Free the Smithsonian and our history from America-hating elites

“Warning: The exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.”That’s a disclaimer every entrance to the National Museum of American History ought to display, according to a new White House report excoriating the Smithsonian Institution and its flagship museum.But it doesn’t take a 160-page report to show what’s wrong with the Smithsonian — just walk into any of its museums.With a bit of time on my hands in the Chinatown area of Washington, DC, last year, I decided to take a stroll through the National Portrait Gallery.The art is as magnificent as ever, but it seemed every historical portrait had to be accompanied by two sets of explanatory text: one talking about the portrait itself, the other describing its subject’s connection to slavery, however distant.For the Smithsonian’s leadership, it often seems less like slavery is a part of American history — an important and awful part, to be sure — than that American history is part of the story of slavery.That casual impression from the National Portrait Gallery is confirmed by the White House Domestic Policy Council’s Report, “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage.”The National Museum of American History was pitched to Congress in the 1950s as “intended to instill in each citizen a deepened faith in our country’s destiny as champion of individual dignity and enterprise,” as well as to impress foreign visitors with a show of “our ever-expanding social technological horizons.”Yet Anthea Hartig, director of the museum today, has other priorities, including using history as a “prime tool of social justice.”Hartig is white, but rather than punishing herself for her “privilege,” she’s trying to lay a guilt trip on the whole country, using taxpayer dollars to “problematize” the history she’s supposed to preserve.The Smithsonian’...