Editors at National Review Online explore the need for revisions at a major American institution.
“America’s Attic” is about to get a thorough dusting.
On Tuesday, the White House sent a letter to the head of the Smithsonian Institution announcing that it will conduct an extensive review of museum content. Spanning everything from exhibition text to museum websites, the audit seeks to align with President Trump’s effort “to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.” If the administration holds to that worthy aim, it can help restore the Smithsonian to its statutory purpose — the “increase and diffusion of knowledge,” rather than of ideology and historical revisionism.
As the woke tide steadily rose in the 2010s and early 2020s, the Smithsonian began infusing many exhibits with a palpable disdain for Western civilization and the American experiment it produced. The Smithsonian’s museums have increasingly promoted the idea that the nation’s story is, fundamentally, one of systemic oppression and racial victimization. Injustice began to be treated as a defining trait of America’s character, not just a facet of its history.
President Trump cited a few examples in a March executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The Smithsonian American Art Museum features an exhibit that “examines the role of sculpture in understanding and constructing the concept of race” in America. In 2020, the National Museum of African American History and Culture proclaimed, in an online portal meant to provide guidelines for discussing race, that hard work, individualism, and the nuclear family were among the “aspects and assumptions of whiteness.”
This sort of nonsense is pervasive at the Smithsonian. An exhibition affiliated with the forthcoming Museum of the American Latino, shown temporarily at the Museum of American History, contained section after section on white colonization and racism. The future American Women’s History Museum — the new museums check all the identity-politics boxes — plans to feature biological men who identify as transgender.
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Author: Mitch Kokai
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