Smithsonian’s American History Museum: Virtue-Signaling, Mediocrity, and Woke Ideology

The 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.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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The 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.