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Democrats who cheered the toppling of statues of American heroes such as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt in 2020, are suddenly deeply concerned that the Trump administration is seeking to curate the Smithsonian museums to better express American exceptionalism.
Please, spare us.
Take Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota and self-professed white guy taco connoisseur, who took to X this week.
WHITE HOUSE REVIEWING ALL SMITHSONIAN MUSEUM, EXHIBIT CONTENT BEFORE AMERICA 250 CELEBRATION IN 2026
“If you’re trying to erase history, you’re on the wrong side of it,” he wrote. But where was this pious outrage when protesters illegally tore down a 90-year-old Christopher Columbus statue at his state capitol in 2020?
That erasure of history was done by an angry mob, with no process. I know, because I read all about it in a 2022 article with the fluffy bubblegum title, “Meet the Indigenous Activist Who Toppled Minnesota’s Christopher Columbus Statue.”
Care to take a guess where that article was published? I swear, I’m not making this up: It was in the Smithsonian Magazine.
Here’s a gem from the apologia, sympathetically describing the vandalism, “‘It’s a beautiful thing because we have suffered from what [Columbus] did to us,’ said Dorene Day, an Ojibwe woman who brought several of her children and her grandchildren to the protest.”
I’m sure you will be shocked to know that the Smithsonian article did not quote a single Columbus supporter, or even acknowledge that such a position was remotely possible. It basically lamented that the statue had not come down sooner.
This is exactly the kind of one-sided, far-left version of history that President Trump and his administration seek to rectify with their review of the museums’ offerings.
Don’t get me wrong, the Smithsonian is a wonderful institution. But the leftist lean has been clear for a long time, including the initial exclusion of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas from the African American History museum.
This speaks to an issue that goes back much farther than the radicalism of 2020. For decades, perhaps half a century, progressives have held hegemonic control over our cultural and historical institutions; Their rule went all but unchallenged.
In their version of events, America is always at fault for the oppression of Americans and pretty much everything else that’s wrong in the world. One display about Cuban immigration blames U.S. intervention in Latin America and entirely leaves out the name Fidel Castro.
This all raises the question of who gets to decide how we tell the story of our nation?
In 2020, under the approving gaze of Democrats, it was protesters who illegally made the decisions. And even when statues were removed “officially,” it never involved a referendum, rather wokesters just formed little committees and had their way with our history.
In their version of events, America is always at fault for the oppression of Americans and pretty much everything else that’s wrong in the world.
According to a recent poll, only 37% of Democrats do not think there is anything to celebrate as the United States turns 250 years old next year. This is because the elites in the academy and our cultural institutions have instilled this version of events in the “well educated.”
The story of history changes over time. It was not until the 1950s, for example, that the Crusades began to be looked at as some kind of racist, colonizing enterprise, and today, it is being revisited by some scholars, viewed more as a needed defensive counterattack against Muslim aggression.
This is not to say that one version of events, be they about the Crusades or the Civil War, is right or wrong. But what is wrong is to ignore the arguments in favor of American greatness so as to only expose our dark underbelly.
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Essentially, somewhere along the line, the decision was made that patriotism does not belong in the museum. It is a bizarre stance that flies in the face of the very history of museums, and there is no reason for the Trump administration to let this fester any longer.
Walz and the statue-toppling hypocrites really need to sit this one out. They have already proven that they will happily destroy history to suit their agenda, so they have no leg to stand on in denying conservatives a seat at the Smithsonian table.
The process to make changes to the Smithsonian under Trump are open, public, and transparent. Finally, this can be a national debate and not just leftists forcing anti-American ideas down our throats.
This process is a lot more than we ever got in 2020, when history was simply taken from us. Many Americans, from coast to coast, welcome it.
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