ROGER KIMBALL: Odysseus Visits the Smithsonian.
I said that the best entertainment I enjoyed last week was the cross-examination—not to say the thorough exposure and humiliation—of Anthea Hartig. And the best of the best, I thought, was the brilliant surgical evisceration conducted by freshman representative Brandon Gill (R-TX). In under 5 minutes, he performed an elegant posterior sagittal anorectoplasty on Hartig’s long tenure at the National Museum of American History. And he did it by the simple, revelatory expedient of confronting her with the Smithsonian’s own public educational materials. “Are you a white supremacist?” he asked. “Oh no, no,” replied Hartig, smiling weakly. “Do you think we all have implicit biases?” asked Gill. “If so, what are yours?” Oh dear. “Do you think it is important to be polite?” Gill wondered. “Oh yes,” quoth Hartig, perhaps thinking that if she said she approved of politeness, Gill would be polite to her. No such luck.
Politeness, you see, is one of the many bourgeois virtues that literature distributed by the Smithsonian has identified as a symptom of white supremacy. Other behaviors and attitudes that raise the alarm about lurking white supremacist tendencies are hard work, rational thinking, respect for private property, delayed gratification, and rugged individualism.
You think that I am making this up, but I am not. It’s all there in an official NMAH brochure called “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States.” File it under “Things are always worse than you think.” Here’s a thought experiment: What if these habits and behaviors really were signs of “whiteness” or “white supremacy”? What then? Or to put it another way, how much of a racist would you have to be to promulgate a brochure like “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States”? (It would be interesting to know whether most of the authors of that odious document were themselves white. I’d wager most of them were liberal white women.)
Thanks to Proposition 65, Sacramento requires labels on just about everything warning about a possible cancer risk. (Or as Consumer Reports quips, “Why California Thinks Your Couch Will Give You Cancer.”) Should the Smithsonian have warning labels about its ideological capture?
Once again, I’ll remind you the Smithsonian said the anti-slavery Benjamin Franklin conducted electroshock experiments on slaves.
With no evidence to prove it.
And boatloads of evidence to the contrary. https://t.co/pbh6mz5ZbQ
— Amy Curtis (@RantyAmyCurtis) July 25, 2026
Incidentally, here’s the excerpt from the page at the Smithsonian that sorta kinda insinuates that Franklin’s research assistants for his electrical experiments may have been “an indentured servant or an enslaved person, although he never mentioned them in reports of his work:”
