A few weeks before he started selling swastika T-shirts on the internet, I considered letting Ye back into my life.

It was inauguration weekend, and I’d been sitting in a restaurant where the bartender was blasting a playlist of songs by the rapper once known as Kanye West. The music sounded, frankly, awesome. Most of the songs were from when I considered myself a fan of his, long before he rebranded as the world’s most famous Hitler admirer. I hadn’t heard this much Ye music played in public in years; privately, I’d mostly avoided it. But as I nodded along, I thought it might be time to redownload Yeezus.

The bartender probably wasn’t making a political statement, but the soundtrack felt all too apt for the dawn of the great uncancelling—the sweeping return of various disgraced figures and discouraged behaviors to the public realm. Donald Trump, a convicted felon, was back in the White House and naming accused abusers, quacks, and even Mel Gibson to positions of honor. Trend forecasters were proclaiming that Trump’s reelection represented a cultural shake-up in addition to a governmental one, replacing the stiff moralism of wokeness with cowboy rowdiness and chic nihilism. Phrases such as “the boom boom aesthetic” and “dark mode” were being coined to describe the phenomenon of young people suddenly dressing like Patrick Bateman and availing themselves of the term retard.

Given this climate, I thought maybe I could loosen up and try that whole “separating the art from the artist” thing again. I’d not been boycotting Ye’s music per se, but for the past few years, the disgust caused by his conduct had ruined the pleasure of stomping around to “Can’t Tell Me Nothing.” Now I could sense something shifting. The second Trump administration’s flurry of disorienting news was already becoming soul-deadening. The bad actors who were reemerging seemed only energized by outrage. Exhaustion was supplanting my sense of ick.

A few weeks later, on Super Bowl Sunday, the ick came roaring back. That day, a commercial aired directing viewers to Ye’s online store, which he then updated to sell only one item: a white shirt with the black, swirling symbol of the Third Reich. When I pulled up the website to see for myself, I felt a few kinds of bad feelings. There was horror at the Nazism. There was embarrassment at the fact that I’d recently wanted to listen to this guy’s voice again. And there was the sinking, instinctual understanding of what Ye was doing: testing how numb America has gotten.

The shirt stunt was part of a sudden flurry of activity suggesting a Ye comeback campaign. He crashed the Grammys; he’s prepping an album; he’s hyping a cryptocurrency. All the while, he’s doubled down on Hitler talk—and asserted his kinship with the second Trump wave. “Elon stole my Nazi swag,” he joked in one X post, referring to the tech mogul’s alleged Sieg heil; “whit[e] guys have all the fun,” he wrote when Steve Bannon seemed to make a similar gesture. He’s been filming podcast videos with an influencer, Justin LaBoy, whom he calls “the culture’s Joe Rogan.” He has described his habit of parading around his wife, Bianca Censori, nearly nude as if she were a pet, in redpilled terms. “I have dominion over my wife,” he posted. “This ain’t no woke as[s] feminist shit.”

Maybe Ye is saying what he truly believes. Maybe mental health is at play (he used to describe himself as bipolar; recently, he’s said the more accurate diagnosis is autism). Definitely, he’s trolling for publicity. In any case, he clearly believes this moment is ripe for him to capitalize on. And perhaps he’s right.

Conservatives who are proclaiming a golden age for America like to talk about the fall of “the regime,” a handy term to refer to any power center steered by liberals, including in the entertainment world. The idea is that we’d been living in a centrally planned culture of racially inclusive sitcoms and feminist pop stars, whose Millennial-pink kumbaya vibe was backed up by vicious online campaigns to shun the insufficiently woke. Now the entertainment regime is under assault through such means as Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center and the Federal Communications Commission’s saber-rattling against broadcast networks. In the MAGA view, these efforts aren’t dictatorial—they’re liberatory.

This logic is credulous logic, conspiracy logic, that tends to downplay a crucial driver of culture: audiences’ desires. Certainly, the idea that 2010s entertainment was smothered by progressive politeness is overstated at best. The decade’s defining TV show was the brutal, T&A-filled Game of Thrones. Hip-hop was driven by young rappers whose music and personal lives defined the word problematic (Tekashi 6ix 9ine, XXXtentacion, Lil Uzi Vert). And, of course, Trump’s 2016 election delighted a whole new cultural scene: edgelords posting frog memes. The internet was undercutting old gatekeepers, turning culture—more than ever—into an unruly, competitive arena. If there was a regime, it was already weakening, not strengthening.

[Read: Kanye West finally says what he means]

Ye has long understood the crowd-pleasing potential of chaos over conformity. Though he once scanned as a liberal protest rapper—remember when he called out George W. Bush on live TV after Hurricane Katrina?—his misogynistic streak hardly made him a consensus figure. In 2016, he got into a spat with Taylor Swift by calling her a “bitch” in a song; the resulting brouhaha damaged her reputation more than it did his. Even after he started praising Trump in 2018 and called slavery a “choice,” he still drew major collaborators and successfully orchestrated hype for new albums.

It was only in 2022 that he pushed far enough to experience something like full-on cancellation, by going full-on anti-Semite. He posted that he wanted to go “death con 3” on Jews. He told Alex Jones, “I like Hitler.” He posted a swastika on X. Consequences piled up: Adidas exited their billion-dollar partnership with Ye; Def Jam, his label, severed ties; Elon Musk, of all people, banned him from X. Yet even then, his career continued: He released an unconvincing apology to the Jews, put out an album full of big-name rap collaborations, and landed a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1. In that song, “Carnival,” he compared himself to vilified men such as R. Kelly and Diddy. “This number #1 is for … the people who won’t be manipulated by the system,” Ye wrote on Instagram at the time.

“The system”—that term is pretty close to what people mean by “the regime.” Ye wasn’t wrong to suggest that important organizations had tried to marginalize him. But if someone booted out of the system can still hit No. 1, what does the system really count for? Maybe this: Even in a culture as fractured as ours has become, people intrinsically sense the existence of a “mainstream,” shaped by widely shared beliefs, norms, and urges. Powerful institutions stay powerful by catering to that consensus. After years of Americans becoming more socially progressive—after a decade in which gay marriage was legalized and Black Lives Matter gained broad-based popularity—it made some sense that, say, diversely cast Marvel movies would be the mainstream and the erratic Hitler-loving rapper would be subcultural.

Perhaps that’s not going to be true for much longer. “You are the media,” Elon Musk told his followers on X after Trump’s reelection, speaking to a platform that, under his watch, has become overrun by white supremacists. Seemingly every other day, a pundit proclaims that Trump is spurring a “cultural revolution.” The president may have been returned to office thanks in part to widespread dissatisfaction with grocery prices, but he was also helped by young people, typically our great trend-drivers, becoming more hostile to social-justice causes. And now here comes Ye, doing that thing you do when you think the masses will buy what you have to sell: film a Super Bowl commercial.

Vestiges of “the system” have, thus far, rebuked Ye’s swastika shirt. Two days after the Super Bowl ad aired, the e-commerce platform Shopify pulled the plug on Ye’s online store, citing a violation of its terms of service in a terse statement. Ye’s talent agency dropped him, and according to his own post on X, a few employees on his Yeezy design team quit. “Maybe one day they will understand why I had to do what I did, and one day they will forgive my method,” Ye wrote on X.

As for that why: In his X posts after the shop was taken down, Ye said he started thinking about selling the T-shirts after seeing the swastika—an ancient symbol used peacefully in Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religions—on clothing in Japan. In his telling, the point is to shock people and show them how free they are to embrace things that society has coded as taboo. That’s also the rationale spread by his defenders. Myron Gaines of the Fresh and Fit podcast, a prominent manosphere outlet, posted that Ye’s “genius” Super Bowl stunt probably got “millions” of fans to buy the shirt—“not because we’re Nazis,” but because Ye was flouting “years of censorship.”

To reiterate: The rapper openly admires Hitler and demonizes Jews. He posted that he made the swastika shirts to show “that I am not under Jewish control anymore.” Gaines wrote that Ye has “revenge to seek for 2 years ago when the jews launched a campaign to cancel him.” So these non-Nazis … just happen to use Nazi imagery while spreading the idea that the Jews are a shadowy cabal that needs to be brought to heel. In late February, Ye posted that he’s no longer a Nazi; a few days ago, he wrote, “Antisemitism is the only path to freedom.”

The absurdity of these antics is so obvious that to expend effort condemning them can feel pointless. I sympathize with the rapper Open Mike Eagle, who posted a video calling Ye’s latest phase a “predictable meltdown nobody has time for.” He noted that Ye’s shock tactics were largely getting drowned out by the drama caused by the Trump administration, and by broader shifts in the attention economy. “Things have changed,” Open Mike Eagle said, addressing Ye. “All the counterculture jive that you used to say, that shit is all mainstream now. There’s just Nazis all over Twitter.”

Ye may well see an opportunity in the fact that what once seemed insane now can seem inane. The institutions that helped us make sense of what’s normal and what’s fringe, what’s upstanding and what’s contemptible, what’s true and what’s false, are weaker than ever. But cultural change never really did happen through the dictates of regimes—it happens through ideas and attitudes moving contagiously, person to person. We absorb how others behave, what they react to and what they don’t react to. Certain people will buy into Ye’s posture of rebelliousness, and maybe even buy his shirt, and maybe even wear it on the street. The rest of us should try clinging to our disgust.

Among the official White House records housed in the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum, in Atlanta, is a photograph of the late president shaking hands with an 80-year-old Black schoolteacher, Septima Poinsette Clark. The photo was taken in February 1979 at a White House ceremony honoring Clark with a “Living Legacy” award, in recognition of her work as a voting-rights educator and civil-rights activist.

I intended to use this photo to illustrate my talk next week at the Carter Library discussing my new book, Spell Freedom, which tells the story of Clark and her work training Black citizens to assert their constitutional rights. The venue seemed to be a perfect match for the theme. But late last month, I found out that I wouldn't be speaking at the Carter Library after all. My publisher informed me that my book event had been canceled, and I subsequently learned from other sources that all programming at the library, which is operated by the National Archives and Records Administration, now needs to be approved by the new administration in Washington.

I was confused. My presentation had been arranged back in the fall and had already gone through NARA’s routine vetting process, usually a pro forma confirmation that affiliated programs are of high quality and based on research using the National Archives’ rich resources. Spell Freedom is my third book of narrative history, and I’ve given numerous presentations at NARA locations before. The event was already up on the Carter Library website. Clearly, the criteria for “approval” had changed.

My little cancellation drama was not unfolding in a vacuum. Just a few weeks into Donald Trump’s second administration, the president fired the archivist of the United States, Colleen Shogan, who was the first woman to lead NARA, and pushed out most of the senior staff. Trump made no secret of his special animosity toward the National Archives, which protects presidential records and had played a role in exposing his improper handling of files from his first presidency.

Trump has also purged the governing board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, and installed himself as board chairman. Speaking of his new side gig, the president promised “no more woke” and “no more anti-American propaganda” on Kennedy Center stages. He also signed executive orders ending all diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities revised their funding guidelines to align more closely with the administration’s ideology.

[Read: America now has a minister of culture]

Sitting at my desk, I tried to channel my suspicion and anger into action. I’m a journalist, so I went to the press. Reporters at The New York Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that other events had been canceled at the Carter library: Joining Spell Freedom on the chopping block were Mike Tidwell’s The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street and Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. Other events went on as scheduled; it seemed obvious that books on race, poverty, and the climate had failed the new administration’s ideological test—though we can’t know for certain, because government officials declined to answer reporters’ questions.

Stifling inconvenient discussions is dangerous business, and it goes far beyond book talks. The Trump administration has flaunted its contempt for many of the country’s cultural, scholarly, scientific, medical, and educational institutions while announcing its intention to defund and destroy them. Investigation and expression on vital topics disfavored by the White House is being squelched. As many writers have already warned, these moves represent a frightening step toward autocratic rule and an erosion of democratic values. The core value that defines NARA, as well as the many libraries under its management, is the notion that the United States is ruled by laws—and that the office of the president matters more than whichever party or person happens to occupy it.

NARA has always been a proudly nonpartisan institution; it holds and protects sacred historical documents, and it is our nation’s collective memory bank. From the Declaration of Independence to the files of the tiniest bureau of the federal government, it’s all there, neatly filed. The presidential libraries chronicle the policies and proclamations of Republican and Democratic presidents alike, providing the essential primary-source material for analyzing their impact on the country and the world.

In recent decades, the archives have been open to all researchers, and therefore to all stripes of historical interpretation. Public programs, including book talks, bring the documents to life, expanding our understanding of the national story and fortifying our collective ownership of our nation’s past—its triumphs and its mistakes. They serve an educational function, which is why it makes sense that they are under attack. Another of the president’s executive orders promotes “patriotic education” in the country’s K–12 schools, threatening to withhold federal funding from those that teach that the United States is “fundamentally racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory.” That cuts out a lot of history.

Under the new administration, the National Endowment for the Arts has declared that its most urgent priority is funding projects that honor the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Our foundational document, held and displayed in the National Archives building on the National Mall, insists that all men are created equal and rails against the tyranny of despots and kings. It is certainly patriotic; it is also revolutionary in every sense of the word. The president is right to recognize its monumental importance, and he should also honor the principles written into it.

[Read: Control. Alt. Delete.]

Septima Clark was dedicated to making her country live up to its democratic ideals, to honor in practice—not just in words or flag pins—the historical principles outlined in the Declaration and the Constitution. A widowed grandmother who stood up to local tyrants, she lost her job and 40 years of pension benefits in 1956 when she refused to renounce her membership in the NAACP, which the southern states had outlawed as “subversive” and “Communist.” She took her teaching talents to the emerging civil-rights movement, developing hundreds of “citizenship schools” across the South that trained tens of thousands of Black citizens to read, write, and reclaim their voting rights. She stared down the Klan, knelt in prayer before a southern sheriff’s tanks, guided the hands of the poor and unlettered so they could hold a pencil and sign their name at the voter-registration office.

In this new culture of cancellations, it seems—though no official will admit it—that this story does not fit into the administration’s definition of “patriotic” narratives of American history. I would argue that the story is absolutely one of fierce patriots—Black citizens who so loved and believed in the promise of the United States, in the constitutional right to vote, in the Declaration’s claim of equality, that they faced down suppression, violent reprisals, economic ruin, imprisonment, and death to participate in their own government and assert their rights as Americans.

I think Clark would have some sharp words for the current administration, with its callous attempts to bend language, art, science, and history to its liking. “I believe unconditionally in the ability of people to respond when they are told the truth,” Clark proclaimed. “We need to be taught to study rather than believe, to inquire rather than to affirm.” This may not fit the current government’s definition of patriotism, but to me, it’s the right spirit in which to honor the history and guard the future of the United States. It’s the kind of patriotism we need right now.