Trump’s Righteous Smithsonian Reforms

The Left has been rewriting history since the concept of a Left-Right spectrum was introduced during the 1789 French Revolution. Yet somehow, the Left thinks its revisionism, once in place, must become holy writ. If anyone says, “No, we’re not doing that,” leftists stomp their feet and make childish noises.

That pretty much sums up some of the shock and alarm emanating from progressives regarding the executive order that President Donald Trump issued on the Smithsonian Museum on March 27, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

The gist of the complaint is that it is Trump who is trying to rewrite history. “Hands off our history, Mr. President,” harrumphed The Washington Post’s letters column on April 6, as incensed readers vented their spleen for the umpteenth time on Trump’s latest action. The paper ran another piece on April 7 in which three columnists discussed the order. It was headlined “The Smithsonian is the latest battleground in the fight for America’s story,” again suggesting that it had been Trump—and not the Smithsonian—who initiated cultural hostilities.

In yet another piece, one of the authors, Monica Hesse, chided the executive order for stating that under the Left’s revision of history, “Our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”

“For who?” Hesse asked, ungrammatically. “Whose happiness did we advance? Whose happiness did we overlook?”

This is typical leftist cant, and the preferred explanation for why leftists must rewrite history. Because America hasn’t been perfect—because, for example, it once engaged in the heinous and disgusting practice of slavery, just like every society before it—it cannot claim to have advanced liberty.

But America’s focus on liberty is its hallmark, precisely why over 100 million immigrants have come here since the 1840s. That includes the 4.6 million black immigrants living here now, who make up with their children more than 20% of the overall black population.

Before the present outbreak of mass hysteria regarding our history, the reality that the rest of the world sees America as a beacon of freedom was taught in schools without any hangups.

But my favorite piece agonizing about the executive order was in the New Yorker, by longtime editor David Remnick. A couple of things make it special. The first is the overwrought handwringing, and how Remnick brazenly leaves out that the Left’s rewriting of American history forced Trump to act.

“This urge to police the past is hardly unique to the Trump Administration. It is the reflexive obsession of autocrats everywhere,” he tsk-tsks. Not only is “Orange Man Bad,” but he’s the latest in a history of “autocrats.”

Remnick also takes aim at me, and in the lede, no less. He notes that soon after Trump’s election, “Mike Gonzalez, a contributor to Project 2025 [gasp!], and Armen Tooloee, the former chief of staff to the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, elaborated on the new Administration’s martial maneuvers, writing in the Wall Street Journal that, in order ‘to put a spike through the heart of woke,’ the White House was duty bound to ‘retake control of museums, starting with the Smithsonian Institution’.”

Yes, David, we wrote that because under Secretary Lonnie Bunch, the Smithsonian is a fully signed-up member of the crusade to “decolonize” our collective mind. Bunch has embraced every attempt to rewrite history, from Black Lives Matter, to the 1619 Project, to diversity, equity, and inclusion (whose trainings are themselves attempts at rewiring our brains).

Soon after taking the helm of the Smithsonian in 2019, Bunch told the house magazine he wanted the museums entrusted to him to “legitimize” the 1619 Project. He wanted “everybody that thought about the 1619 Project” to see “that the Smithsonian had fingerprints on it.”

The New York Times was crystal clear that the mendacious project sought “to reframe the country’s history.” For her part, its founder Nikole Hannah-Jones told the Harvard Gazette that its telling of slavery “would corrupt and corrode and shape everything about the United States.”

France’s Jacobins changed everything from the names of the days of the week, to the months in the calendar, to thousands of street names that referred to Catholic saints. Every leftist since then, from Marx to Lenin to Pol Pot, from Castro to Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, has tried to revise history.

And they have their reasons to do so. What characterizes the Left—and why it’s so difficult to abandon the Left-Right spectrum—is a lust for destroying the social order. The intelligent right, as Edmund Burke understood, manages necessary change by maintaining what is valuable.

The Left doesn’t always purge historical facts or fabricate events, the way Stalin airbrushed out of photographs accomplices who had fallen into disfavor, sent to the Gulag, or murdered. Leftists sometimes pretend that official history has been written to preserve the present order of things. “White history is the norm of history,” writes DiAngelo in White Fragility.

But if you agree with Trump that maybe we don’t want to corrupt and corrode everything about the United States, and that the Smithsonian shouldn’t be in the business of legitimizing such activity, then you see why we must stop this revisionism.

Originally published by the Washington Examiner

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