Please Follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Gettr, Truth Social, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram

Lonnie G. Bunch III announced his retirement last week from his position as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution — a post he was appointed to in June 2019.

“It is with very mixed emotions and heartfelt gratitude that I announce my retirement from the Smithsonian,” Bunch said in a statement released September 8. “I have spent nearly half of my life working at and being part of the Smithsonian family, and what a privilege it has been. There is no place like the Smithsonian—it has been one of the great loves of my life, and I am extraordinarily proud of what we have accomplished together.”

The announcement by Bunch – who, according to a Fox News Digital review, took in over $4.4 million between 2020 and 2024 in salary and added benefits – comes in the wake of years of growing concern about the penetration into the nation’s 21 museums of a political and social agenda that reflects anti-American, pro-abortion, open borders, and transgender ideologies.

On July 4, the White House released a report titled “Saving America’s Story”, a document prepared by the Domestic Policy Council in response to President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

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,” the report concluded.

The Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez asserted in a video that aired July 21 that the Smithsonian’s NMAH “doesn’t have a single major exhibit dedicated to George Washington, or Thomas Jefferson, or Alexander Hamilton, or any of the founding fathers.”

“Here’s what it does have: glorification of gender transition in exhibits meant for children, a sadomasochistic ‘crotch harness,’ radical race politics, praise for illegal immigration, and woke propaganda of all kinds,” Gonzalez observed in “Radical Shift: Inside the Smithsonian’s Ideological Makeover.”

“Normal Americans are looking at this and saying, ‘How did this happen?’” Gonzalez added.

Museum leaders, including Bunch, have been very clear that their objective has been directing the nation’s museums down a path of social justice political activism.

On its website, the “Museum’s Vision” reads, “As the nation’s history museum, we challenge ourselves to become the country’s most accessible, inclusive, relevant, and sustainable public history institution.”

Bunch himself 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.”

In documenting the museum’s mission of political activism, the Domestic Policy Council noted as well that NMAH Director Anthea Hartig, “has explicitly stated that she sees history as a ‘prime tool of social justice’ and one of her roles as connecting ‘research and scholarship to activism and advocacy.’”

In August, Trump lamented in a post on Truth Social that the Smithsonian is “OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

“We are not going to allow this to happen, and I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made,” the president added.

Subsequently, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum wrote August 28 to the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents that “the White House Domestic Policy Council ‘s report is replete with alarming examples of how this radical ideology is reflected across exhibitions, educational materials and public programming, causing historic subjects and artifacts to be presented as vehicles for this ideology while packaged as educational programming.”

Burgum indicated that more than $1 billion in federal taxpayer funds are appropriated to the Smithsonian annually as he further detailed the findings of the council’s investigation:

… the report documents how NMAH’s educational materials and exhibit language have sought to legitimize illegal immigration and open borders. This includes developing a curriculum that instructs high school teachers to avoid the terms “illegal alien,” “illegal immigrant” and “illegal, illegals’‘; sending Museum staff to Mexico to interview deported illegal aliens; and creating official educational materials lionizing those advocating for citizenship for millions of illegals, for the abolition of Federal immigration law enforcement and against the deportation of criminal aliens. The report also describes how several NMAH exhibits present the view that biological men can be women and should be permitted to compete in women’s sports.

Burgum said the federal government “cannot in good conscience continue to support the Smithsonian under current leadership by, for example, loaning artifacts for exhibits, enabling procurement processes and making discretionary grants.”

“Indeed, the administration has recently uncovered evidence that the Smithsonian leadership’s institutional culture may have resulted in significant violations of Federal antidiscrimination law, including creating a hostile work environment and engaging in practices that classify individuals and allocate opportunities, funding and other benefits on the basis of race, ethnicity and other protected characteristics,” the secretary noted.

The Smithsonian’s Board of Regents will appoint Bunch’s replacement. Members of the board include Vice President JD Vance and Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court John Roberts.

In its announcement of Bunch’s retirement, the Smithsonian included a statement released by the chief justice in which Roberts praised him for “his distinguished service for the past seven years in the Smithsonian’s top job.”

“Secretary Bunch has pursued excellence in the telling of our nation’s story,” Roberts said. “The Regents, and the Smithsonian, have benefited greatly from his wisdom, vision and leadership.”

The Heritage Foundation’s Gonzalez, nevertheless, said a new Smithsonian secretary should not “treat the Institution as a battleground for his culture wars.”

“Instead, let’s hope that he or she takes seriously the mission of the national museum complex that he or she leads, that is to say to preserve and transmit America’s history, culture and art—in a word, heritage—to future generations,” he added.

‘NO AD’ subscription for CDM!  Sign up here and support real investigative journalism and help save the republic!'