The NEH – National Endowment for the Humanities has recently published a breakdown of taxpayer-funded projects including a massive $300,000 for talks about water, $75,000 for a complete database of podcasts, and $30,000 to collect the oral histories of gay and lesbian residents of Idaho.
This is the first list to be released under the Trump’s administration and Jon Peede, the Chairman of the NEH and a Trump appointee has full discretion to sign off on every grant award. So, what was he thinking?
A $30,000 grant was approved for the University of Idaho for a project on “Oral histories of LGBTQ community.” Idaho Humanities Council has already received a sum of $3500 as Denise Bennett start up the “multimedia project examining the experiences and lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in the state of Idaho.”
The entire list of NEH projects sum to $39.3 million, and only add fuel and credibility to President Trump’s effort to eliminate this wasteful and useless organization’s taxpayer funding.
According to a source with deep knowledge of the cultural agency, “There is no difference between the millions of dollars of grants awarded by the Trump and Obama NEH, this in spite of the president’s request to defund it.”
The source also noted that project names have been modified to sound more mainstream for the Trump Administration grant approval process.
A spokesperson from the NEH confirms that the titles are somewhat changed, Paula Wasley said, “The agency occasionally offers alternatives to applicants’ proposed titles for clarity.”
Paula also defended the proposed list of projects also including $320,000 outright and $100,000 matching grant to University of Virginia for publication of papers of George Washington, and more of separate grants for paper publications of other founders as well.
She further went on to comment, “NEH stands by its decision to fund presidential paper projects for John Adams, James Madison, James Monroe, and George Washington as well as projects from the Michigan Humanities Council, University of Idaho, and an educational program focused on 15 indigenous Alaskan communities,” However, it remains to be seen whether these taxpayer grants will actually be used to preserve American history, or to smear the Founding Fathers – as liberals always do.
NEH representatives also defended the huge grant of $300,000, which would provide funds for Michigan to implement educational programs focusing on the historical, cultural and the environmental impact of water.
The Louisiana State University and A&M College received $39,982 for recreating a theater dated back to 18th century for the Paris Fair, the recreation is a virtual reality game, and would revolve around the same play.
Similarly, Jeremy Morris, assistant professor, who started up his podcast archive is receiving a grant worth $74,972 to create a podcast archive. As per Jeremy, “A lot of the database that I’ve built relies on metadata—you’re able to search through the database and find keywords … If you want to find out what was happening in podcasts that’s related to Trump, or that’s related to transgender rights or bathroom bills, these are all keywords you can search through the metadata.”
