Race Rage, Climate Craziness, and Sex-Change Silliness at the Smithsonian

At its American History Museum, anger’s in, real history’s out, and heads need to roll.

T he Smithsonian is still in the news, and, it seems, it’s the Swamp’s most soigné snake. Its American History Museum delivers us the mother of all mission changes, moving as it has from the study of the past to social justice warfare. I’d rather write about art history, but I’m fighting the good fight on behalf of quality and — when it comes to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History — good, useful history. Art historians are indeed historians. We just get to use slides in our lectures and look at art in addition to dusty tomes.

I watched the congressional-committee testimony of Anthea Hartig, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The Domestic Policy Council at the White House prepared a long, detailed report, titled Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage. It chronicles the museum’s own mission gallop away from history and toward advocacy of open borders, sex changes for kids, oppressor ideology, and Hartig’s “I’m high on DEI” back-of-house administration. She’s obsessed with white supremacy and white privilege. In tone, she resembles Christine Blasey Ford more than a little.

Agenda directors like Hartig are to be deplored. She finds value only in her narrow range of interests, so all roads must lead there. She’s formulaic and blinkered. In curators and art-museum directors, I’ve seen it. Looking at her résumé, I think she’s a mediocrity as a historian as well but wants to feel needed, important, and hip. Don’t mistake her as a go-with-the-flow type. She’s a true believer marching through the institution. She calls history “a prime tool for social justice” and frankly mixes “research and scholarship with advocacy and activism.”

She’s said these things over and over in dozens of different ways. In her testimony, Hartig pretended for a few seconds that she’d never heard of the Smithsonian-based, insane toolkit for dismantling systemic racism. It’s called the Museum As a Site for Social Action Toolkit, or MASS Action. “We didn’t develop it. . . . It’s not our toolkit,” she said, adding, “We did not come up with it.” But of course they use it. The White House report is piled high with evidence, including the factual statement that the MASS toolkit “was co-authored by half a dozen current/former Smithsonian employees.”

Hartig has so little self-awareness that she doesn’t realize how many lines her museum has crossed. History is stepping into the past, not a ladder to Hartig’s version of utopia. Lonnie Bunch, the Smithsonian’s top banana, claims that the museum’s goal is to present history and all its warts. But pushing open borders is a far cry from that. It’s hijacking the museum to dive into topics that are very much in flux and contested. Nothing wrong with left-wing politics, aside from all the false values. It’s a free country. What’s wrong is putting your thumb on the scale when you run an institution. Good historians don’t do that. Take what they’re saying and negate it to see what they mean. Their ideal isn’t American history, “warts and all,” as Hartig claimed. It’s all warts and no history. They’re into politics and selling an agenda.

I do read the New York Times every day, many stories from start to finish. But I skim many, while mentally placing “no,” “not,” “none,” and “never” before every appropriate noun, adjective, adverb, and verb to get a sense of what really happened. Last week, I read a strawman argument on the Smithsonian and politics by, of all people, Kim Sajet, canned last year as the director of the National Portrait Gallery, another Smithsonian museum that’s too woke for words. “The overarching thing we want to ask ourselves is,” she said — leaving me not exactly at the edge of my seat, since I think she was a lousy director — “do we want politicians deciding how history’s taught and understood.”

It’s a fake argument on so many levels. It’s egotistical, since the Smithsonian is far from the only place to get American history. Some who go there might incorrectly think it’s official history, which we, unlike, say, North Korea or the old Soviet Union or dozens of other despotisms, don’t have. American history writ large comes from thousands of historians, tens of thousands of teachers, and the amorphous but very real civic culture. Good history takes years to cook. When it comes to things like the Covid mass hysteria/hypnosis/hallucination, many are still in the denial-and-obfuscation stage. The truth is coming out, bit by bit and, last week, in one gusher from Fauci’s diary. In addition to a liar, sleaze, and quack, he’s his own biggest fan boy.

Our history is constantly tweaked and often unsettled. How did the Great Depression start? That’s still unsettled. We know we won World War II, but how? Did Hillary Clinton shoot Vince Foster? Of course she did, but that’s my opinion. I’d never argue for it in a history exhibition. This flux, from new evidence and new thinking, keeps historians in business. The term “marketplace of ideas” is a cliché, but it fits my point. As players confess and scholars write, we get as close to the truth as we can, but do people at the Smithsonian even believe in truth?

Sajet had a defective curatorial vision in part because, like Hartig, she had an agenda that revolved mostly around white supremacy and women’s issues. I’ve reviewed close to a dozen NPG shows over the years, since I like the museum and thought some of them were very good; some were same old, same old; a couple were wretched. Some of the galleries look awful. Sajet is Dutch, via Australia, and she lacks an intuitive feel for American art. I don’t know why the very nice Milwaukee Art Museum hired her as its new director, but there she is. Poor Milwaukee.

Sajet, Hartig, and Bunch are deep into politics. They’re creatures of Washington, first of all. The Smithsonian is also part of the federal government. People working there are federal employees. It gets most of its money from politicians in Congress. Its regents — the trustees — are appointed by Congress and the president. About a third of the regents are elected politicians. Public education, including history classes, is funded in all 50 states by elected legislatures, school boards, mayors, and, of course, voters.

Let’s use some common sense, my friends at the Smithsonian. Coming from your funders or the general public, “I don’t like what you’re doing” is legitimate feedback. “It’s none of your business” and “let us experts decide” never was an acceptable response, and it certainly doesn’t fly anymore. You display a trans chest binder; adulate Fauci, a hideous human being; make a centerpiece of artsy butterfly wings that are meant to symbolize illegal immigration; celebrate Angela Davis, another atrocity; and on and on and on? You’ll infuriate people. It’s an abuse of power and undermines the institution. And it’s fake history.

On Hartig’s orders, all exhibitions must address or implicate at least one of a series of issues: race or gender, which mean oppression; the environment, which means the climate hoax; immigration, which means open borders; inequality; “technological change,” whatever that means; nationalism, bad when it’s American; or globalism, better make it the Davos line. How boring. Grinding axes does not good music make. Don’t they know how to do anything else?

“Have you been experimenting with your identity in video games?,” one show at the history museum asks. That’s a title of a Cosmo story, not a question about understanding the past. “Ten Dreamers You Should Know.” “Your Authenticity Is Your Superpower.” “Girlhood — It’s Complicated.” “I Was a Boy When I Was Supposed to Be a Girl.” On and on it goes. It’s not history. It’s Teen Vogue. Hartig doesn’t know the difference, and neither do the people she’s hired.

The past doesn’t become scholarly history the second the clock strikes midnight, another thing the museum doesn’t seem to understand. “What really happened?” “What was the president thinking?” “Who failed, who succeeded?” These all take time to answer. “Follow the money” usually leads to a labyrinth. What Hartig, Bunch, and others at the Smithsonian want is an official history, but they want only theirs, and they want theirs to be everyone’s. They want everyone else to take their cue.

Blasey Ford dwelled in her moment of fame right in the middle of the intersection of acting, lying, fantasy, and malice. Toss in twisted patriotism. Washington has crazy five-way intersections, right? She and Hartig and the rest of their ilk hate Trump. Objectivity means putting him aside. He’ll be gone in two years.

The history museum’s upcoming exhibition is First Do No Harm/Lo primero es no hacer daño. It’s about the American medical system. “While the science of healing has never been more powerful,” the exhibition description reads, “many people remain excluded from its benefits.” Can we expect history, or more of the Squad’s talking points? And why the Spanish? Like Fauci, for now, the Smithsonian will take the Fifth.

The Smithsonian has caught the woke virus. Treatment? Let the heads roll. Hey, I’m a doctor. I know, it’s an art history Ph.D., and don’t ask me to do a tracheotomy, but here my cure’s spot on.

I’m appalled to see the museum has nothing planned for the 25th anniversary of 9/11. They did first- and tenth-anniversary exhibitions but skipped the 20th anniversary, which I covered in a review of the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York. Why not this year? I can tell you. Many at the museum believe some version of “We deserved it.” Most recoil at noting that 9/11 was a Muslim enterprise, and not because they fear charges of Islamophobia. It’s that they’re afflicted with a weird Islamophilia — of the Queers for Palestine, River to the Sea, Stop the Genocide variety.

And let’s not forget Lonnie Bunch, who runs the Smithsonian. He was thrilled with the 1619 Project, sponsored by the Smithsonian and the New York Times. That’s foundational to the Smithsonian’s woes. He’s about to turn 75. Earlier this year, the Smithsonian finished its $2.5 billion comprehensive campaign started in 2018. In a few weeks, I’ll write about what’s in it, since it’s hard to tell by looking at the Smithsonian’s Campaign for Our Shared Future website. A good time for Bunch to leave is now, along with the regents who are blocking change.

And while cleansing the Augean stable, let’s sink the new Museum of the American Latino and the Women’s History Museum. They’re skeletal now, but every day some flesh is added to the bones. They’ll be two more monstrosities added to the American History Museum unless leadership and culture change from the top. Washington has too many museums already, and the Smithsonian, with 20 museums, a dozen libraries and archives, and a zoo, is too big already. Ditch ’em and cut a billion dollars from the deficit. Don’t be suckers. The Smithsonian doesn’t want them. Pull the plug. There will surely be a squawk or two, but after that no one will care.

On July 24, President Trump issued an executive order requiring warning signs in front of the history museum to inform visitors that its interpretations are inaccurate and, absorbing the spirit of the EO, that its director and curators are ingrates. The Park Service and the Interior Department should also, I see from Trump’s directive, direct visitors to better sources for American history. Please, Mr. President, may I beg off on this one? I’m about to go on vacation.