Telling America’s story is too important to leave to radicals



Every nation has a story. Recently, the Washington Post described the Smithsonian Institution, with its 21 museums and 14 educational and research centers, as “the official keeper of the American Story.” What kind of story have the Smithsonian museums been telling about our country?

On March 27, President Trump issued an executive order arguing that there has been a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history” and promote a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” This “revisionist movement” casts American “founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” A White House fact sheet calls for “revitalizing key cultural institutions and reversing the spread of divisive ideology.” Vice President JD Vance, a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, will lead the administration’s efforts.

The debate over the Smithsonian is only one front in a wide-ranging, ongoing conflict over first principles and concepts of justice (equality versus equity).

Critics of the executive order responded quickly. They maintain that the Trump administration wants to “whitewash the past and suppress discussion of systemic racism.” The Smithsonian, the critics contend, is led by nonpartisan professionals whose aim is to be truthful and inclusive and tell the whole story of America, including groups that have been neglected in the past. Professor David W. Blight of Yale, president of the Organization of American Historians, complained that the executive order is a “laughable thing until you realize what their intent actually is and what they’re doing is trying to erode and then obliterate what we have been writing for a century.”

Is there a divisive ideology being taught, as the Trump administration maintains, and if so, what is it? What have university professors been writing about America, if not “for a century,” for at least the past decade? Professor Blight’s OAH revealed its ideology by embracing the New York Times’ 1619 Project, declaring:

The 1619 Project’s approach to understanding the American past and connecting it to newly urgent movements for racial justice and systemic reform point to … the ways in which slavery and racial injustice have and continue to profoundly shape our nation. Critical race theory provides a lens through which we can examine and understand systemic racism and its many consequences.

What do we call the ideology that, as the OAH explains, “acknowledges and interrogates systems of oppression — racial, ethnic, gender, class — and openly addresses the myriad injustices that these systems have perpetuated through the past and into the present”?

As most are aware, the ideology expressed by the OAH is dominant in universities today. It views American history negatively through the lens of “oppressors” (white males) versus “oppressed” and “marginalized groups.” This ideology has been variously called political correctness, identity politics, social justice, and wokeness. We could use Wesley Yang’s term “successor ideology,” meaning it is the new, radical, left-wing ideological successor to the old patriotic liberalism of politicians like Walter Mondale and historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Not surprisingly, given its pre-eminence in America’s universities, this divisive “successor ideology” is at the heart of the worldview propounded by the leaders of the Smithsonian.

Something rotten in the Smithsonian

The current secretary of the Smithsonian is Lonnie G. Bunch III, who is adept at dealing with donors, stakeholders, and Republican congressional appropriators. His language is mostly measured and reasonable. He talks in terms of truth, nuance, complexity, and nonpartisanship. But in reality, Bunch is a partisan progressive, a skilled cultural warrior, and a promoter of the leftist “successor ideology.”

Bunch partnered with and promoted the biased 1619 Project, which asserts that slavery is the alpha and omega of the American story and that maintaining slavery was a primary motivation for some American colonists who joined the revolutionary cause. The architect of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, bragged that it “decenters whiteness,” and she denounced her liberal academic critics as “old white male historians.”

Nevertheless, Bunch proclaimed, “I want the Smithsonian to legitimize important issues, whether it's 1619 or climate change.” Of the Smithsonian’s participation in the 1619 Project, he declared, “I was very pleased with it.” Bunch proudly noted that people “saw that the Smithsonian had fingerprints on [the 1619 Project]. And that to me was a great victory.”

Bunch pictures America as a nation in which systemic racism is pervasive. During the George Floyd riots, Bunch told the Atlantic, "It is really about systemic racism throughout, not just the police department, but many parts of the American system.”

Further, he made excuses for the violence in the summer of 2020, which resulted in more than a dozen Americans killed and between $1 and $2 billion worth of property damage:

How dare they loot. Well, that kind of protest is really one of the few ways the voiceless feel they have power. And while I am opposed to violent protests personally, I understand that frustration sometimes pushes you over the edge. I think what’s important for us to recognize is, let us not turn attention towards looting in a way that takes away what is the power of these protests.

Three years ago, the Smithsonian assisted in the creation of a new College Board AP course on African American Studies. Ethics and Public Policy Center scholar Stanley Kurtz has revealed how APAAS is a radical neo-Marxist, anti-American project that calls for the socialist transformation of the United States. APAAS is soaked in the tenets of critical race theory, flirts with supporting violence, and implicitly advocates dismantling the American way of life, including free-market capitalism. It is a curriculum where students learn from Frantz Fanon that America is a “monster” and from Aimé Césaire that Stalin’s Soviet Union was a model society. Nevertheless, the APAAS curriculum is promoted on the Smithsonian’s Learning Lab.

Under the leadership of Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Florida legislature passed the Stop Woke Act that bars APAAS from the state’s K-12 schools because it promotes the divisive concepts manifest in CRT. Lonnie Bunch and his close ideological ally Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, falsely accused DeSantis of ignoring African-American history. On the contrary, DeSantis created a new black history curriculum based on serious and accurate scholarship. In response to DeSantis’ opposition to APAAS, Bunch complained to Alexander:

I am upset because you know we were involved in helping [APAAS] and the notion that somehow simply having a course that forces us to understand complexity, nuance, and ambiguity is a problem, that’s a problem for all of America.

In truth, there is very little “complexity” and “nuance” in the Smithsonian-promoted APAAS. It is one-sided, partisan propaganda. Kurtz notes that APAAS is not in fact inclusive, ignoring the work of black conservatives “like Glenn Loury, Shelby Steele, or Robert Woodson” or even “liberal black intellectuals, like Randall Kennedy or John McWhorter.”

Bunch often talks in terms of “nonpartisanship” and promoting the best of historical and cultural scholarship. But at the same time, he promotes the progressive left agenda, stating that the “job” of the National Museum of African American History and Culture is “really to create new generations of activists,” and “for me it really is about how … museums play a social justice role.”

Our story

To use one of Lonnie Bunch’s favorite terms, what is the “context” in which President Trump issued his executive order? It recognizes that a left-progressive cultural revolution (the “successor ideology”) has marched through our universities, schools, foundations, and museums, transforming the story of America into a tale of oppression and exploitation. The woke revolutionaries aim to “fundamentally transform the United States” from a nation based on a natural rights concept of the equality of citizenship to “equity,” a system of racial-ethnic-gender group quotas and group consciousness.

The debate over the Smithsonian is only one front in a wide-ranging, ongoing conflict over first principles and concepts of justice (equality versus equity). If the cultural revolutionaries are “transformationist,” in the sense that they aim to deconstruct the American way of life, the position articulated by Trump’s executive order is “Americanist,” in the sense that it represents a cultural counterrevolution that affirms America’s past and principles.

Are the Organization of American Historians and the current leadership of the Smithsonian right that America is a nation built on “slavery, exploitation, and exclusion”? Or is the American story what British writer Paul Johnson described as one of “human achievement without parallel,” the story “of difficulties overcome by skill, faith, and strength of purpose, and courage and persistence”? Was Johnson right when he wrote, “The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures” and that Americans “thrown together by fate in that swirling maelstrom of history” are “the most remarkable people the world has ever seen”?

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.

After Trump Executive Orders, Smithsonian Page Pushing Racist Propaganda Disappears

'If you identify as white, acknowledging your white racial identity and its privileges is a crucial step to help end racism.'

Smithsonian Exhibits Need Great Storytelling, Not More Politics

A Smithsonian exhibit on American entertainment eliminated country music from our nation's history. Trump’s executive order will change that.

Trump flushes woke programs at Smithsonian museums, orders return of leftist-targeted statues



The left's long march through the institutions was a resounding success. Numerous businesses, churches, libraries, law enforcement agencies, schools, and other organizations have for decades served as incubators for radical activists and amplifiers for pernicious ideologies.

Leftist marchers are, however, now being routed.

Conservatives and other normalcy advocates have in recent years undertaken a reconquest, enjoying success with certain academic institutions such as the New College of Florida as well as major businesses including Walmart, Harley-Davidson, and John Deere.

President Donald Trump — who has taken an axe to DEI, critical race theory, and gender ideology in the federal government and in federally funded organizations — continued his D.C.-focused purge of radicalism on Thursday, this time taking aim at the nation's premier museums.

Trump intends to rid the Smithsonian Institution, its 21 museums and 14 education and research centers, and the National Zoo of radical leftist programs, policies, and installations.

In an executive order titled "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," the president noted, "Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation's history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth."

'Museums in our Nation's capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination.'

"This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light," continued Trump. "Under this historical revision, our Nation's unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed."

Trump slammed the Biden administration for advancing this "corrosive ideology" and cited the following as examples of the anti-American propaganda at issue.

  • The Smithsonian American Art Museum's exhibit "The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture," which represents that "[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement."
  • The National Museum of African American History and Culture's assertions that the nuclear family, rugged individualism, self-reliance, prioritization of work over play, emphasis on rational linear thinking, punctuality, decisiveness, and a future-oriented outlook are "aspects and assumptions of whiteness and white culture in the United States."
  • The "forthcoming Smithsonian American Women's History Museum plans on celebrating the exploits of male athletes participating in women's sports."

The Smithsonian also enraged conservatives in recent years with the National Museum of American History's Hispanic exhibit portraying religion and history through a Marxist lens and the Smithsonian Institution's 2020 "Girlhood" exhibit featuring the racist founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, and a medical transvestite.

Trump directed Vice President JD Vance to work with senior staffers to "remove improper ideology" from the Smithsonian Institution and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.

Trump also tasked Vance and Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, to work with congressional lawmakers to ensure that Congress avoids bankrolling exhibits or programs at the Smithsonian Institution that "degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy."

Cognizant and critical of the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum's initiative to feature male cross-dressers in future exhibits, Trump also insisted that the museum does "not recognize men as women in any respect."

"Museums in our Nation's capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history," said Trump's order.

In addition to flushing leftist radicalism out of the Smithsonian museums, Trump — whose administration has been reverting the names of federal lands and military bases to what they were before Joe Biden took office — set his sights on a restoration of that which the iconoclasts of yesteryear chose to eliminate from the public consciousness.

Radicals both inside and outside government committed to a campaign of destruction and deracination in the wake of George Floyd's death in 2020, digging up graves, toppling statues, renaming animals, melting down busts, and knocking out church windows.

Trump directed Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to figure out whether public monuments, memorials, statues, or other properties within the Interior Department's jurisdiction were removed or changed during this radical campaign "to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology."

The president demanded further the reinstatement of pre-existing monuments that were removed.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

National Zoo euthanizes elephant days ahead of the election, inspiring talk of omens because of its namesake



The Biden-Harris administration euthanized a 50-year-old elephant in Washington, D.C., on Friday. Its name was Kamala.

While zookeepers, members of Kamala's herd, and distant animal lovers mourned the creature's death, some commentators suggested online that Kamala's demise — so soon after the New York Department of Environmental Conservation's slaying of Peanut the squirrel and on the eve of the election — might constitute some sort of omen.

The National Zoo, one of the many federally owned Smithsonian Institution facilities in the D.C. area, announced Saturday that after helping manage Kamala's osteoarthritis for 10 years, the creature's keepers elected to "humanely" dispose of her.

According to the zoo, Kamala — not an African elephant but rather an endangered Asian elephant from Sri Lanka that was orphaned as a calf then raised by humans — found it increasingly difficult over the past several weeks to move, suffering limited motion in her wrists, hips, and shoulders. The elephant's degenerative disease affected her joint cartilage and the underlying bone, leaving her stiff and in constant pain.

'The elephant grew up in a middle class family.'

Hoping the flat terrain might help, the zoo let Kamala and her herd mates parade around the Elephant Community Center and neighboring outdoor habitat. Unfortunately, this change of scenery didn't help as the old elephant "increasingly chose to stand in one spot rather than move about."

The zoo also indicated that Kamala's pain medications were no longer a match for her osteoarthritis.

On account of her limited mobility and increasing discomfort, Kamala's keepers euthanized her in the Elephant Barn.

"The elephant care team fondly remembers Kamala as a smart and inquisitive individual who held a dominant role within the herd," the zoo said in a release. "She built strong bonds with her keepers and enjoyed their attention. Whenever keepers approached, she would rumble and squeak, behaviors that indicated her happiness and excitement."

Kamala was born in Sri Lanka in the mid-1970s, moved to Canada for a period during which she birthed two offspring, then was transferred with her daughter to the National Zoo in 2014.

Owing to the late elephant's namesake in the United States Naval Observatory, superstitious commentators online suggested Kamala's death had greater meaning while others made jokes at the vice president's expense.

Rob Eno, Blaze Media's director of content marketing, tweeted, "The die has been cast. The omens have been read."

Social media influencer Douglass Mackey, the man sentenced to prison last year for Hillary Clinton memes, wrote, "Ominous."

Since the elephant has long been a symbol for the Republican Party, it's unsure precisely what such an omen might portend regarding the election.

"The elephant grew up in a middle class family," wrote one X user.

"Only 50% of the country loved this elephant," quipped another user.

"Her name is Kamala, she lives in DC, is of Indian descent (but is often mistaken as African), has never worked at McDonald's, is claimed to be beloved by many (but is frankly not doing well) and is saying goodbye to supporters this week after a losing battle. She is an elephant," wrote X user Jolly Brandon.

The British political commentator Carl Benjamin, also known as Sargon of Akkad, noted that as news of Kamala's euthanization was spreading, there was also a trending video showing a baby hippopotamus "choos[ing] the Trump cake."

The video, reshared by the New York Post Monday, shows baby pygmy hippo Moo Deng of Thailand presented with a choice of two cakes, then eating the option emblazoned with President Donald Trump's name.

Jimmy von Thron, producer for BlazeTV's "Prime Time with Alex Stein," joked that his confidence was significantly shored up by the hippo's selection, writing, "Just put my mortgage on Trump."

Former NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch said of the hippo's prediction, "More accurate than most."

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

New Exhibit Chronicles The ‘Brutal’ Life Of Washington’s Ugly Architecture

In these polarizing times, it seems little wonder that even federal buildings have turned into political battlefields.

Washington Post Criticism Of Christians Is All Name-Calling, No Argument

What’s most arresting about Washington Post Senior Critic-at-Large Robin Givhan’s theological musings is that they lack an actual argument.

‘Julia’ Documents The Life Of The Beloved French Chef Who Changed The Way Americans Cook

Viewers didn’t admire Julia Child despite her on-air mishaps or distinctive voice. They loved her because of them.