A New White House Report Reveals Its Corrosive Teachings
Woke is not dead. That’s the clear takeaway from a lengthy new report from the White House Domestic Policy Council: “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage.” As it lays out in detail, the Smithsonian at best ignores America’s heroes, traditions, and history while magnifying our country’s shortcomings. Observant parents who visit the museum will discover an anti-patriotic smorgasbord of propaganda that’s especially designed to get younger Americans to dislike—and even hate—their country.
In the words of the museum’s director Anthea Hartig, the Smithsonian aims to “reframe the traditional celebratory narrative of U.S. history” and “transform…the national historical narrative.” As anyone who lived through peak woke can tell you, this anodyne language conceals a radical project of fundamentally upending patriotic civic education in favor of the kind put forward in the infamous 1619 Project.
If the goal of Hartig and other Smithsonian leaders is to create a generation of young Americans who loathe their country’s past and firmly reject the teachings of the books of nature and Scripture, then they have done their job well.
Those aims are, of course, directly contrary to the museum’s founding purposes. In congressional testimony in 1955, Smithsonian Institution Secretary Leon Carmichael stated that, if built, the Museum of American History would “tell the story of American national progress” and “cement America’s progress for citizen and foreign visitors alike.” This understanding is in line with the broader historical purposes of the Smithsonian Institution, which was founded by an Act of Congress in 1846 “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men,” in the words of British scientist James Smithson.
According to the Domestic Policy Council’s detailed investigation, however, the Smithsonian under Hartig’s watch has worked to propagate woke ideology under the guise of faux sophistication.
The report was initiated by President Trump’s March 2025 executive order on American history, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” This EO charged the vice president and other administration officials to halt the growing influence of a “revisionist movement [that] seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States” at the National Museum of American History, Independence Hall in Old City Philadelphia, and other museums and historical sites around the U.S.
As the report discovered at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, out is the patriotism of even mid-20th-century liberalism, and in are the metaphysical commitments of critical theory. The museum has imported a left-wing framework crafted by individuals such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the chief creators of critical race theory.
This is why one of the Smithsonian’s exhibits lionizes Angela Davis, who ran as vice president of the American Communist Party in 1980 and who, the report notes, “has called for the abolition of police, jails, prisons, and immigrant enforcement.”
The report charges that the Smithsonian under Anthea Hartig has “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.” Hartig, it continues, has said that she sees history as a “prime tool of social justice.”
This helps explain why American heroes like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson are generally discussed only in relation to slavery. Daniel McCarthy notes the same type of presentation at the National Portrait Gallery, also part of the Smithsonian, where each piece of art features a note about its “connection to slavery, however distant.” It’s also why Christopher Columbus is called a “murderer,” “slaver,” and “thief,” and Thanksgiving is labeled a “National Day of Mourning.”
Unsurprisingly, American Christianity gets the same savage treatment at the Smithsonian. As the report lays out, Christianity is framed as being mostly
an instrument of conquest, exclusion, or cultural erasure, while the constructive role of Christian belief and Christian institutions in shaping the Nation and its freedoms receives scant, if any, attention. White, male, and Christian Americans are regularly denigrated as the alleged embodiment of oppressive power structures.
In light of these findings, the report unsurprisingly finds that America 250 didn’t seem to be on the museum’s radar. “Independence Day itself went unmarked by any special programming…in 2025 and 2026, despite the Museum being open,” it finds. The Smithsonian has no semiquincentennial exhibits that are expressly dedicated to “our Founding Fathers, the Second Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolutionary War, or the achievement of independence and the establishment of the constitutional rule of law.”
This makes sense considering Hartig’s pledge to figure out ways to “problematize” the “250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.” Countering this type of view, which is all too common among those of Hartig’s class, Director of the Domestic Policy Council Vince Haley sketched out a common-sense view of American civics in 2026: “During this 250th anniversary year of our heroic founding, the least we owe our Founding Fathers is an honest and inspiring account of who they were, what they did, and what they built.”
Standing squarely against Haley’s admonition, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History directs staff to focus on intersectional themes, spotlights those who rail against “whiteness” and “white supremacy culture”—essentially most of American history in its view—shills for illegal aliens, and promotes transgender ideology to the mostly younger crowds that flock to the museum each year as part of school field trips or family vacations. As the report found, its annual National Youth Summits have included topics such as “Teen Resistance to Racism, and Gender Equity” and “Elections and Politics,” which featured talks from Democratic Party operatives.
Smithsonian staffers also regularly met to read and discuss the “Museums as a Site for Social Action” Toolkit, which the report states was “co-authored by half a dozen current/former Smithsonian employees.” The toolkit advises how museums can decenter “dominant Western ideals of race, class, and gender,” which it links to “white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, abuse of labor, colonization, imperialist theft of art and artifacts, destruction or absencing of alternative ways of interpreting or representing art and artifacts, structural racism and other oppressions.”
As is obvious, the Smithsonian clearly fails the test of instilling an “informed and honest patriotism” that President Trump outlined in his executive order last year. This is not just about a better use of taxpayer dollars—the report notes that in Fiscal Year 2026, Congress appropriated to the Smithsonian over one billion dollars, 60% of which is public money. It’s about our taxes going to fund institutions that are actively seeking to undermine the pillars of American citizenship, especially among younger generations.
It’s one thing to present a balanced account of American history, warts and all. As the report’s executive summary notes, we should not seek a whitewashed version of American history. But it is quite another to present America’s institutions as being “chiefly instruments of oppression” meant “to provoke visitors into activist forms of political resistance to that alleged oppression.” Rather than creating patriots, the Smithsonian is creating more ideological foot soldiers for the “Resistance.”
The clear presupposition underlying the museum’s exhibits is that, as opposed to parochial MAGA forces that see everything in black and white, it represents the forces of enlightened cosmopolitanism, complete with various shades of gray. But this is fiction. In reality, the museum’s leaders have adopted a cartoonish view of American history that’s nothing but a sordid tale of white men doing despicable things ad infinitum. In 2026, this claim is about as interesting as Mitt Romney’s 59-point jobs plan.
What’s happening at the Smithsonian is unfortunately not a special case. Jeffrey Anderson and John Fonte have both noted the woke teachings at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia—teachings the Trump administration has gone to great lengths to excise.
A country that teaches its students to hate themselves and to despise their country’s historic way of life will simply not last. Fortunately, the administration is undertaking the necessary work to ensure that students can appreciate America’s monumental successes over the past 250 years.
