Besmirching American History on our Dime
After 13 days of bombing Iran, on Friday we took a break. If we were dealing with rational opponents, the war in Iran would be over now, but we are dealing with fanatics and a situation where the monsters are fighting each other, and no one seems sufficiently in charge to enter into a meaningful surrender.
In the meantime, we can turn to domestic matters, and to my mind, the situation at the Smithsonian Museum warrants our attention. It seems that we are paying super-woke people to denigrate our history and culture, and because of the way in which the governance of this important institution is set up, there’s little power for the White House to quickly change it.
This month, the White House issued a 165-page report on the Smithsonian which sets out in detail its failure to fulfill its mission of providing historical education and scholarship.
The National Museum of American History, whose director is Anthea Hartig, draws considerable attention for turning the museum into a tool of “extreme political activism.” She has
explicitly stated that she sees history as a “prime tool of social justice” and one of her roles as connecting “research and scholarship to activism and advocacy.” Hartig has also stated that “we work to reframe the traditional celebratory narrative of U.S. history for visitors.” She claims to have had a personal head start “propped up as I was and I am by the cushions of whiteness and the pillows of the bourgeoisie.”
Hartig believes the museum profession has “to figure out” how “we’re going to” “problematize” the “250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026,” that “loving America is very complicated,” and that objects in the Museum’s collection should be used to move attention away from an “Anglo-centric” focus on the American Founding.
The report details
the Museum purposely presents America as a problematic country irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression. In the Museum’s current telling, the country is, above all, defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and systemic injustice.
The report identifies a broad pattern: the Founders are minimized, if not entirely excluded; traditional patriotic narratives are treated with suspicion, if not outright contempt; and the basic symbols and stories that once helped unify Americans are presented not as reasons for gratitude and inspiration, but as objects to be inherently questioned, dismantled, “problematized,” and reinterpreted to achieve ideological ends. To the extent that there is a story told at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, it is not one of “the victory of freedom and genius of our country” but one of regret, tragedy, and shame.
It seems that we are paying super-woke people to denigrate our history and culture, and because of the way in which the governance of this important institution is set up, there’s little power for the White House to quickly change it.
Staff of the Museum are directed, no matter the display topic, to focus on 
“race/identity, gender/sexuality, climate change, immigration/migrations, economic inequality, technological change, nationalism/globalism,” which Director Hartig views as the “core issues of our time.”
Making the shocking propagandizing more immediate than the written report might, Director Hartig was questioned by Congressman Brandon Gill about some specific actions taken by the Museum and received replies that were arrogant, smug, and unresponsive. Here’s an example noted in the report and emphasized in the hearing -- the Smithsonian “Social Action Tool Kit.”
The kit lists, inter alia, the following “aspects and assumptions of white culture,” implying that these must be changed: believing hard work is a key to success, using objective, linear thinking, seeing cause and effect relationships, children having their own rooms and being encouraged to be independent, viewing the nuclear family as the ideal social unit, and using “The King’s English.” Among my favorite parts of the Gill interrogation was his confronting Hartig with her statement that we “all have implicit biases’ and asking what hers were. (Don’t hold your breath expecting an honest response to that. It never came.)
How far and how bizarrely the Smithsonian went to distort the historical record was made clear by Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzales, who pointed to a multiyear special exhibit “The Electric Dr. Franklin” that “pondered whether he had ever done experiments, electrical, electric shock on indentured servants or slaves.”
The President has ordered signs placed on National Park Service land around the Museum stating that exhibits must be redone to comply with the report and directing visitors to resources for accurate information on American history.
The Smithsonian is unusual -- it’s not under the executive branch, but instead is run pursuant to a “Trust Instrumentality” which Congress created. Under this trust, there’s a 17-member Board of Regents. (At present there are 15 because two of the member slots are vacant.) Chancellor of the Trust is the Chief Justice. Also on the Board are the Vice President, three senators (John Boozman, Catherine Cortez Masto, and Gary Peters), and three congressmen (Carlos Gimenez, Doris Matsui, and Adrian Smith). The remaining members are citizen regents, two of whom must always be District of Columbia residents. The secretary of the Smithsonian is Lonnie G. Bunch III, and with oversight by the board, he is in charge of personnel.
Like the governance of so many charitable and educational institutions, the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents apparently view their position as honorary ones, requiring no real work on their part to preserve the missions of the institutions they are supposed to serve, which leaves the field clear for the most outrageous leftist staff. Congress can, if it chooses, set some limits on Smithsonian appropriations, and the Administration can work with Congress to fill vacancies on the Board with workers, being more mindful in the future of new appointees who will be more than cardboard trustees, but short of that, Ms. Hartig can, with our funds and Bunch and the Regent’s imprimatur, continue distorting American history and culture.
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