Smithsonian CEO Resigns. He Should Have Been Fired

The Smithsonian Institution has long claimed a special place in American life as a repository of the nation’s accomplishments and a source of inspiration for the world. Lonnie Bunch, who resigned this month as the Smithsonian’s 14^th leader, shattered that vision, portraying American history as a narrative of oppression, rather than the exceptional story of liberty and triumph that it is.

Where Lonnie Bunch went disastrously and insultingly wrong

Bunch departs in the face of President Trump’s effort to return the Smithsonian to its purpose. He leaves behind a team dedicated to using the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex to prosecute their war on American values under the construct of “curatorial independence.”

The Smithsonian is a trust instrumentality of the United States, sits on federal land, and receives more than 70% of its funding from the federal government. Most of its employees are federal civil servants, and it is governed by a 17-member board that consists of the chief justice, vice president, three members appointed by the president pro tempore of the Senate, three appointed by the speaker of the House, and nine nominated by its board and approved by Congress.

Like other federal employees, the Smithsonian’s professionals take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution.” They are charged with advancing the Smithsonian’s mission and the institutions to which they are assigned. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) opened in 1964 to instill in “each citizen a deepened faith in our country’s destiny as champion of individual dignity and enterprise” and “each foreign visitor admiration and respect for our ever-expanding social and technological horizons.”

Bunch and his team have a different goal. Last year, President Trump signed an executive order which observed that:

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. 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. 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. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame. …

The Smithsonian has been rotting from within for a long time

Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology. This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.

Trump’s order directed the vice president as a Smithsonian board member to work to eliminate anti-American ideology from the institution, and asked Congress to defund programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans by race, or recognize men as women.

Two months ago, on July 4, the White House Domestic Policy Council issued an exhaustive report on how “ideological capture” at the NMAH “erases our heritage.” The report concluded that the museum:

[P]urposely presents America as a problematic country irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression. In the Museum’s current telling, the country is, above all, defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and systemic injustice.

Furthermore, the NMAH minimizes the nation’s founders and focuses on their flaws, treats patriotic narratives with suspicion and contempt, and portrays America as a cauldron of oppression.

Three weeks later, NMAH director Anthea Hartig testified before the House Oversight Subcommittee. Her smug and evasive testimony exemplified Bunch’s curatorial class. She claimed the Smithsonian “does not take sides in America’s political debates,” and denied responsibility for many of her museum’s exhibits and materials. Asked whether she intended to use a taxpayer-funded museum to divide Americans along racial lines, she never directly responded. She declined to clarify her presentation last year at UCLA, during which she explained that she sees history as a “prime tool of social justice” and takes an “equity-based, justice forward, community driven” approach to the museum.

How to make America 250 a problem

Hartig believes the museum profession has “to figure out” how to “problematize” the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and that “loving America is very complicated.”

Of course, the Smithsonian should acknowledge slavery, the challenging history of Native Americans, Japanese internment, and other uncomfortable truths that no knowledgeable American denies. The quarrel is about whether America is defined principally by its mistakes, or by its accomplishments and values, and whether a federal trust institution should support America or its enemies.

Those who cherish America, conservative and liberal alike, take the side of American exceptionalism, while far left progressives, socialists, communists, and Islamicists pursue a different paradigm. American liberties allow them peacefully to do so, but not as curators for the Smithsonian institution or any of its museums, libraries, or research centers.

Many on the left have pushed back against Donald Trump’s effort to reform the Smithsonian as a threat to its “independence.” That view is terribly misguided when talking about the primary federally funded and controlled cultural institution. A federal trust instrumentality exists to advance American interests. Its employees do not have the authority or moral right to weaponize it to attack the nation. Their duty is to champion America and unify us, or resign if they decline to do so.

The Smithsonian badly needs new leadership and direction

Supporting America does not require ignoring its flaws. It requires respect for its achievements in absolute terms and relative to other countries. It also requires a belief (or an ability to feign belief) in our political, cultural and economic systems, borders, meritocracy, and the Constitution, including the First, Second, and 10^th Amendments. Not every museum exhibit (or any exhibit) needs a section on intersectionality or social justice. The Air and Space Museum can celebrate Apollo 11 without discussing race. The NMAH can display the Betsy Ross flag without attributing it to a newly-discovered legacy of slavery because 200 years later a racist group adopted it.

The Smithsonian Institution, particularly the NMAH, has corrupted the symbols and stories that unify Americans to question, diminish, and dismantle America’s history, with the goal of rejecting our values and achievements in favor of radical left objectives. That repudiation of American exceptionalism is false and unpatriotic by any ordinary definition of the word.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.