Celebrated fitness expert Jillian Michaels appeared on a CNN panel and mocked several Smithsonian museum exhibits for displaying blatant progressive bias.
On CNN’s “NewsNight with Abby Phillip,” Michaels fired back at Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) and former Democrat strategist Julie Roginsky for taking issue with the Trump administration’s official review of exhibits and materials at the Smithsonian.
Roginsky claimed that Trump has “some random person” deciding what is appropriate for the museum and that the exhibits now must align with topics that do not offend the president or his supporters. Michaels asked the panelist to address some of the exhibits, to which the Russian Roginsky replied that slavery was something the Trump administration did not want to talk about.
‘Do you know that when you walk in the door, the first thing you see is the gay flag?’
“He’s not whitewashing slavery,” Michaels said. The trainer continued, despite Roginsky’s objection: “And you cannot tie imperialism and racism and slavery to just one race, which is pretty much what every single exhibit does.”
Michaels argued that it was worth noting just 2% of white Americans owned slaves, and the horrible practice has been around for “thousands of years” and therefore predates America.
“Do you know who was the first race to try to end slavery?” Michaels asked Roginsky.
At that point, host Phillip chimed in, “I’m surprised you’re trying to litigate who is the beneficiary of slavery.”
Michaels immediately rejected the assertion and later remarked that Phillip was trying to straw man her argument and connect everything to race, just as the museum was.
“Every single thing is like, ‘Oh, no, no, no, this is all because “white people bad.”‘ That’s just not the truth,” Michaels said about the exhibits.
She was not done.
Phillip asked for other examples from Michaels, who was able to cite several from documents she brought with her.
“Every single exhibit, I have a list of every single one. Like, people migrated from Cuba because ‘white people bad,’” Michaels explained. “Do you know that when you walk in the door, the first thing you see is the gay flag?” she told the panelists.
Still Phillip was not convinced, so Michaels continued.
“There’s one [exhibit] called ‘Change Your Game,’” she detailed. “‘Is gender testing fair in sports?’ Then it goes on to say how it’s complex to do gender testing in sports. It’s not complex. It’s basic science.”
The panel, often interrupting, seemingly could not answer Michaels’ questions as to “why is this in the Smithsonian?”
“It’s been completely captured, and it’s totally partisan,” the 51-year-old claimed.
As Michaels rattled off her examples, the CNN host declared, “We don’t have time to litigate all of this,” but Michaels fired back again.
“Of course we don’t because then you’re gonna lose the argument. Everything [in the museum] is racialized.”
Michaels took to her X page following the segment to share an image of a Smithsonian exhibit about Cuban and Caribbean migration to the United States.
The exhibit blamed the migration on U.S. support for “foreign governments that favored U.S. businesses and fought communism,” along with “U.S. policy” that contributed to “violence and corruption.”
It also noted “wealthy white Cubans” as the first to leave the island but did not openly note communist policies as a reason for poverty or corruption.
“When you make every single exhibit about white imperialism when it isn’t relevant at all, that is a problem,” Michaels told the CNN commentators.
As for her claim that just 2% of white Americans owned slaves, progressives have argued the figure is unfair because it does not focus on the states in which slave-owning was most prominent, which Politifact called “the most reasonable way” to measure it.
Although the 2017 article sought to disprove a similar claim (the figure used was 1.4%), Politifact actually cited a historian who said the idea that black American slave owners had around 20,000 slaves of their own during the same time period was “not that far off.”
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