased by others after the antiseptic effect of time’s passage—whether museums love institutional critique only as long as it’s directed at some other institution.

[58] Hal Foster, “What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?,” p.26.

[59] Ibid., p.23.

[60] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?,” New Left Review 65 (2010), p.33-34.

[61] Rodrigo Nunes, Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization (London: Verso, 2021), p.232.

[62] Chloe Veltman, “Sweeping cuts hit NEA after Trump administration calls to eliminate the agency,” National Public Radio Culture (May 3, 2025).

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/03/nx-s1-5385888/sweeping-cuts-hit-nea-after-trump-administration-calls-to-eliminate-the-agency

[63] The obsession with queer sexuality and race during the 1980s and early ‘90s Culture Wars was evident across a range of targeted artists, including Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe (especially his images of black and white gay men), and Marlon Riggs (images from his video Tongues Untied were featured in a notorious Patrick Buchanan campaign ad).

User clip, “Pat Buchanan Ad featuring Tongues Untied,” C-Span (February 28, 1992)

https://www.c-span.org/clip/public-affairs-event/user-clip-pat-buchanan-ad-featuring-tongues-untied/4679699

For more information on the 1990s Culture Wars see: Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts, edited by Richard Bolton (New York: Norton and Company, 1992).

[64] For copies of the original scores see:

https://www.eina.cat/sites/default/files/documents/Scores-Collected-Doc-revised.pdf

Also see: “Whitney Museum Axes ISP Performance Centering Palestinian Mourning,” News Desk, Artforum, (May 22, 2025)

https://www.artforum.com/news/whitney-museum-axes-performance-on-palestinian-mourning-1234731135/

[65] One can imagine the myriad ways, subtle and overt, by which it was communicated to Whitney Museum staff that certain topics (Gaza, Palestine) were not suitable subjects for “experimental, responsive and risk-taking” engagement.

[66] “Sara Nadal-Melsió joins as first Associate Director,” e-flux Education announcements (March 28, 2024).

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/596723/sara-nadal-melsi-joins-as-first-associate-director

[67] “Statement: Whitney Museum Undermines Artistic Freedom with ISP Suspension and Associate Director Termination,” Artists at Risk Connection (June 13, 2025)

https://artistsatriskconnection.org/statement/whitney-museums-suspension-of-isp-termination-of-associate-director-undermine-artistic-freedom/

The Whitney Museum’s eagerness to reframe this entire episode as a simple bureaucratic matter of “leadership change” has unfolded even more rapidly than I could have anticipated. Only two weeks after I completed this essay the Whitney released a call for applicants to fill the position of ISP Director. It’s notable that among the criterion for applicants is the ability to “own outcomes—successes and failures” and to “model integrity and ethical decision-making,” two qualities that seem to be singularly lacking among the Whitney’s leadership. The job call also, amusingly, retains the “mission statement” credo that the Whitney “must be as experimental, responsive, and risk-taking as the artists with whom we collaborate,” unless, apparently, those artists bring up topics that offend the Whitney’s Director or board members.

https://whitneymuseumofamericanart.applytojob.com/apply/uGuULFR2Nj/Independent-Study-Program-ISP-Director

[68] Helms’ full quote is: “There’s a big difference between The Merchant of Venice and a photograph of two males of different races [in an erotic pose] on a marble-top table.”

See: Maureen Dowd, “Unruffled Helms Basks in the Eye of the Arts Storm,” New York Times July 28, 1989, p.B6.

[69] There is a sizable body of research on this linkage. For a recent example, see Tad Delay, “Christian Zionism and the US Political Imaginary,” Parapraxis, “The Palestine Issue” (2024). Here’s a representative quote from Delay’s essay: “I asked an Israeli staff member what she thought of American evangelicals who believe unconverted Jews will be damned to hell. She smiled and replied, ‘Evangelicals are Israel’s best friend’.”

https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/category/Palestine+Issue

[70] See, for example, Sara Nadal-Melsió, Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on a Musical Figure (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2025)

[71] Hal Foster, “What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?,” OCTOBER 70 (Fall 1994), p.23.

[72] See Edward Helmore, “US anti-fascism expert leaves country day after being blocked from flying to Spain,” The Guardian (October 9, 2025)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/09/anti-fascism-mark-bray-rutgers-university