While the rest of the country was setting off fireworks for America's 250th birthday last weekend, the White House released a pretty damning report.
It's about the Smithsonian—specifically the National Museum of American History. You know, the big one on the National Mall, the one your tax dollars fund to the tune of millions a year, the one that exists for one reason: to tell the story of this country to the people who live in it and the people who come to visit.
According to this report, it has stopped doing that job. On purpose.
The museum used to describe its mission like this: to "explore the infinite richness and complexity of American history."
But under its current director, that mission statement got rewritten. The new version drops all pretense by saying it exists for: "empowering people to create a more just and compassionate future by exploring the complexity of our past."
One is the mission statement of a history museum. The other is something very bad wearing a history museum's skin.
Of course this wasn't an accident. It wasn’t some committee getting carried away with buzzwords.
The director, Anthea Hartig, said out loud that the goal was to "get out of the 'America First' mentality" when telling history. Hartig, who is white, acknowledges that she, herself, is only where she is because she’s been, “propped up … by the cushions of whiteness and the pillows of the bourgeoisie,” so it should surprise no one when she describes history itself as a "prime tool of social justice" and part of her own job as connecting "scholarship to activism and advocacy."
It seems like she’s accomplishing her goals.
In this, the 250th anniversary year of American independence, the National Museum of American History has no major exhibit dedicated to the Founding. Not to Washington. Not to Jefferson. Not to the Declaration, the Continental Congress, or the Revolution itself. Not even to Hamilton! When the Founders do appear, it's mostly in the context of slavery.
It’s pretty crazy, because if we step back and look at the last 250 years, there have really only been a handful of revolutions that reshaped the world. The American, the French, the Russian, and the Chinese. Four attempts to tear down the old order and build something new.
Three of them ended in mass graves, terror, gulags, and forced starvation. Tyranny dressed up as liberation every single time.
Only one produced a country people spend their whole lives trying to get into rather than flee.
Ours.
I’m sorry, but when someone sets out to tear down the one revolution that actually worked (and do it while necromancing the ideas behind the three that ended in body counts), you're right to ask what they're really after.
For years I've been warning that most of our institutions have been captured by people far to the left of their base. The public schools. The universities. And now, apparently, even the museum whose entire reason for existing is to pass our story down to the next generation.
Every single one of these is an institution we were told we could trust to teach our kids about their country. Every single one. And one by one, we're finding out that a lot of them decided somewhere along the way that the story wasn't worth telling straight.
But there is still one institution that can never be captured.
The family.
And the would-be revolutionaries and revisionists know it too. That’s why they have worked tirelessly to gain access to our kids, and to cause division and mistrust between parents and children.
That's the whole reason we do this work.
Volume 3 of our America's History series is out now, and it does what the museum on the Mall apparently won't—it tells kids the real story of this country. The Founding and the failures; Washington and Jefferson and the Trail of Tears. Not to make them proud, and not to make them ashamed, but to make them informed so that no institution, no matter how prestigious, ever gets to be the voice telling them who they are.
We've extended our America 250 sale through the weekend.
It gives you 25% off the whole site with code USA250.
Honestly though, the books are just tools. The real work is you deciding that you're the one who gets to teach your kids who they are and where they came from—not a museum, not a curriculum committee, and not whoever happens to be running things this decade.
You’ll tell them the story yourself. You’ll tell them the good and the hard parts, and in doing so, you’ll raise the kind of kids who'd walk through that museum, notice what's missing, and know why it’s been reframed.
— Connor
