The Smithsonian Institution is at the center of yet another controversy over leadership using the publicly funded museum complex to promote leftist ideological assumptions on power, race, sex, “gender,” and American history.
Last week, leftist Smithsonian Director Anthea Hartig was in the flaming hot seat in a congressional hearing on “Rewriting American History: Examining the Smithsonian’s Efforts to Reshape the Past.” The U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee that held this hearing was motivated by an alarming 162-page White House report titled “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage.”
The report reveals that under Hartig’s direction which began in 2019, the Smithsonian created a wildly distorted lens through which Americans and visitors will come to see the United States as “defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and systemic injustice.”
The biased Hartig and her minions reimagined American history in ways that would put a twinkle in the eyes of Howard Zinn, Ibram X. Kendi, and Nikole Hannah-Jones. According to the report,
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 … it is not one of “the victory of freedom and genius of our country” but one of regret, tragedy, and shame.
One particularly troubling criticism concerns America’s 250th anniversary. The report criticizes the Smithsonian for “Failing to dedicate a single (new or current) exhibit on display at the [National Museum of American History] to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, other Founders, or pivotal events of the American Revolution, including Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, during the 250th anniversary of these events.”
The same leftist tripe to which students from kindergarten on up through college have been exposed for years pervades museum exhibits. Visitors will find the the same jargon that began in the academy and insidiously slithered down into even elementary schools.
The evidence provided in the report is staggering and make Hartig’s claim that the “museum does not take sides in America’s political debates” ludicrous.
The “key findings” in the report include the following:
- “the Museum has shifted from scholarship to activism, pointing to Museum leadership’s own public statements … calling for American history to be ‘reframed,’ and describing museum work in terms of ‘reparations,’ ‘restorative history,’ ‘systemic intervention,’ “decolonization,’ and ‘social justice.’”
- “the Museum’s Interpretive Plan directs staff to, ‘whatever the topic,’ tie exhibits back to a set of seven ‘core issues of our time’—specifically, race/identity, gender/sexuality, climate change, immigration/migrations, economic inequality, technological change, and nationalism/globalism.”
- “the Museum’s Center for Restorative History cast illegal alien political activism in heroic terms, partnered with and interviewed deported illegal aliens, and designed official materials that included signs advocating for the abolition of the ‘287g’ program, which allows local law enforcement to partner with federal law enforcement to identify and deport criminal illegal aliens.”
- “Museum exhibits and educational materials present gender as fluid, treat biological males as girls or women, and fold contemporary advocacy for transgenderism into the Museum’s treatment of female childhood development, women’s history, and women’s sports.”
In the “Girlhood: It’s Complicated” exhibit that ran from 2020-2023, “Jazz Jennings,” birth name Jaron Bloshinsky, a man who pretends to be a woman was featured. So too was the chest binder of Lacey/ “Leo” Baker, a female skateboarder who began pretending to be a man about ten months before the Smithsonian Girlhood exhibit opened. So, “Jazz Jennings,” a man, was included because he pretends to be a woman, and “Leo” Baker was included despite pretending to be a man.
But the museum doesn’t take sides in America’s political debates.
This isn’t the Smithsonian’s first controversy. In 2020, the public got wind of a chart displayed in the museum that identified these hallmarks of “whiteness”:
- objective, rational, linear thinking
- self-reliance
- planning for the future
- working before playing
- belief that hard work is the key to success
- respect for authority
- planning for the future
- delaying gratification
- belief that the nuclear family with mom, dad, and kids is the ideal social unit
The museum caught such heat for that chart that it was compelled to issue what should be clear by now was a phony public apology.
The entire budget of the Smithsonian is approximately $1.75 billion, about 65 percent of which comes from taxpayer pockets. In fiscal year 2026, Americans funded the Smithsonian to the discordant tune of $1,080,500,000. What did Americans get for this eye-popping sum? They got a poke in the eye with a sharp stick by leftists—leftists like Hartig who said, “Our work is governed by the Smithsonian standards of … nonpartisanship.”
Lest any leftist again falsely accuse conservatives of trying to falsify history, here is what the report asserts the Smithsonian should teach about American history:
It should tell the whole story of a nation, including the good and the bad, so Museum visitors can understand the development that led our nation to where it is today. In doing so, it should tell a story of a people driven to overcome injustice and live up to its promise—a story of imperfection but also extraordinary accomplishment, of tragedies but also great triumphs, and hardship but 11 also noble heroism. In short, it should focus on “Americanism—the people, principles, and progress that define our nation.” It should tell the story of how the colonies inherited slavery from both global and European slaving practices, but also how the words, actions, and ideas of America’s Founders helped spark a worldwide movement that ultimately ended slavery. It should tell the story of how at least eight American colonies passed or attempted to pass laws to either tax or severely limit the importation of slaves before the Revolutionary War, only to be forced by the British Crown to continue it. It should tell the story of how 750,000 Americans died in the Civil War. It should tell the story of how Americans came to reject Jim Crow and segregation, backing a colorblind standard derived from America’s founding documents. In short, it should tell the story of the birth of America and how the United States, because of the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and upheld in the Constitution, has done more to advance and secure fundamental rights than any other nation in the world.
Instead of teaching “America’s story honestly and in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic,” the Smithsonian under Hartig has used the tax dollars of hard-working Americans to distort the presentation of American history in ways that erode pride in and love for this peerless country. Not even the Chinese Communists could have devised a more nefarious plan to undermine American patriotism.
Perhaps what the Smithsonian needs now is an exhibit detailing the subversive propaganda of DEI and CRT ideologues who appropriated the money of We the People and used it as a weapon against American principles, the American story, and Americans who love America. Anthea Hartig, who says, “as we all know … loving America is very complicated,” should feature prominently in that story of betrayal.