The Patriot Post® · Saving the Smithsonian From the Left

It’s entirely fitting that as we celebrate our 250th year — as visitors from all over the world celebrate everything from our wide-open spaces to our pickup trucks to our ranch dressing — we remind ourselves of the importance of protecting the American Story.

This story, utterly unique among nations, is a story best told not only by individual encounters between World Cup visitors and everyday Americans, but by a spectacular museum whose plot was chosen in 1846 and whose namesake and benefactor never set foot on American soil.

It’s perhaps also fitting, and sadly so, given the details of a just-released report from the Trump administration, that this singular museum — this home to the glorious Fort McHenry flag, to Wilbur and Orville’s aerodynamically challenged Flyer, and to the world’s largest deep-blue version of a girl’s best friend — was built “in the neighborhood of an open sewer.”

According to that 162-page report, our taxpayer-funded Smithsonian Institution has devolved into a showcase for self-loathing. Its executive summary states:

As this report shows, the Museum purposely presents America as a problematic country irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression. In the Museum’s current telling, the country is, above all, defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and systemic injustice.

The report identifies a broad pattern: the Founders are minimized, if not entirely excluded; traditional patriotic narratives are treated with suspicion, if not outright contempt; and the basic symbols and stories that once helped unify Americans are presented not as reasons for gratitude and inspiration, but as objects to be inherently questioned, dismantled, “problematized,” and reinterpreted to achieve ideological ends.

The report’s key findings are that the institution’s National Museum of American History “fails to substantively present America’s founders and founding; has ‘problematized’ the 250th Anniversary of America’s founding; has removed ‘American history’ from its mission statement to ‘get out of the "America First” mentality’; has abandoned historical scholarship for political activism" by promoting our nation’s story through an “activist ‘interpretive plan’” that includes anti-white-, illegal alien-, and transgender activism; and has, in sum, failed to meet its obligations and deliver on its longstanding promise to the American people.

Thus, as the editors of National Review foretold a year ago, “‘America’s Attic’ is about to get a thorough dusting.”

Indeed, it did. But the usual suspects aren’t on board with the report’s disturbing conclusions. As The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott laments:

More than a year after President Donald Trump announced his intention to rewrite history at the Smithsonian, the administration has issued a lengthy, 160-page report, with more than 500 footnotes, on its flagship museum. Drafted by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, the document tries to demonstrate how “ideological capture” at the National Museum of American History “Erases Our Heritage.” And at every turn, it proves the opposite, while scrubbing American history of everything that doesn’t fit officials’ feel-good narrative of a country only incidentally marred by imperfections, all of which are safely in our past.

In particular, the museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, “is attacked for mentioning the statistic that Black girls are suspended from school six times more often than White girls,” Kennicott claims. “The authors argue this shouldn’t be attributed to race, but to other factors, like trauma, socioeconomic status and mental health issues — as if these have no connection to racial disparities.”

I’m not sure that such a statistic merits inclusion in the American Story, but heck, with a director like Hartig, who needs Critical Race Theory?

Kennicott even takes issue with the report having taken issue with Hartig’s use of the tellingly leftist academic word “problematize,” claiming that “problematizing is the essence of historical thinking.”

To Kennicott, I would simply say: There are plenty of books out there for leftist America-loathing problematization, but they’re not taxpayer-funded.

Nearly a year ago, in writing about wokeness at the Smithsonian, I put it this way:

Self-loathing is a sickness, and it’s one of the hallmarks of the Left. They want us to believe that our nation is irredeemably racist; that it was built upon the genocide of the Native Americans and the slave labor of black Americans. Indeed, when the Democrats are in charge, they peddle ahistorical rubbish like … ‘The white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world.’“

Folks, despite what the Left might want you to believe, prosperous and enduring nations don’t hate themselves. This is a memo that the folks at the Smithsonian clearly haven’t yet gotten.