The left-wing consortium of Smithsonian museums in D.C. have been accused by the Trump Administration of ideological capture on issues of race and gender. In NPR’s July 21 online report, culture reporter Anastasia Tsioulcas covered a congressional hearing featuring House Republicans sharply questioning the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Anthea Hartig.
Tsioulcas did not delve into the details of the Republican arguments against the Smithsonian, but muddled their points into crude accusations to make the conservative criticism sound buffoonish:
In a subcommittee hearing Tuesday, House Republicans sharply questioned the director of the National Museum of American History, Anthea Hartig. The GOP lawmakers' comments closely mirrored the Trump administration's criticisms of the institution she leads as insufficiently patriotic.
NPR's article briefly raised a specific criticism, but kept the details out of it. For example, an exhibit at the National Museum of American History featured "transgender advocate Jazz Jennings," a biological male.
The hearing itself unspooled on strict partisan lines. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) questioned Hartig about an exhibition called "Girlhood," which included mentions of gender identity and puberty. Mace asked, "When was your gender revealed to you, Dr. Hartig?"
At another point, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) asked Hartig, "You intend to use a taxpayer-funded national museum to push a racial narrative that divides Americans by their skin color and guilt?" Hartig, who kept a cool tone throughout the hearing, eventually replied: "So the Smithsonian is a nonpartisan institution we're very proud of."
Just like NPR, leftist museum curators pretend to be nonpartisan. Meanwhile, truly vitriolic attacks on the GOP by Democratic pols were blandly relayed:
Many of the Democrats who spoke at the hearing linked the July 4 report to what they perceive as broader GOP attacks on museums, the arts and education. Rep Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.) spoke about another Smithsonian institution, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, saying: "I'm here as a Black man who grew up in segregation … We will not let you destroy that museum, no matter how long it takes, how many battles are required, how much effort is needed. We will not allow that to happen unless you find a way to kill all of us and walk over our bodies to change history. That history is too sacred, it is too precious, and it will not be erased."
There are no "fact checkers" when it's claimed that Republicans want to destroy a museum. Left out: The African American museum’s 2020 online display of a graphic linking positive traits like hard work, punctuality, and rational thought as presumably unfavorable aspects of “white culture,” which managed to be racist all the way around.
The two-minute audio version of this story on Morning Edition contained only two congressmen: Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) arguing the Smithsonian suggests "history is just an ongoing power struggle between oppressors and the oppressed," and Mfume's wild charges, again with no pushback.
A July 7 interview by Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep was worse, showing a hypocritical respect for Independence Day (to bash Trump), a respect totally absent from NPR, which halted its annual reading of the Declaration of Independence in 2022 and whose past transcripts now carry a prominent trigger warning.
Steve Inskeep, Host: President Trump's administration chose Independence Day weekend to attack the Smithsonian Institution again. The administration accuses the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History here in Washington of, quote, "extreme political activism" for its portrayal of history….Sarah Weicksel joins us next. She's executive director of the American Historical Association….OK. So you've seen the latest accusations against the Smithsonian, which didn't strike me as all that major. They disagreed with a few bits of wording on cards and so forth. What do you make of it?
With a slanted set-up like this by Inskeep, his guest had no choice but to answer in the negative.
Inskeep: You've walked around that museum, I would imagine. Does it distort history, in your view?
Weicksel: It does not distort history. And in fact, the report is misrepresenting the museum's collection and especially the exhibition of extraordinary artifacts that tell the history of the American Revolution. They seem to have missed entirely, for instance, one of the exhibits that takes up the greatest floor space, "The Price Of Freedom," which tells the history of American war.
Inskeep: Wow. Wow. I want to ask briefly in the seconds we have left about Lonnie Bunch, who we heard at the beginning -- first African-American head of the Smithsonian Institution. He has not been fired. He's not been removed. He's not been pushed aside. Are you -- how would you rate his performance over the last year and a half of pressure?
Weicksel: I think that Secretary Bunch has done an extraordinary job….
Inskeep returned to his opening Trump-ruining-July 4 theme, concluding, "On this week after Independence Day weekend, Sarah Weicksel, thanks so much."
PBS’s brief hearing mention on July 21 also emphasized the rebuttals, and PBS’s live coverage of the House oversight hearing was accompanied by an Associated Press story claiming “Many historians are alarmed by the revisionism.”
