Time to clean house: The Smithsonian has betrayed the people

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EXCLUSIVE — Just before fireworks on the Fourth of July, the White House unloaded a devastating report on the Smithsonian Institution, detailing how the nation’s museum complex denigrates the country and its heritage.

The report, 129 pages long and buttressed by 522 footnotes, painstakingly demonstrates how the Smithsonian’s leaders have commandeered an institution entrusted to them to effect cultural transmission and perversely turned it into its opposite: a hothouse for anti-American activism.

We can begin to understand why we have politicians like Zohran Mamdani, Darializa Chevalier, and Melat Kiros. It’s not that our institutions failed to teach them and their voters to love America — they taught them to loathe America.

Though the report by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council focuses on the National Museum of American History and its director of the past seven years, Anthea Hartig, it obviously aims much higher. It amounts to a full-range indictment of the entire 21-museum complex and its leadership, starting at the top with Secretary Lonnie Bunch III.

Having read the report, it’s hard to see how the Board of Regents, which governs the Smithsonian Institution and appoints its leader; Congress, which votes $1.08 billion a year to keep it running; or the American people, the intended targets of the indoctrination but also the ultimate paymasters, continue to put up with Bunch, Hartig, and the rest. No self-respecting people would rationally pay for their own cultural erasure.

In fact, to make sure that the board — which includes Vice President J.D. Vance, U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, several members of Congress, and other citizens — does the right thing, Congress should immediately call for hearings and set up investigations.

The report lets the museum and its leadership do the talking. The NMAH’s didactics and wall texts, and Hartig herself, lay out for all to see what the Smithsonian’s new mission is.

The report also includes graphic photos of sexually explicit exhibits that are accessible to children, not just of drag queens and naked bodies, but of bondage wear and kink gear, visuals that could easily scar young minds.

The opposite of all this was promised to the American people when Smithsonian leadership came to Congress in the 1950s and 1960s to plead for the creation of the NMAH.

According to a 1953 brochure, the United States should create the new museum because it would “place before millions who visit the Nation’s Capital each year a stimulating permanent exposition that commemorates our heritage of freedom.”

Remington Kellogg, director of the U.S. National Museum, said at the MMAH’s opening in 1964 that it was intended to awaken “a clear understanding of the inspiring story of the United States — its origins, struggles, development, traditions, strength.” President Johnson himself promised at the opening ceremony that the museum would “foster patriotism.”

Hartig, who pathetically acknowledges “the privilege and dominance of my whiteness,” sees in history not a faithful recounting of the past, but a “prime tool of social justice” to expiate such unearned advantages. This should obviously be very worrisome for someone who heads our national history museum, but she is explicit about seeing her role as a way to connect “research and scholarship to activism and advocacy.”

Unlike Johnson and Kellogg before her, Hartig wants to “get out of the America First mentality” when telling history and move away from what she calls the “Anglo-centric” focus on the American Founding.

This is where the argument collapses under its own weight. The ancestors of all the Founders hailed from the British Isles. Not just that, they were primarily of English stock, and all but one — Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration and the grandson of an Irish settler in Maryland — were Protestants.

The Founding, thus, was pretty “Anglo-centric,” an immutable fact that Hartig and others can’t alter. Perhaps this is why she says that “loving America is very complicated.” Things like the Founding stubbornly won’t fit into her diversity knapsack.

So no wonder that Hartig actually removed “American history” from the NMAH’s mission statement. It is now “empowering people to create a just and compassionate future by exploring, preserving, and sharing the complexity of our past.”

In short, our national history museum is no longer at all about history at all, but about changing America’s future by distorting its past. That may explain why, as the report says, “a visitor to the Museum today will find no major exhibit dedicated to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, the Continental Congress, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, or major moments of the American Revolution, such as Washington’s crossing of the Delaware.”

You think the Mayflower is important to the story of America? Well, the NMAH has nothing on it. Instead, it has an exhibit called Upending 1620, the year of the Mayflower’s arrival, which “explicitly reframes the Christian Pilgrims as colonizers, not ‘founders of the U.S. nation’,” and reframes Thanksgiving as a “National Day of Mourning.”

When the Founders do make a cameo at the NMAH, it is more often to tell their sins. The report explains that “visitors will find Founders, such as Benjamin Franklin, introduced chiefly through their connection to slavery, while their decisive roles in building the Republic and their anti-slavery efforts are minimized or ignored.”

The NMAH’s indictment of Franklin borders on the criminal. A wall didactic on an exhibit about him notes that his scientific accomplishments were “enabled by slavery.” Visitors have to wait until the last paragraph to learn that “Franklin became president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1787.”

All these mental tics and animus have meant that Hartig and her brethren atop the museum leadership unconsciously wasted a great opportunity for the museums to play their role in celebrating the nation’s semi-quincentennial.

On the contrary, Hartig had planned to “problematize” the “250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.” But with the Trump administration warning that America would only pay for so much America-trashing, the leadership apparently decided to drop the problematic exhibits that were planned.

That explains why the New York Times’s Robin Pogrebin reported in late May that all but one of the “Smithsonian plans for the 250th have fallen by the wayside.” That included an exhibition titled “Many Americas, Many 1776s.” We won’t see it now, but we can guess what it might have portended.

The yearning to retrofit history to serve a woke museum leadership’s mission to change America from within reaches its apotheosis in the NMAH’s Center for Restorative History, which, of course, exists to “encourage systemic change.”

Having such a center at the NMAH in the first place is troubling enough. The term “restorative” — like “problematizing,” “centering,” “interrogate,” etc. — is part of the language of critical race theory, and connotes that past harms require restorative practices, if not actual reparations.

And, indeed, the NMAH will tell you that it created the center to help craft the necessary revisionism. It was set up, it says, for the purpose of “transforming the national historical narrative, restructuring institutional priorities, and privileging knowledge production in the communities that have been silenced or overlooked by museums and other educational institutions.”

Is this really what we get for over $1 billion a year? Should the American people be required to pour their hard-earned tax dollars into an endeavor that purposely erases their culture, their history, their identity, and their nationhood, sacrificing it all on the altar of woke fantasies?

The report is a wake-up call to Congress and to the more sober-minded members of the Board of Regents. Clean house.