Instead of heroes, the Smithsonian feeds kids grievance lessons



In 2021, a poll showed that only one-third (36%) of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 were “very” proud to be Americans. Another third stated they were only slightly or not at all proud of their country. Ten years earlier, Pew Research anticipated the trend when it noted that the rate of Millennials who called themselves “very patriotic” fell from 80% in 2003 to 70% in 2011.

Part of a national museum’s job is to prevent that outcome. Preserving the historical truth is a high purpose, but so is instilling the sentiment of gratitude. America’s museums can and should do both.

Visitors to the Smithsonian should leave the building with warm feelings of pride, thankfulness, and patriotism.

Instead, as of this writing, if you visit the home page of the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, the very first exhibit you see is the Greensboro lunch counter from the famous sit-in of 65 years ago. The text introducing the exhibit gives visitors the first fact they are supposed to learn about the American past: “Racial segregation was still legal in the United States on February 1, 1960.”

The curators could have chosen something else as a first impression — a triumphant fact, not a guilty one. They could have highlighted America’s victory in the Cold War or the religious freedom and economic opportunity that drew the Puritans from England, the Irish during the famine of the 1840s, and Jews from Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century. Or they could have showcased the founding documents themselves, which have inspired Democratic reformers worldwide for 250 years. But they didn’t.

Beneath the photo of the lunch counter are three other objects chosen from the Smithsonian’s collections. One is the table on which women at Seneca Falls drafted a declaration of rights in 1848. The second is the 1861 badge of a member of a volunteer African-American firefighting company in Charleston, South Carolina. The third is a sign for a community center in Washington, D.C., founded in 1988 to serve pregnant Latina immigrants. For the needy, the ones battling for rights and freedom, women, and minorities, the theme is that American history is a tale of the identity-oppressed struggling to overcome their oppression.

Again, this is what the curators select as their introduction to the institution — and to America. They have a knack for creating accusatory first impressions.

‘Key concepts’

If you enter the museum building from the Mall side and pass through security, immediately to your right is a huge display window with a red banner behind it: “Fight the Virus, NOT the People.” Two lines of Cantonese script run below it. Above the banner are small signs in red and white that command, “STOP Asian Hate,” “STOP Racism,” “We Want Justice,” and “STOP Asian Bashing.”

The banner comes from a movement in San Francisco’s Chinatown after the COVID-19 outbreak of 2020, which led to the community “being shunned, even targeted,” according to the accompanying text. The curators go on to regret that “Asian Americans have been subject to racist scapegoating and violence so often in the past.”

Visitors from far and wide get the message as they pause in the lobby, often with kids in tow, and orient themselves to the collection: America is a place of racial danger. Even in a city as prosperous and liberal as San Francisco, Asian-Americans are not safe. The story told by the display is that their shaky status in a racist polity has produced a poignant plea we should all remember: “Stop the Hate!”

This is an ongoing trend. The Smithsonian’s National Youth Summit topic for 2020 was “Teen Resistance to Systemic Racism.” For 2021, it was “Gender Equity.” The museum’s education page has a “Becoming Us” resource that offers teachers case studies and lesson plans to foster “a more accurate and inclusive migration and immigration narrative.” Until recently, we are to assume, the narrative of immigration has been narrow and distorted. “Becoming Us” is a correction. Among the “Key concepts” students should absorb are:

  • “Race is a social construct.”
  • “Arguments about national identity, security, and patriotism have been employed to target different groups at different times in U.S. history.”
  • “Laws and policies are enacted to restrict, encourage, or reform migration in ways that exclude specific populations.”
  • “The cultural diversity of the United States is similar to other nations around the world, particularly post-colonial nations, but also unique in important ways.”

It’s a characteristically tendentious layout. Arguments about security, for instance, are employed for many other reasons besides the persecution of disfavored demographic groups. A large exhibit gives visitors further reminders of American injustice. The entrance to the section on the Revolutionary War features a 1774 quotation from a freed black writer addressed to advocates of independence: “I need not point out the absurdity of your exertions for liberty, while you have slaves in your house.”

A few feet away, we learn that we shouldn’t celebrate the success of the American founding too much since “the Revolutionary promise was unclear. Women had few political rights, and girls’ education, when available, focused on domestic and social skills like needlework and dancing.” From there follows much more material on slavery before we turn to religion in the 19th century.

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Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Although the United States had extraordinary religious diversity and freedom relative to other nations in 1850, we fell short again according to a note on “Religious and Utopian Communities on the Mississippi.” It says, “Though the United States promised freedoms, those who practiced different religions and ways of life were not always accepted.”

The examples cited are Mormons and the Icarians, a group of European utopians. Then come the black, Japanese-American, and Mexican veterans, returning from war and “fighting for respect” at home. The Chinese were harassed in Chicago. The Mexicans were attacked in Los Angeles (ironically titled “Los Angeles — City of Promise”). And so on.

Miracle on Pennsylvania Ave.

The Trump administration has good reason to review the Smithsonian’s federal funding, critique its ideological agenda, and put pressure on it to change its ways. The Museum of American History has some wonderful installations, such as those showcasing actual battle conditions for American soldiers and the dresses of first ladies. But the identity tales are far too many, the resentment far too thick.

The curators can’t even report on the stunning success of the Broadway show “Hamilton” without an acerbic, identitarian edge: “Through rap and hip-hop — and non-white casting — ‘Hamilton’ made this history accessible and relatable to audiences of color and gave more people a sense of ownership of American history.”

“Becoming Us” speaks of a better “narrative,” which is clearly a counternarrative to American exceptionalism and American greatness, a story of broken promises, unequal rights, and too many white men. Despite the term “narrative,” the curators clearly consider it the indisputable truth. However, they may protest, they’re not really relativists — they’re realists.

National museums have a noble purpose, one parallel to that of the military. Soldiers maintain our security; curators maintain our patrimony.

The spread of woke historiography in the public sphere is a 21st-century phenomenon, but if you’ve been in academia, you’ve experienced it long before Black Lives Matter came along. I watched the slow occupation of the humanities during the ’80s and ’90s, as the World War II generation of professors retired and young ones took their place with an utterly different conception of what academic labor should be and do.

In a word, they added social change to disciplinary duties.

Officials in the museum and library world did the same, and they guard their positions today with zeal. These people leave no room open for debate. You can’t interact with those who think you’re lying. If you suggest a more positive vision of the American past, they peg you as an apologist, a chauvinist, or worse. They attribute selfish motives to you; they don’t believe you or trust your facts. Disagree with them and you get a condescending sneer.

These are the people who have seized our cultural and educational institutions, and they’re not going to let go just because you have persuasive evidence.

A national obligation

Of course, a national museum can’t operate this way. It has an obligation to represent the country in an honest but appreciative light. Visitors to the Smithsonian should leave the building with warm feelings of pride, thankfulness, and patriotism. Less victimhood, with its unsettling mix of resentment and sentimentality, more heroism and celebration. The overall approach to America should be exactly what President Donald Trump laid out in his July 4, 2020, speech at Mount Rushmore. At the very words “Fourth of July,” he said, “every American heart should swell with pride.”

Trump positioned 1776 as the continuation of “thousands of years of Western civilization” and set his sights on an “unstoppable march of freedom” from that year forward. He cited the violence and vandalism of that dark summer of 2020 and tied it to “years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions.” He elaborated:

Our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but were villains. … All perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted, and every flaw is magnified.

The president’s response to those trends wasn’t a counter-critique. It was a barrage of counterexamples: the leadership of George Washington, the brilliance of Thomas Jefferson, the convictions of Abraham Lincoln, the courage of Teddy Roosevelt, our religious principles, the uplifting message of Martin Luther King Jr., the Wright brothers, Clara Barton, the Hoover Dam, the Manhattan skyline, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Irving Berlin, Ella Fitzgerald, the Ford F-150. These are the proper ingredients of the Smithsonian collections, placed up front where they belong.

Again, parts of the Museum of American History showcase some of those very American idols. But others downplay or dismiss them. The museum’s installations and web pages are a lighter version of the woke lessons that you hear in American Studies classrooms in higher education and find in social studies learning standards in blue states. They aren’t outright anti-American — they are only critical of “greatness” and “exceptionalism.” But that’s enough to justify action.

“Americans must never lose sight of this miraculous story,” Trump concluded at Mount Rushmore. The presentation by the museum is designed to obscure and diminish that miraculous side of things.

RELATED: 'White people bad': CNN panel crushed over embarrassing Smithsonian exhibits

Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

A noble purpose

A nation cannot thrive if its citizens have no civic pride and patriotic devotion. They won’t defend its borders or work for the national interest. A guilty past weakens the present. People want to believe that their home is a joyful, virtuous place. The shadow of a shameful heritage blunts their confidence. They’re in a culture war without sufficient arms. It is not too cynical to think that this is one intention of the curators.

National museums have a noble purpose, one parallel to that of the military. Soldiers maintain our security; curators maintain our patrimony. If the president manages to orient the Smithsonian to American greatness, academics and journalists, as well as scholarly associations, will grumble and condemn. Charges of whitesplaining, bigotry, propaganda, racism, and xenophobia will follow. So what? Just do it — the people will cheer.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

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What’s REALLY behind MSM’s false reporting on Trump’s Smithsonian initiative? Glenn Beck has a theory.



“It's one thing to get a story wrong; it's one thing to misunderstand … but it's an entirely other thing to intentionally take things out of context, intentionally leave things off the table, intentionally paint a picture that you know is not true,” says Glenn Beck.

If you didn’t already guess, Glenn is talking about the mainstream media — specifically its reporting on President Trump’s recent initiatives targeting the Smithsonian Institution, which has long insisted on portraying slavery as America’s defining story.

On August 12, the White House, in accordance with President Trump's vision of American exceptionalism, initiated a comprehensive review of eight Smithsonian museums, focusing on exhibition content, curation, and operations. A few days later, President Trump followed up the directive with a Truth Social post, explaining the need for reform in Smithsonian museums.

Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media cherry-picked from Trump’s words and published stories implying that he thinks slavery wasn’t so bad. The New York Times ran a piece titled, “Trump Says Smithsonian Focuses Too Much on ‘How Bad Slavery Was.’”

The Washington Post, NPR, and Reuters, among many other outlets, published similar pieces.

Despite the fact that President Trump has repeatedly and publicly condemned slavery, the media is pushing the narrative that Trump’s desire to highlight the whole picture — America’s failures and her accomplishments — equates to whitewashing slavery.

Glenn, a history lover and the founder of the American Journey Experience, a state-of-the-art museum and research library, knows the importance of studying the darkest parts of human history. “If we don't teach our kids that these dark things happened in this country, two things happen,” he says. “One, they don't believe us on the good things. … The second reason it is really important is if you don't teach [the bad stuff], you will repeat it.”

But the problem with the Smithsonian and other historical institutions, he says, is that they’re only telling the dark parts of American history. They’re trying to “make history about now,” examining it through the lens of modern ideas, cultural trends, and political agendas.

“Well, history is about the past,” says Glenn, adding that if we are to view history rightly, we need to ask questions, such as, “How did people think back then? Why did they think that way back then? Who fought against that at that time? What was the real argument?”

When we fail to ask these honest questions and instead view history as a means to accomplish an agenda, we get academics and scholars pushing information that is “absolutely dishonest” — like the idea that “Frederick Douglass never, never said a good word about the Constitution,” when in fact he called it “the greatest freedom document of all time.”

Why do they push false narratives like this?

Because “their goal is to get rid of the Constitution,” says Glenn. From academics and liberal politicians to progressive activist groups and, of course, the mainstream media, the overarching agenda is to convince Americans that the United States is “a bad nation and communism is neat.”

President Trump’s insistence that the Smithsonian put more focus on America’s long list of incredible accomplishments is a bold and necessary effort to reverse this insidious anti-American agenda.

“You want to [talk about] slavery? Tell both sides of slavery — not just the horrors of slavery, but the miracle of those who were white who stood up and tried to stop it,” Glenn pleads.

“I absolutely want the story of slavery told, but I want it to be told in context. And it's not the story of America. It is one of the stories of America that, thank God, we fought.”

To hear more of Glenn’s analysis and commentary, watch the clip above.

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'White people bad': CNN panel crushed over embarrassing  Smithsonian exhibits



Celebrated fitness expert Jillian Michaels appeared on a CNN panel and mocked several Smithsonian museum exhibits for displaying blatant progressive bias.

On CNN's "NewsNight with Abby Phillip," Michaels fired back at Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) and former Democrat strategist Julie Roginsky for taking issue with the Trump administration's official review of exhibits and materials at the Smithsonian.

Roginsky claimed that Trump has "some random person" deciding what is appropriate for the museum and that the exhibits now must align with topics that do not offend the president or his supporters. Michaels asked the panelist to address some of the exhibits, to which the Russian Roginsky replied that slavery was something the Trump administration did not want to talk about.

'Do you know that when you walk in the door, the first thing you see is the gay flag?'

“He’s not whitewashing slavery," Michaels said. The trainer continued, despite Roginsky's objection: "And you cannot tie imperialism and racism and slavery to just one race, which is pretty much what every single exhibit does.”

Michaels argued that it was worth noting just 2% of white Americans owned slaves, and the horrible practice has been around for "thousands of years" and therefore predates America.

"Do you know who was the first race to try to end slavery?" Michaels asked Roginsky.

At that point, host Phillip chimed in, "I'm surprised you're trying to litigate who is the beneficiary of slavery."

Michaels immediately rejected the assertion and later remarked that Phillip was trying to straw man her argument and connect everything to race, just as the museum was.

"Every single thing is like, 'Oh, no, no, no, this is all because "white people bad."' That's just not the truth," Michaels said about the exhibits.

She was not done.

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Phillip asked for other examples from Michaels, who was able to cite several from documents she brought with her.

"Every single exhibit, I have a list of every single one. Like, people migrated from Cuba because 'white people bad,'" Michaels explained. "Do you know that when you walk in the door, the first thing you see is the gay flag?" she told the panelists.

Still Phillip was not convinced, so Michaels continued.

"There's one [exhibit] called 'Change Your Game,'" she detailed. "'Is gender testing fair in sports?' Then it goes on to say how it's complex to do gender testing in sports. It's not complex. It's basic science."

The panel, often interrupting, seemingly could not answer Michaels' questions as to "why is this in the Smithsonian?"

"It's been completely captured, and it's totally partisan," the 51-year-old claimed.

As Michaels rattled off her examples, the CNN host declared, "We don't have time to litigate all of this," but Michaels fired back again.

"Of course we don't because then you're gonna lose the argument. Everything [in the museum] is racialized."

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Jillian Michaels at the Wellness Your Way Festival at the Colorado Convention Center on August 16, 2019, in Denver, Colorado. Photo by Tom Cooper/Getty Images for Wellness Your Way Festival

Michaels took to her X page following the segment to share an image of a Smithsonian exhibit about Cuban and Caribbean migration to the United States.

The exhibit blamed the migration on U.S. support for "foreign governments that favored U.S. businesses and fought communism," along with "U.S. policy" that contributed to "violence and corruption."

It also noted "wealthy white Cubans" as the first to leave the island but did not openly note communist policies as a reason for poverty or corruption.

"When you make every single exhibit about white imperialism when it isn't relevant at all, that is a problem," Michaels told the CNN commentators.

As for her claim that just 2% of white Americans owned slaves, progressives have argued the figure is unfair because it does not focus on the states in which slave-owning was most prominent, which Politifact called "the most reasonable way" to measure it.

Although the 2017 article sought to disprove a similar claim (the figure used was 1.4%), Politifact actually cited a historian who said the idea that black American slave owners had around 20,000 slaves of their own during the same time period was "not that far off."

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Brian Stelter melts down as Trump makes the Smithsonian great again



The left's "long march through the institutions" was a great success. Since the time that slogan was coined in the late 1960s, numerous businesses, churches, law enforcement agencies, schools, and other organizations have been transformed into incubators for radical activists and amplifiers for anti-Western campaigns.

The marchers have, however, been stopped in their tracks by President Donald Trump, who has supercharged conservatives' reconquest of American institutions and normalcy advocates' corresponding war on DEI, critical race theory, gender ideology, and anti-Semitism.

Liberals — including CNN's chief media analyst, Brian Stelter — appear concerned that the president might successfully liberate the Smithsonian in time for America's 250th birthday as part of this broader campaign.

How it started

The president issued an executive order on March 27 titled "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History."

"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," Trump wrote.

'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 the president. "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."

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Trump blasted his predecessor's administration for advancing "this corrosive ideology" and identified several examples of the Smithsonian-housed anti-American propaganda at issue, including 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."

"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," wrote Trump.

The president directed Vice President JD Vance, a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to work with Lindsey Halligan, special assistant to the president, and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought to see to the removal of "improper ideology" from the Smithsonian Institution, its 21 museums and 14 education and research centers, and the National Zoo.

How it's going

The White House is presently whipping the Smithsonian into shape.

Halligan, Vought, and Vince Haley, director of the Domestic Policy Council, sent a letter to Smithsonian Institution secretary Lonnie Bunch III on Tuesday, noting that they will "be leading a comprehensive internal review of selected Smithsonian museums and exhibitions."

'It really is a colonoscopy of the Smithsonian.'

The first phase of this review concerns eight museums, including the National Museums of American History, Natural History, African American History and Culture, and the American Indian. Other Smithsonian museums will be assessed in the second phase of the review.

In their review, Trump's team will:

  • "assess tone, historical framing, and alignment with American ideals" when it comes to public-facing content;
  • interview curators and senior staff to "better understand the selection process, exhibition approval workflows, and any frameworks currently guiding exhibition content";
  • review current and future exhibitions, especially those planned for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence; and
  • look to the development of consistent curatorial guidelines.

Halligan, Haley, and Vought also requested that the Smithsonian cough up an index of all permanent holdings as well as documents relevant to its 250th anniversary programming, current exhibition content, internal guidelines, governance, educational materials, external partnerships, grant data, and digital presence.

While the reviewers want some of these documents submitted within the next 30 days, the remainder need to be turned in by the end of October.

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By Dec. 10, the White House team wants the museums to begin "implementing content corrections where necessary, replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions across placards, wall didactics, digital displays, and other public-facing materials."

The letter indicated that the purpose of this review is to "ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions."

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told Blaze News that "it really is a colonoscopy of the Smithsonian."

Gonzalez noted that in addition to glossing over or ignoring key aspects of what makes America exceptional, such as its recognition of natural rights, the Smithsonian continues to push leftist propaganda, engage in lies of omission, and glorify radicals such as Angela Davis.

Davis is a former Black Panther and recipient of the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize who was once accused of supplying weapons to a black supremacist who went on to murder Superior Court Judge Harold Haley and two inmates.

"She's an awful person, but she gets four exhibits and Justice [Clarence] Thomas gets nothing," said Gonzalez.

PEN America, a liberal organization that has fought parents' efforts to keep LGBT propaganda out of the classroom, condemned the White House initiative.

"Telling the story of the United States must extend to the full and complex history of its past and present, including an honest assessment of wrongs and injustices, and a recognition of the never-ending project of creating a more perfect union," stated Hadar Harris, managing director of PEN America's office in Washington, D.C. "The administration’s efforts to rewrite history are a betrayal of our democratic traditions and a deeply concerning effort to strip truth from the institutions that tell our national story, from the Smithsonian to our national parks."

Brian Stelter asked CNN's remaining viewers this week, "Do you want Trump White House political appointees, political aides vetting the tone and the content and the framing of museum exhibits? That is the question on the table here."

Stelter suggested that some say the White House's initiative "sounds like a Stalinist purge — sounds like something out of history books about regimes trying to control information."

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller stated on Thursday, "The Trump Administration will proudly and diligently restore the patriotic glory of America and ensure the Smithsonian is a place that once more inspires love and devotion to this nation, especially among our youngest citizens."

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John Wayne’s epic ‘Freedom Train’ could save America’s 250th birthday



Many Americans of Generation X and older will recall the red, white, and blue American Freedom Train that was a centerpiece of America’s glorious bicentennial celebration in 1976. But few know that the Freedom Train — pulled by a steam locomotive and filled with American historical artifacts — was the brainchild of none other than John Wayne. As we fast approach the 250th anniversary of American independence, it’s time to get Wayne’s American Freedom Train back on the tracks as part of the quarter-millennium celebration.

Ross Rowland, who spearheaded the American Freedom Train effort as a young man, recently told me how Wayne came to have the idea. Rowland had run away from home in the 1950s and fortuitously ended up working as a groundskeeper for Wayne. The Duke befriended Rowland and eventually convinced him to return home. Rowland, whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been railroad men, had success on Wall Street and then commemorated the centennial of the 1869 “golden spike” — the completion of the transcontinental railroad — by having a steam train travel from New York City to Salt Lake City.

There’s still a chance to make the quarter-millennium anniversary a spectacular, unifying event like the bicentennial was a half-century ago.

Wayne joined Rowland for the final leg of that journey (and arranged to have “True Grit” premiere in Salt Lake City the night before). As they rode in an open-air train car, observing the large crowds as they passed, Rowland says Wayne told him something to the effect of, “You know, Ross, we’ve got America’s 200th birthday coming up. We should do this for that.” And they did. Rowland handled most of the planning and execution, Wayne got support from Bing Crosby and others in Hollywood, and President Richard Nixon agreed to let the train carry artifacts usually housed at the Smithsonian, Library of Congress, and National Archives.

The American Freedom Train was a tremendous success. During the bicentennial period, it traveled to all 48 contiguous states, stopped 138 times, and had an average of more than 50,000 visitors board at each stop. Riding along a moving walkway, visitors saw such artifacts as Paul Revere’s saddlebags, President George Washington’s copy of the Constitution, the actual Louisiana Purchase document, Abraham Lincoln’s top hat, Babe Ruth’s bat, John F. Kennedy’s handwritten copy of his inaugural address, and other artifacts, enough to fill 12 display cars.

The American Freedom Train, perhaps more than anything else, tied the national and local bicentennial celebrations together. John Warner, who headed up the congressionally created American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, said the train was “the most visible” of the bicentennial offerings and was able to “sew together” various festivities. President Ford said it “brought the story of America to the people.”

During the recent period of peak wokeness — from around 2020 to 2024 — it looked like the nation’s 250th anniversary risked becoming more of a condemnation than a celebration of American history. President Donald Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris largely ensured that the occasion would be a celebration. Yet there is a very real danger that this milestone anniversary — perhaps the best chance in 50 years to reset how Americans view our nation’s founding — might barely register with the public, making it a massive lost opportunity.

Planning for the quarter-millennium is woefully far behind where planning was at this stage for the bicentennial. The official planning entity, created by Congress during the Obama administration, is useless and focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. President Trump wisely created Task Force 250 to fill this void, but it faces a severe shortage of time.

Fortunately, the American Freedom Train could hit the tracks in the first half of 2026. Rob Gardner, president of the American Steam Railroad, told me the “sister engine” of a locomotive that pulled the train during the bicentennial is being restored and will be ready for action. All that’s really needed is for President Trump to authorize the use of federal artifacts at the Smithsonian, Library of Congress, and National Archives, consistent with his recent executive order telling the Smithsonian to stop denigrating America and instead “remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage.” Everything else would quickly fall into place.

There’s still a chance to make the quarter-millennium anniversary a spectacular and unifying event like the bicentennial was a half-century ago. Reprising the American Freedom Train is a big part of that. Let’s bring back John Wayne’s rolling tribute to America’s finest.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.