NEWS: Members of President’s Arts Committee Resign en Masse in Protest

All but one private member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities (PCAH), which advises the President on cultural issues, resigned this morning, with a letter to Trump that condemns his “support of the hate groups and terrorists who killed and injured fellow Americans in Charlottesville.”

The letter, posted in full on Twitter by actor and former Obama official Kalpen Modi (Kal Penn), strongly rebukes Trump for his equivocal comments about the violent events in Charlottesville last weekend. “The false equivalencies you push cannot stand,” it reads. “We cannot sit idly by, the way that your West Wing advisors have, without speaking out against your words and actions.” The letter goes on to list some of the ways in which Trump has attacked the arts and humanities, including his proposal to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and his persistent verbal assaults on journalists. It concludes: Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions. We took a patriotic oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values. We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too. Read More