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“The Smithsonian is an American treasure, generously funded by American taxpayers, and working there is a privilege, not a platform to push a political agenda on American taxpayer money.”
That’s from U.S. Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas, District 27), in an op-ed published Sunday at Newsweek.
“These are museums of American history, not museums of American apology, and it’s time the Smithsonian remembered the difference,” Cloud wrote. “Smithsonian curators have no authority to edit the past to fit a present narrative. The truth distorted becomes a lie.”
The recent hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform confirmed, for Cloud, that “[c]urrent leadership at the Smithsonian seems to believe American history is something to be condemned and not celebrated.”
The hearing also confirmed the results of a White House report, titled “Saving America’s Story” and released July 4 – on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence – that the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) “has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”
Indeed, Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III admitted his ideological and political goals in a 2019 interview published at Smithsonian Magazine.
Laying out his view that the Smithsonian should be “legitimizing” such “important issues” as the now highly discredited “1619 Project” and “climate change,” Bunch said its mission is to “help people think about what’s important, what they should debate, what they should embrace.”
“Everybody that thought about the 1619 Project, whether they liked it or disagreed with it, saw that the Smithsonian had fingerprints on it,” he said. “And that to me was a great victory.”
Bunch also said he wanted the Smithsonian “to make diversity and inclusion so central that it’s no longer talked about.”
To accomplish these goals, Bunch has taken in “over $4.4 million from 2020-2024 in base salary and added benefits,” according to a report at Fox News.
“While the Smithsonian funds executive compensation through private trust revenues to comply with federal pay caps, the high-dollar package could draw fresh scrutiny because federal taxpayers still fund roughly 60% of the institution’s overall budget,” the report observes.
Historian Arthur Herman, the author of Founder’s Fire: From 1776 to the Age of Trump, agrees that Congress needs to step up now to save the Smithsonian Institution.
In an op-ed Sunday at Fox News, Herman expressed his outrage that “the woke toxin that has been destroying American education has spread deep into our national museum culture.”
He saw it revealed, as well, during the hearing with Smithsonian officials who “continue to deny or cover it up.”
“Even liberals should be horrified at what’s happened,” Herman fumed. “We can quote the words of an iconic liberal historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who wrote more than three decades ago: ‘If we repudiate the quite marvelous inheritance that history bestows on us, we invite the fragmentation of the national community into… cultural and linguistic apartheid.’”
But, Herman said, that’s exactly the intention.
“Apartheid is precisely what the left wants, in order to seize power,” he asserted. “Now, in our 250th anniversary, it’s time to turn the telling of history in our nation’s capital from condemnation to celebration.”
Herman’s most piercing words, however, were directed at those politicians through the years who have claimed to represent conserving America’s exceptional history – yet “did nothing”:
They watched as the radical left took over our universities and colleges, and did nothing.
They frowned a little as the left took over K-12 education, but did nothing.
They squirmed when the left took over Monticello and Montpelier, but again did nothing.
Now a DSA-style agenda has infected our most important museums in the nation’s capital.
“It’s time for ordinary Americans to stand up against the radical denigration of their country and its culture,” Herman urged.
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Stop unconstitutional funding of Smithsonian!
Congress can't pass a kidney stone...how will they "save" the Smithsonian? The Left will just keep on displaying the anti-America exhibits and the Right will do nothing but whine. This is how Conservatives handle problems. Whine and "sound the alarm."
Stop your whining!🥱