Every Day’s a Full Moon at the Smithsonian’s American History Museum

Virtue-signaling, mediocrity, and woke ideology lay the Smithsonian low and make a thorough head-rolling essential.

T he Domestic Policy Council has just published its audit of the woke poison at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History: Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage. It’s a doozy of an exposé — 162 pages and 522 footnotes — that reveals the museum’s director and key staff she’s appointed as lunatics. Full-moon howlers. The History Museum’s problem, the report tells us, isn’t that it’s “added overlooked stories, corrected perceived errors, or broadened its historical scope.” All that is fine. But we learn that the museum — from its perch on the National Mall, with 2.1 million visitors in 2024, and 60 percent of its budget from the taxpayers — has gone out of its way to define the country by “white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and systemic injustice.” Lovely.

The report points to the need for an overdue Augean Stable deep clean, starting with the regents — the Smithsonian’s trustees — and Lonnie Bunch, the Smithsonian’s head, along with his senior staff and Anthea Hartig, the director of the History Museum. Hartig fits snugly in the movement among American historians to drain the heroics and virtue from the country’s founding, to “problematize” it, as the lingo puts it, and to rewrite it along the same lines as the 1619 Project: America as a white supremacist, slavery-based proposition.

Hartig is a museum bureaucrat and a mediocrity who’s hung her hat on bubblegum woke ideology since she can’t do it on scholarship. She hasn’t produced much. So what do we get? You’re either oppressed or an oppressor. Race explains everything. The United States didn’t start as a political, ideological, and ethical project in 1776 with the Declaration, or in 1620 with the Mayflower, but in 1619, when the first slaves came to Virginia. The grifter, race pimp, and fake redhead Nikole Hannah-Jones might have assembled the 1619 Project and written most of it, but she’s a black studies academic. Inserting it into our museums and classrooms was the work of the New York Times and the Smithsonian, which sponsored the book version. Hartig was among the engineers, builders, and administrators, one of many at the Smithsonian.

We’ll start with the big lie. The current mission of the museum is “empowering people to create a more just and compassionate future.” I’m a historian — an art historian inclined to American studies — and never saw my work or interests leading to “a more just and compassionate future.” I’m an art historian mostly because I love art. I love history because I’m curious about people and how the country and I, two different propositions, got to where we are. I love history for its entertaining, riveting, and sobering stories. Its propensity to warn is priceless. “Don’t be stupid” is history’s clarion call to us today.

At today’s Smithsonian, history is a call to arms. “Did you get into the museum business in order to be an agent of social change?,” the Smithsonian’s undersecretary asked Deborah Mack, the system’s Reckoning with Our Racial Past chief in 2021. “Actually, absolutely,” she said, with a flapper’s glee. She pledged to enlist the entire staff, working in “ways that reinforce their activism, their sense of equity, their sense of social justice.” Hartig agreed, saying that’s why she came to the Smithsonian. She wants to get “out of the ‘America First mentality’ when telling history.” Does she ever listen to herself? She’s the director of the American history museum.

“The fundamental needs of a democratic and civilized society are domestic peace and social justice,” she said. No justice, no peace. Isn’t that Mangione’s line?

I hate agenda directors and agenda curators like Hartig. With Hartig’s push, the museum has embraced illegal immigrants as heirs to slaves and pre-suffrage, pre-feminism women. It’s worked closely with illegal-immigrant groups, especially the DACA cohort. The museum also aims to develop what she calls a “pan-institutional effort” at the Smithsonian to reframe American history through the lens of migration, legal but mostly illegal.

Smithsonian education materials — mostly lesson plans — and publications push “a more accurate and inclusive migration and immigration narrative.” Teachers of hundreds of thousands of kids have gotten these materials promoting the notion that citizenship for illegals is a right and that we should eliminate immigration and customs enforcement. The museum’s mid-level staff connive — and connive a lot — with groups promoting illegal immigration. That’s not history.

The report cites spots, aside from the 1619 Project’s contortions and myths, where America’s Founders get the predictable trashing. Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin owned slaves. Franklin might have used his slaves and his indentured servants for electrical experiments, the museum told us, “while admitting there’s no evidence” that he did. That’s what passes as scholarship at the History Museum. The Pilgrims were, to use Hamas Speak, settler colonialists. Columbus, said Kevin Gover, the Smithsonian’s No. 2 administrator and past director of the American Indian Museum, was a slaver, murderer, and thief. The History Museum agrees. If Columbus lived in 1942 instead of 1492, he’d be a Nazi. I made that one up.

The report faults the History Museum for not profiling our forebears’ immense positives. Columbus was a visionary, adventurer, and explorer. Washington was the indispensable man. Franklin was the age’s premier polymath. Jefferson was our premier dreamer politician. These men are giants. They teach us what great leaders can achieve. There’s very little Lincoln in the Museum, either. That these aspects are not writ large and proud is a massive curatorial and factual failure. It’s a failure in storytelling, too. Humanity is turned into stick figures, totems for good and evil. They make history boring.

When asked last year what her favorite objects in the museum collection were — what most inspired her on the eve of America’s 250th — Hartig cited costumes worn in The Handmaid’s Tale, a cane belonging to the Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture, and Billie Jean King’s tennis outfit (because, Hartig said in a lecture, she was a “social justice pioneer” who defeated “outspoken chauvinist” Bobby Riggs in “the battle of the sexes” tennis match). Oh, and a pair of hand-painted, supersized monarch butterfly wings, the logo of the “Dreamers.” Crazy and performative, angry-liberal-white-woman stuff.

Hartig’s education director, Orlando Serrano, supports reparations and repatriation of land to Native tribes, what’s called the “reMaorification” of America. Together with Hartig, they’ve developed a Center for Restorative History to address “harms.” “Harm” is the new pop word for grudge ’n’ grievance, for leaving visitors feeling depressed and angry. They both love land acknowledgements but want to actually put teeth in them through givebacks, of land or federal money. They want to expand the history of the United States so it includes the entire hemisphere. This outfit aims at “a full-scale re-ordering of the world.” I wouldn’t want this woman babysitting my child. Why would I want her reordering the world? At Hartig’s museum, the Marxist feminist Angela Davis gets the spotlight, with a quote by her highlighted in an exhibit about women’s “invisible labor”: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world.”

These Smithsonian staff are in the wrong line of work. If transforming the world is their cup of tea, they should get a job at the Ford, Mellon, or Open Society Foundations. Or run for office. Or go on The View. Then they can feel warm and fuzzy, virtuous and important, fight the good fight, and sing “We Shall Overcome” or “99 Luftballons” at the top of their lungs.

The report also describes a 200-page primer called “Museums as a Site for Social Action Toolkit,” written by Smithsonian insiders past and present as a recipe for purging “dominant Western ideals of race, class, and gender,” and — there they go again — “white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, abuse of labor, colonization, imperialist theft of art and artifacts, . . . structural racism, and other oppressions.” It was must-reading at the History Museum in the early 2020s. That’s Hartig’s mission. In 2020, something similar got yanked out of the teacher lesson plans published by the Smithsonian’s African American History and Culture Museum. Protestant work ethic? Bad. Scientific method, meaning objective, rational thinking? Very white of you. Grammar? Patriarchy, patriarchy, five-alarm fire! And on and on.

It’s part of Bunch’s and Hardig’s 1619 Project agenda. When the Smithsonian-backed book version was published, Bunch called it “a great victory” and wanted to ensure that everyone “saw the Smithsonian’s fingerprints on it.” He should be fired for this alone.

Hartig has also injected gender ideology into the museum, tossing what she calls “who gets to be a girl” into the mix of museum topics. In one exhibition, there’s a PC glossary. “It’s best to ask people who are gender-fluid what their pronouns are,” her glossary advises. A child may feel likes a girl one day and a boy another day. I’d say, “Skip the pronouns, do 50 push-ups, and put away your toys.” And why in the world would the museum display the spandex chest binder that trans nonbinary skateboarder Leo (Lacey) Baker, a woman, wears to make herself look like a man? And why so many girl-power exhibitions? How about boys? So many seem to be lost.

Hartig is so full of herself that she doesn’t understand she represents the museum. Don’t these nuts understand that they work for the government, get their money from Congress, aren’t free riders, and need to show some circumspection? They’re not pushing “unvarnished history,” as Bunch claims. They’re pushing anti-human, anti-history trash.

The report is damning and astonishing. Stealth quotas; conferences led by left-wing hacks; a best-bud relationship with the odious Southern Poverty Law Center; pushing abortion on demand and the notion that Thanksgiving should be a National Day of Mourning; Covid and racism presented as America’s “twin pandemics,” and turn on the waterworks for these. There’s a dumb squiggle for a logo and 400 DEI initiatives proudly touted in 2023. The ukulele is racist. Mickey Mouse is a black minstrel in disguise.

Worst of all, the report finds, is Hartig’s horrifying edict that every exhibition must be linked to one of seven themes or it won’t get her green light. Race and identity top this list. Then there’s gender and sexuality. “Environmental change,” which means advancing the climate hoax, and immigration, the more illegal, the better. “Inequality,” technological change, and nationalism, and that’s it. If you do a D-Day show, you’d better have a trans angle. Display Julia Child’s kitchen? Her gas stove might bake the flakiest croissants, but it melts the glaciers, too. A show on Christmas displays? Nazi and Christian-nationalist propaganda. Patent models, an exhibition I enjoyed? Racist. Celebrates imagination, science, and initiative. White to a fault. They’ve done Phyllis Diller, but how about Joan Rivers or Carol Burnett’s comedy? Rivers was Jewish and automatically an oppressor. Burnett? Racist. “Miss Ellen’s poitiers,” need I say more?

The Smithsonian’s too important to abandon. I hope Trump and Congress can put this particular left-wing march through our institutions in reverse gear. The time is now or never.