OPINION:
The nation’s largest group of scholars says a taxpayer-funded family museum must include an exhibit that features a sadomasochistic crotch harness, pages from a 6-year-old girl’s diary that depict her yearning to grow a penis, video clips of drag queens and a magazine promoting female masturbation.
The Organization of American Historians also supports exhibits that describe “Mickey Mouse as a vestige of long-standing traditions of blackface minstrelsy,” the ukulele as “a product of U.S. imperialism” and Wild West shows as turning the “subjugation of Indigenous people into theater.”
Those are just a few of the displays at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, and they are depicted in the White House’s report “Saving America’s Story,” released on July Fourth. Naturally, a group of elitist liberal historians is rejecting the White House’s assessment.
The Organization of American Historians blasted the Trump administration for presenting a partisan ideological attack on the Smithsonian. In a statement, it accused the White House of ignoring decades of scholarship and trying to “erase the conflict, struggle and diversity — the complexity — that have always defined the American experience.”
Yet that was not the goal of the 162-page report, which was produced by the White House Domestic Policy Council. It argues that the Smithsonian is largely critical of American history and “no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated.”
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has reframed America’s founding as evil and depicted the worst parts of our nation’s Founders. Christopher Columbus was described as a “murderer,” “slaver” and “thief.” In the Benjamin Franklin exhibit, 20% of the space was devoted to “Enslaved People” and questioned whether Franklin conducted electric shock experiments on slaves, with zero evidence.
According to the Smithsonian, Christian pilgrims were “Colonizers,” and Thanksgiving should really be treated as a “National Day of Mourning.”
Who is worthy of promotion and praise at the American History Museum? Angela Davis, who was accused of aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder in connection with an armed courthouse hostage-taking attempt in Marin County that left four people — including the judge — dead.
Ms. Davis was charged with aggravated kidnapping, first-degree murder and conspiracy and went into hiding, placing her on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in 1970. She is a self-avowed Marxist who ran as vice president on the Communist Party ticket in 1980 and 1984. She called for abolishing police and jails, setting the stage for today’s Democratic Socialists of America, the home of the likes of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Illegal aliens are also portrayed as heroes within the Smithsonian. The report details how the museum’s Center for Restorative History 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.”
The Smithsonian’s featured exhibits largely reflect the viewpoints of its woke leadership.
Its current director, Anthea Hartig, has explained that her job is to “dismantle” the “narrative lockdown that many of us have inherited,” and has defined “History as a practice … is for me a prime tool of social justice.”
Within a week of George Floyd’s death in 2020, the National Museum of American History posted on its website: “The nation was founded on the great paradox of a dynamic form of republican democracy based on the supremacy of white, landed men and the institution of chattel slavery.”
Hardly unifying. Or inspiring. Or central to its mission: to commemorate our heritage of freedom and tell the story of American national progress.
It is hardly surprising that the Organization of American Historians is siding with Ms. Hartig’s version of history. She is one of their progressive peers who believe that America is inherently a flawed country founded by White colonizers. They are offended that the Trump administration has noticed their hostile takeover of the history museum and that it has documented all its progressive propaganda.
The Trump administration is right to point it out and demand more unifying exhibits that highlight American greatness — not ones that are solely from one end of the ideological spectrum. The federal government funds 62% of the Smithsonian’s budget, and the Smithsonian Board of Regents includes members of Congress, the vice president of the United States, the chief justice of the Supreme Court and nine citizens.
“The bottom line is that there’s no national story at the National Museum of American History,” White House Domestic Policy Council Director Vince Haley told Fox News. “That’s what has happened under the ideology that reigned supreme over there.”
Kudos to the Trump administration for exposing it.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at the Washington Times.
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