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Oprah really knew how to capture an audience.  Way back on December 22, 2010, her spell may have reached its zenith when she shouted out to her live audience, “you get a car, and you get a car!  Everyone gets a car!”

Just about a decade later our president channeled that giving feeling as well.  President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan(ARP), a coronavirus relief package, in the Oval Office of the White House on March 11, 2021, in Washington.

It was a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package passed without one “yea” vote from the stingy Republicans.  The Democrats, fresh off of a Capitol and Oval Office sweep felt compelled to give back.

Not everyone in America got a car to help beat that pesky virus.  But, some institutions and good citizens got more, way more, after having to shove a Q-Tip halfway to some remote island.

Take the Oral History Association for example.  They received $825,000 in ARP funds for a grant-making project titled, “Diversifying Oral History Practice: A Fellowship Program for Under/Unemployed Oral Historians,” which provided eleven year-long fellowships of $60,000 each for oral historians “from communities that have been historically marginalized in the field,” such as “Indigenous peoples, people of color, people with disabilities, and working-class people.”

Are you wondering what exactly is an Oral Historian?  Let Google be your friend.  Oral historians document the past by preserving insights not found in printed sources. The skilled practitioner must remain impartial, listen, and stay in the background.  Got it?

One of the recipients of the 60k giveaway was Elizabeth “Beth” Castle, a “Shawnee-ancestored anti-racist educator.”  This inspired her to create “A Collaborative Oral History of the Fight Against Mineral and Uranium Mining in the Black Hills, the Origins of the Global Indigenous Movement, and the Ongoing Struggle to Protect the People who Protect Mother Earth.”

We kid you not.

Want another? And, another?

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) received $135 million from the plan and proceeded to hand out half of the handout.  The NEH awarded $50,000 in ARP funds to a nonprofit organization in the Northern Mariana Islands called 500 Sails for “reopening programs that teach Indigenous canoe-building and explore pre-colonial sea life.”

The NEH also helped the Science History Institute in Philadelphia.  They were awarded $359,097 by the NEH to create a “multiplatform project exploring the historical roots and persistent legacies of racism in American science and medicine.”

As inflation hit 8.6% in May some economists, including former Obama administration economic advisers, have blamed the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package for overheating the economy.

President Biden didn’t feel that way when he signed the bill.

“We need Congress to pass my American Rescue Plan,” the president said at the time. “Now, critics say my plan is too big, that it costs $1.9 trillion. So that’s too much. Well, let me ask them: What would they have me cut?  What would they have me leave out?”

Where are the Northern Mariana Islands anyway?

Here is a hint.

Five dollars per gallon of gas and a free car from Oprah can’t get you there.

And, the freebies should have been electric vehicles.