The Smithsonian Institution gets about $1 billion a year from American taxpayers. In return, it runs a “decolonization working group” and a program to preserve the history of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Fox News Digital did something the mainstream press should have done years ago: it looked up who actually runs the Smithsonian. What they found was exactly what anyone paying attention already suspected. Roughly two dozen people in leadership positions or curatorial roles at the Smithsonian’s flagship history museum previously worked for Democratic political offices or left-wing nonprofits. The hiring pipeline runs straight from progressive advocacy to the taxpayer-funded institutions meant to tell the country its own story.
The Smithsonian called itself “nonpartisan” and said “politics does not factor into our hiring practices.” This is the standard non-answer that institutions deploy when caught. The facts speak for themselves. When you spend a decade filling a hiring office with people whose professional identity is organized around progressive ideology, you get a museum that uses its exhibits to, in the words of one curator’s official biography, stitch “social justice throughout the Americas.” You get a Center for Restorative History that says it exists to “spotlight the people and stories that have been excluded from our national narrative using the principles of restorative justice.” You get a decolonization working group sitting inside the division responsible for exhibits about American presidents.
Republicans in Congress have been pushing back. The Trump administration ordered signs placed outside the National Museum of American History directing visitors to a White House report criticizing the museum’s portrayal of American history. Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas has been calling out the pattern in hearings. Democrats are howling that it’s political interference. The irony is thick enough to cut.
The real political interference happened years ago, quietly, through hiring decisions and DEI-focused internship programs. The cure for that is what Democrats are now calling an attack on the institution.
The Smithsonian’s defenders will say the museum has always reflected evolving scholarly consensus, that history is complicated. None of that requires a decolonization working group. None of that requires eleven consecutive years of a hiring director with Democratic Party credentials. None of that requires preserving BLM movement history as a flagship program while complaints about the treatment of the Founding Fathers pile up.
