The Audacity of Obama's Agitprop and Leftist Patronage at the Met
How the Obama Presidential Center, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and leftist tech billionaire power couple Stewart Butterfield and Jen Rubio have funded commissars to shove ugly art down our throats
The left dominates arts and culture because its billionaires are willing to pour money into them. Any electoral victories will be fleeting for the right unless its leaders stop neglecting these vital fields. A new generation of commissars is opening their checkbooks for demoralization at the Met and Obama Center, which are following the MacArthur and Mellon foundations into the woke slop abyss. Institutional capture will only get worse until the resources are deployed to counter them. Know what is going on around you.
Outside of the tech and art worlds, few have heard of billionaire power couple Stewart Butterfield and Jen Rubio. He founded the work messaging platform Slack and sold it to Salesforce for $28 billion in 2020. She started the luggage company Away, which was once valued at over $1 billion but has since been plagued by a toxic culture. Neither was born in America, but they are dedicated to subverting it. They made fortunes from 2010s girlboss millennial mimesis when every AWFL conformed to colorful carry-ons with built-in batteries that charged their phones, so they could Slack and Instagram about their eat-pray-love jet-setting trips.
Last week, the Rubio Butterfield Foundation announced a $23 million donation to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The funds will be earmarked to ensure that all internships will be fully paid positions, along with a pledge to support a new modern art wing. Rubio recently joined the Met’s board, while Butterfield serves on the board of the Whitney Museum. They are also Democrat megadonors who host fundraisers at their mansions in Aspen, Southampton, and the West Village.
Rubio virtue signaled cringe word salad in the Met’s press release:
Stewart and I are proud to support The Met in making that entry point more equitable, ensuring that emerging voices, perspectives, and expertise help define the future of the Museum and the broader cultural landscape.
Sotheby’s slobbered over her contributions to the Whitney:
Rather than putting her name on a big marble staircase, for example, she has instead endowed a curatorial position focusing on Latinx art and a fellowship for emerging curators at the Whitney, along with the Free Fridays program. Since the latter’s launch, she proudly notes, the pool of visitors on a Friday has become 40% more diverse, the average age 10 years younger.
Their taste in art is stunning and brave:
What inspires these commie collectors? How much DEI will they fuse into their internship program? Will their conservative counterparts even contribute a fraction of what they have? Sadly the answers are predictable.
Butterfield’s daughter Mint from his first marriage identifies as nonbinary. They ran away from home in 2024 at the age of 16. His ex-wife filed a missing persons report and a week-long search ensued before thankfully they were found safe. They were living in the van of an “adult friend” a decade older than them in the Tenderloin, where they were known to frequent for substance abuse. The future Met interns will be clones of Mint.
The left hates billionaires, except for the ones who bankroll them. In 2024, Rubio and Butterfield held a $100,000 per head fundraiser for Tampon Tim to support trans youth. They believe in every MSM hoax, referencing that Matthew Shepard was killed for being gay instead of the reality that it was a drug deal gone wrong.
From an Inc scoop on their limousine liberal resistance gathering in the Hamptons:
Attendees mingled by the Southampton estate’s tennis court, before heading to the south patio–a stunning manicured lawn area surrounded by hedges–for the event to kick off. Butterfield, who is Canadian by birth, praised Walz during his introduction of the governor, nodding to Walz’s history of being willing to tackle fraught issues, as he did in 1999, when he agreed to advise the Gay-Straight Alliance at Minnesota’s Mankato West High School, where Walz was a teacher and coach. This was not even a year after the death of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man in Wyoming, which made national news, as he was beaten to death because of his sexuality.
“I don’t think it was an act of great personal sacrifice, but it was an act of real decency and nobility,” Butterfield said. “I think it was important that it was the straight teacher, the hunter, the football coach, that took that step and spent social capital. It built community.”
On Juneteenth, the Obama Presidential Center will open to the public for $30 a ticket. The billion dollar monstrosity will be run by the Obama Foundation instead of the National Archives and Records Administration, which manages all other presidential libraries, because he is a god who transcends the office. The New York Times revealed a sneak preview of the interiors in an article called “The Audacity of Art”.
Saint Barack’s mecca will feature agitprop slop made by 30 of his and Michelle’s favorite artists. Almost all of them are diverse. The group was commissioned by the Obamas and curated by Virginia Shore, who served for 20 years as Chief Curator and Director of the State Department’s Office of Art in Embassies (AIE). Since retiring during Trump’s first administration in 2017, she has consulted for many globalist organizations with her pronouns on “art-driven advocacy initiatives spanning education, immigration, climate, voting rights, inclusion, diversity, and racial equity.”
Julie Mehretu’s painted glass scribbles, “Uprising of the Sun,” climbs the museum's north facade. As an Ethiopian-born LGBTQ+ BIPOC, her intersectionality scores climb even higher. Also a winner of the MacArthur Genius grant.
Allison Saar’s “Torch Song” desecrates the Statue of Liberty and she appears to be fond of making hideous statues that look like her:
Jeffrey Gibson’s “With a Steady Beat” features 17 prints on rainbow that reflect his queer Choctaw and Cherokee heritage with identarian communist messages like “We shall overcome, “Native Power”, and “si sue puede”. It will be located in the museum’s “More Inclusive America” exhibit. He expressed his enthusiasm for the Obamas’ spirit of “inclusivity.”
"Be the Change" by Tyanna J. Buie is a BLM Instagram feed.
Rashid Johnson’s Broken Men is a cartoonish mosaic:
Spencer Finch’s “Memory Landscape (Nairobi, Chicago, Honolulu, Jakarta),” kindergarten color squares were inspired by Obama’s early years in these cities. He is the token white guy, but is probably gay in order to be honored by the Obamas.
This is the future by default. If the right neglects investing in beauty, then ugliness will inundate us. The Met will get rid of its classic masterpieces to make room for the Obama commissar slop. Rubio and Butterfield will fund and curate President AOC’s library in the Bronx. Who is willing to counter the cultural revolution?
Invest in Arts and Culture to Win America's Counter-Cultural Revolution
American capitalists have a responsibility to protect our civilization from communists.
For more on the subversion of art:
The National Portrait Gallery is a Victim of Communism
Communism has killed over 100 million people. In 2022, The Victims of Communism (VOC) Museum opened to honor them and all who have fought for freedom against socialism. It is located a block away from The White House on 15th & I St (McPherson Square). The VOC Memorial Foundation was established in 1993 with unanimous Congressional support, but it took 3…
Like fellow Filipino Jia Tolentino, Jen is a rebel in the streets but colonized in the sheets:
The classics endure, even though a demoralized donor class is currently funding the pollution of our civilization
this is so ugly, it could be a modern art masterpiece!
Funny anecdote for you: I live in Chicago (western burbs) and have a membership to the Museum of Science and Industry. We take the kids a few times a year and last outing in November we invited my in laws. My mother in law is a huge Obama fangirl and when we were pulling into the museum campus, she saw the new Obama presidential center (which was nearly complete at the time and sits right next door) and guffawed saying "what is that hideous thing they are building?" I replied it was the new Obama library and it took her brain about 15 seconds to battle the cognitive dissonance when she replied 'wow, it looks really beautiful'.
The programming runs deep but you can always see the cracks.
No one genuinely likes this trash, they appear to like it because its another signal of belonging. As is the title of your substack though, the ugliness and subsequent demoralization is the point.