We have recently been told by the Trump administration that “improper ideologies” are taught in our schools, universities and cultural institutions.

Lately the Trump administration has taken interest in the exhibits and narratives at some of the nation’s premier museums. Notably, even the Smithsonian Institution has come in for criticism from MAGA dogmatists for going beyond “objective facts” with “distorted narratives driven by ideology rather than the truth.” In a word, they seem unhappy that the nation’s major historical blunders have become part of our shared history: events no longer sufficiently papered over by older and more sentimental narratives. Hence, we get lists of terms (above, collected by the New York Times) that agencies are discouraged from using. Actor Jack Nicholson’s Col. Nathan R. Jessep could have been talking to the MAGA faithful in the film A Few Good Men (1972) when he told other officers “You can’t handle the truth!”

The unspeakable horrors visited on native Americans, and the centuries long struggle of African Americans for freedom and a piece of the American dream are just two of the historical realities that have been traditionally finessed. Even with more grit in modern western films, we still warm to the favored manifest destiny in How the West was Won (1962) than narratives about  the Sand Creek Massacre in eastern Colorado. A marker on the barren plains and a Wikipedia Post remain. But the murder of 750 native American men, women and children in 1864 is history that I never encountered as a student in Denver.

What do we do with atrocities committed in the name of a society we want to celebrate?

We have recently been told by the Trump administration that “improper ideologies” are taught in our schools, universities and cultural institutions, mostly meaning that new and less fantasized cultural sensitivities are now part of the curriculum. The awkward phrase reads like a line in Mao’s Little Red Book, or boilerplate lifted from an old Soviet training manual. Its use suggests a person or group reaching for good reasons where there are none.

Events can be affirmed or disputed, but ideologies cannot be fully grounded in empirical data. Each of us engages with aspects of ideological premises as we form our foundational beliefs to navigate the world. Ideologies are also not monolithic; they emerge from our unique political and social histories. Given the conventional usage of the term, can we truly label certain ideologies as “improper”? This notion is akin to accusing someone of possessing a “vivid imagination” or offering an “imprecise estimate.” In both cases, the initial adjective suggests—yet fails to provide—a definitive benchmark for assessment. We can manipulate language to mask the inherent contradictions between concepts, but ultimately, these distortions reflect an unfounded yearning for certainty. In authoritarian regimes such as Russia authorities can penalize the expression of “improper” ideas. Yet, ideas function as cognitive tools—they can embody thoughtful or dubious insights, but they should never be deemed “improper.”

Draconian sanctions against certain ideas are small-minded. It is disheartening to hear an American administration endorse this kind of rhetorical beast. Its sudden presence in our official rhetoric is unamerican and another reason to admire the built-in give and take in parliamentary systems that would expose “improper ideologies” as a semantic monstrosity.