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

The 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.