Congress must use its often-neglected power over the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents to remove Lonnie Bunch III, Anthea Hartig, and other of the museum’s leaders—that is, if it wants to reverse the capture of this national treasure. To be fair, it’s not as if these leaders seized the museums alone, by stealth overnight, as in some Hollywood movie.

Indeed, their thirst for leftist activism was why these men and women were thrust into their positions at the height of immense societal change in 2019-2020. To completely fix museums’ indoctrination problem, we must all reflect on how to fix the museum-industrial complex—the accrediting institutions, the funders, the history associations, the museum professions, and the art history departments that instruct them.

Not that this would absolve the Smithsonian leaders. As I testified at two congressional hearings on back-to-back days two weeks ago—one of those times sitting right next to Hartig—Congress must clean house in the world’s largest museum system by working with the governing Board of Regents, whose members it appoints.

Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian, Hartig, the director of its National Museum of American History, and other leaders now use museums under their charge not to preserve and pass on American history and culture, but to lure visitors to taking a dim view of America.

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The White House is right to act, as it has with a recent report detailing the history museum’s activism, and with executive orders that demand that the Smithsonian correct course. The two congressional hearings helped clear the air. The executive leaders of the Smithsonian museums are most responsible for the skewed presentation of American history, art, and culture in the system’s 21 museums, which now depict the country as structurally oppressive and systemically racist, including in the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Portrait Gallery, and the National Museum of the American Latino.

Bunch and Hartig, both promoted to their positions in 2019, are intricately linked with the museum-world blob. They shaped its views on using museums as instruments of social justice, and the organizations dutifully thrust them forward.

For years, Bunch has played a leading role in the profession’s main accrediting body, the American Alliance of Museums (AAM); Hartig was until two years ago the president of the Organization of American Historians. This primary scholarly organization, which publishes the Journal of American History, has become her staunchest defender.

As early as 2000, Bunch was writing in AAM’s magazine that “the museum field is awash in whiteness,” and insisting that “staff diversity move to the top of the priority list for all our museums.” Hartig, speaking as director of the California Historical Society in 2014, was already demanding to “empower people to use history as a tool of social justice and as a tool of critical analysis.”

In his AAM article, Bunch demanded that the accreditation process be used not just to promote diversity but also “more sophisticated interpretive programming.” It is precisely through this “interpretive” work, which the AAM now does push, that Smithsonian leaders in recent years have been able to do such things as smear Ben Franklin in an exhibit by suggesting, without offering any evidence, that he may have performed electroshock experiments on slaves.

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In 2015, as founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Bunch expanded the demand for diversity to “getting funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts or the Rockefeller.” Sure enough, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest supporter of arts and humanities in the country and one of the Smithsonian’s largest funders, announced in 2020 that it would start “prioritizing social justice in all of its grantmaking.”

In 2022, already entrenched as Smithsonian head honcho and acting as co-chair of the AAM’s “Excellence in DEAI Task Force,” Bunch demanded DEI training of museum staffers to help them jettison “clear structural racism and other forms of oppression.” The task force’s report appealed for “the actions required for transformational change.” It recommended a “toolkit” to train the museum staff and serve as “just-in-time resources and tools that their staff, board, and key stakeholders can access to deepen their learning and practice skills between formal learning sessions.” The toolkit calls for extinguishing such “characteristics of white supremacy” as “perfectionism,” a “sense of urgency,” and “worship of the written word.”

The Smithsonian leaders, in other words, not only fail to require that museum professionals overcome biases that studies show lean heavily to the left—they go out of their way to formally train them on how to frame exhibitions to achieve the societal transformation they lust after.

They must go. Cultural knowledge is not passed in the bloodstream; national museums play a vital role in the transmission of heritage. Americans are being asked to fund their own cultural erasure when they fork over $1.1 billion a year to fund the Smithsonian museums.

An overhaul should not stop with only Bunch and Hartig, but all of America’s museum culture, starting with the Smithsonian.