There’s a Secret Message Hidden in the White House Arts Committee’s Resignation Letter

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The letter is clear. The coded message in it, even clearer.

Eileen Kinsella, August 18, 2017

The open letter to President Trump from the resigning members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, with our attempt to decode its very subtle message.

The members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities weren’t the first high-profile figures to distance themselves from Trump over his comments on Charlottesville. This morning’s fiery letter denouncing his comments from the 16 prominent artists, authors, performers and architects comes, after all, in the wake of the mass resignation of a slew of CEOs advising the President.

But leave it to the artists to do it with an extra dash of style.

Actor and activist Kal Penn’s Tweet sharing the letter has already been re-tweeted more than 25,000 times. The missive doesn’t mince words:

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.

But some savvy observers have spotted another message in the letter (we first saw Hunter College art history professor Michael Lobel notice it.) If you read just the first letter of each paragraph, there’s a little something extra in there.

Here’s our marked up version of the letter, to make it plain: