Last month, the New York Yankees used their fifth-round pick in the 2025 Major League Baseball draft to select University of Utah shortstop Core Jackson. It was a move that drew plenty of positive reviews from scouts who know the amateur game well, given the litany of athletic attributes Jackson brings to the table — ideal size, a strong throwing arm, great range and a power bat.
The wildest thing about the Yankees’ selection of Jackson seemed to be that a player with his athletic resumé didn’t get picked much earlier than the fifth round. Turned out, there was a reason: According to a report from The Athletic, Jackson admitted to drawing a swastika on a Jewish student’s dorm room door while he was “blackout drunk” during his freshman year at Nebraska in 2021.
To his credit, Jackson informed scouts he dealt with before the 2024 draft that the troubling incident occurred and that he sought help. His agent, Blake Corosky, thought about severing ties with Jackson before getting him in contact with Elliot Steinmetz, the men’s basketball coach at Yeshiva University, an Orthodox Jewish School in New York City.
Jackson convinced him that he “felt like the worst person in the world,” but Corosky wanted Steinmetz to educate him on the effect his actions had on the Jewish community. That led to intense sensitivity courses on the Holocaust for Jackson, who maintained he grew up without knowing Jewish people or being taught their history in the Christian school he attended.
“Right away,” Steinmetz told The Athletic, “you could tell (Jackson) was the nicest, sweetest kid in the world, (but) dumb as rocks when it came to these kinds of issues.”
Let this serve as a warning for being dumb as rocks when it comes to the travesties man has inflicted upon itself throughout history. That type of ignorance stands to be an affliction for many in this country if we willingly let its glorious history be told to future generations without qualifying it with its darker moments.
Yet, we see it as exactly the dangerous lack of awareness President Donald Trump is proposing to inflict on the American people with his cockamamie hopes of whitewashing the telling of the nation’s history by museums and national historic sites.
In a post on his social media platform, Trump singled out Washington, D.C.’s, Smithsonian Institution — the quintessential American history museum established by the government in 1846 with a simple six-word mission: “The increase and diffusion of knowledge.” He called the museum “OUT OF CONTROL” and too focused on “how horrible our Country is.”
Especially damning, he effectively criticized the Smithsonian for doing too good a job telling the story of “how bad Slavery was.”
“Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” Trump wrote, promising a sweeping review of museum exhibits to better tell the story of the America he’d prefer to portray. The comments came a week after the White House ordered the museum to alter content that troubles the Trump administration in its “tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals.”
On its face, this is straight from the textbooks of Authoritarianism 101. There’s a reason the most brutal dictators, from Hitler to Stalin and just about all of them beyond, portrayed museums as enemies and stifled their missions through censorship, changing exhibits and destroying artifacts. Controlling museums means controlling history, the greatest molder of public perception. Nationalistic objectives are only achieved by those willing to deny the public knowledge of their consequences.
You might wonder how a college student can be “dumb as rocks” about the pain a sight of a swastika inflicts on members of the Jewish community. Well, the same way someone in this country could ultimately see slavery as a viable means to an end in years to come: Through a lack of understanding.
That comes only from an orchestrated effort, intentional or not, to avoid teaching it — to shield its horrors and its consequences and the hundred years it essentially took for those on which it was inflicted to finally secure equal rights in the eyes of the law from a public that may not always want the reminder, but certainly needs it.
There’s a reason dictators don’t like museums. Their importance to an informed, educated and understanding democracy is vital. Forcing one to ignore the dark moments in history because they aren’t politically expedient to the sitting administration has obvious damaging consequences for our future.
We all know the old saying: Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Never trust someone who urges us to ignore it.
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