Column: Is the Smithsonian racist? MAGA makes a case using Newspeak

If you haven’t heard that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is a hotbed of “anti-White activism,” “illegal alien activism” and “transgender activism,” the Trump administration and its MAGA allies in Congress have some news for you.

You can read all about it in what news accounts have called a “scathing” 162-page report released July 4 by the White House. It accuses the museum and its leaders of presenting a “radical view” of American history.

U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, echoed that language in his opening remarks to a hearing titled “Rewriting American History: Examining the Smithsonian’s Efforts to Reshape the Past,” although the alleged “reshaping” amounted largely to a collection of carefully selected examples.

Burchett claimed the American history museum is pushing radical left-wing narratives, a view that echoed President Donald Trump’s earlier claims, but I cannot confirm that Trump has ever read a book, including his own.

Burchett also noted that these narratives are driven by museum Director Anthea Hartig, who believes that history is a “prime tool of social justice” — as if that’s a bad thing.

MAGA’s rhetorical lexicon is full of terms the movement has appropriated from the left, such as “social justice,” which they endow with axiomatically bad connotations. “Social justice warriors” rank next to “wokeness” among the threats supposedly posed by the left.

Seeing lawmakers meet to decide whose version of history is permissible reminds me of what the scholarly Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about censorship. It “reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is the hallmark of an authoritarian regime.” Heaven help us.

Although the Smithsonian Institution encompasses 21 museums, the National Zoo, libraries, archives and research and education centers, the White House report particularly takes aim at the National Museum of American History.

The report accuses the museum’s leadership of adopting “an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”

That’s pretty grim, and I’m sure Trump approves. It’s quite a novel way to look at the institution, in my view, and I say that having made countless visits with friends and family over the years.

The report is written in language designed to conceal as much as it reveals. It reminds me, as bureaucratic documents often do, of the rules and manufactured “truth” decreed by Big Brother in the authoritarian “Newspeak” of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”