A Fox News Digital reporter's tour of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History found exhibit after exhibit framing the nation's past through the lens of racial and gender grievance, and now Congress and the White House are pushing back.
The Entertainment Nation exhibit, a sprawling section of the taxpayer-funded museum devoted to sports, television, and music, reads less like a history gallery and more like a progressive seminar. Placards tie basketball jerseys to immigration politics, link superhero movies to Black Lives Matter, and celebrate a television show primarily for its diversity checklist, all inside an institution that draws roughly two-thirds of its billion-dollar annual budget from federal appropriations.
Fox News Digital's Peter D'Abrosca walked through the museum and photographed the displays, quoting placard text verbatim. What he found was a pattern: nearly every exhibit he documented turned an artifact, a jersey, a costume, a gold chain, into a vehicle for left-of-center social commentary. Fox News Digital reached out to the Smithsonian for comment. No response was included in the report.
One display features a Phoenix Suns jersey from 2010, when the team wore "Los Suns" uniforms to protest Arizona's immigration enforcement law. The placard tells visitors:
"In 2010 Arizona empowered police to question anyone on their immigration status, in effect targeting any Spanish-speaking person with brown skin."
That is not a neutral description of the law. Arizona's statute, widely known as SB 1070, was a border-security measure that required officers to check immigration status during lawful stops when reasonable suspicion existed. The Smithsonian's placard skips the legal framework entirely and jumps straight to an accusation of racial profiling, presenting it as settled fact to every family that walks through the door.
The same placard frames the Suns' protest as a stand for "basic principles of equal rights and protection under the law." A visitor who reads only the museum's text would never know that the Supreme Court upheld the law's central provision, the immigration-status check, in 2012.
Across the exhibit, a costume worn by Halle Berry in a 2014 X-Men film sits behind glass. The placard beside it does not discuss the movie's box-office performance, its place in the superhero genre, or Berry's career. Instead it tells visitors:
"As #BlackLivesMatter went viral in the summer of 2014, one of the first Black woman superheroes was fighting discrimination on the big screen."
The connection between a comic-book franchise and a political movement is presented without qualification, as though the two were part of one unified story. That is editorial framing, not history.
Nearby, a display devoted to the television series Glee celebrates the show's cast as "a diverse group of students: Black, white, Asian, straight, LGBTQ+, disabled, brassy, rebellious, shy, and geeky." The placard praises the program for exemplifying the motto "See the world not as it is, but as it should be." The exhibit headline declares that Glee "celebrated the arts, and, most importantly, humanity."
A taxpayer-funded history museum chose to devote wall space to a network TV show, and the curatorial takeaway was not about the show's ratings, cultural reach, or place in television history, but about its cast's identity categories. That choice tells you where the museum's priorities sit.
The exhibit also includes a jersey worn by Jason Collins, identified as "the first active and openly gay NBA player," and a hat Dr. Anthony Fauci wore while throwing the ceremonial first pitch at a Washington Nationals game after COVID-19 shutdowns paused the baseball season. Both items are presented without critical context, Collins's jersey as a milestone of inclusion, Fauci's hat as a memento of public health leadership.
Not every display in the exhibit is as easy to dismiss. A section focused on the 1960s and 70s features Bill Russell, the Boston Celtics legend who won eleven championships and five MVP awards. The placard describes Russell as "a defensive powerhouse on the court who played offense against racism" and notes his role in staging what it calls "the first NBA game boycott" in 1961, when he led Black teammates in a protest against racial discrimination.
Russell's civil rights record is well-documented, and a museum of American history has every reason to tell that story. But the exhibit's curatorial lens treats every sports figure the same way, as a vessel for progressive politics, and that flattens the difference between Russell's genuine courage and what comes next.
A few steps away, the museum honors rapper Nipsey Hussle, born Ermias Asghedom, with a gold chain, a crew neck sweatshirt, and a notepad of handwritten lyrics. The placard calls him a "Grammy Award-winning rapper" whose "political ethos was as strong as his rap" and praises his activism and community reinvestment. It refers to his death as an "untimely passing."
What the placard does not mention is that Asghedom was a self-identified affiliate of the Rollin' 60s Crips street gang who rapped about violence and drugs. It does not mention that he was shot and killed by Eric Holder Jr., described in reporting as a fellow gang member, after Asghedom confronted Holder and accused him of cooperating with law enforcement. The exhibit's version of Hussle's life is scrubbed clean of the very street violence his music depicted.
A historian who recently visited the museum for the first time in over a decade reached a similar conclusion: the institution has traded education for activism.
The Fox News Digital tour is not an isolated complaint. On July 6, 2026, the White House Domestic Policy Council released a 162-page report following what it described as a year-long investigation into the museum's practices and exhibitions. National Review reported that the document accuses Smithsonian leaders of using the museum as their "prime tool" to reshape America's core narratives with a left-wing, revisionist agenda.
The report's language is blunt. It states that the museum's mission has gone "from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country." A separate passage, cited by the Washington Times, declares that the Smithsonian "under its current leadership and current interpretive ideology, cannot be trusted to tell America's story honestly and in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic."
Museum Director Anthea Hartig has not helped her own case. She has stated publicly that the museum worked "to reframe the traditional celebratory narrative of U.S. history" and called history a "prime tool of social justice." A White House Domestic Policy Council summary of her views notes that Hartig believes the museum profession must "problematize the 250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026" and that "loving America is very complicated."
That is the director of the nation's flagship history museum, in her own words, describing her job as complicating Americans' love for their own country, with taxpayer money.
The White House report accusing Smithsonian leadership of radical activism has only intensified scrutiny of how the institution spends its federal dollars.
The political response has been swift. DOGE Subcommittee Chairman Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, demanded that Director Hartig testify before Congress about the museum's exhibits. The New York Post reported that Burchett's letter frames the issue around the Smithsonian's funding structure:
"As an organization that receives 62 percent of its funds from the federal government, the Smithsonian Institution should serve the American people, not promote an ideologically charged agenda."
President Trump went further. He ordered Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the National Park Service to install warning signs at the museum's entrances. The Washington Examiner reported that the signs read: "Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don't want you to love your country."
Hartig pushed back, stating: "As we continue to fact-check the report, we unwaveringly attest that it does not fairly or accurately characterize the full body of work at the museum." But she did not dispute any specific exhibit text or placard language cited in the White House report or in Fox News Digital's tour.
The administration had already signaled its posture months earlier, when Trump signed an executive order in March titled "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," targeting Smithsonian funding for programs advancing what the order called "divisive narratives" and "improper ideology." The Smithsonian receives roughly $1 billion a year, with about two-thirds coming from federal appropriations, a funding structure that gives Congress and the White House considerable leverage.
Historian Dr. Jody Edward Ginn, who analyzed the museum's exhibits, found that a new display features three times more liberal items than conservative ones. That ratio, in an institution funded by all Americans, is the kind of imbalance that invites exactly the oversight now bearing down on the Smithsonian's leadership.
The president's order to post warning signs outside the museum marked one of the most visible confrontations between the administration and a federally funded cultural institution.
Meanwhile, the administration's broader effort to cut ties with progressive organizations inside the federal footprint has extended well beyond the Smithsonian. The Interior Department recently severed 43 progressive group partnerships and pulled more than $4 million in funding.
And outside voices have piled on. A Heritage Foundation legal expert demanded a full leadership overhaul, calling some of the museum's exhibits indefensible.
The Smithsonian National Museum of American History sits on the National Mall. Millions of families visit every year expecting to see the story of their country, its struggles, its triumphs, and the people who built it. What they find instead, exhibit by exhibit, is a curatorial staff that treats American history as a problem to be diagnosed rather than a story to be told.
A basketball jersey becomes a lecture on racial profiling. A superhero costume becomes a Black Lives Matter display. A television show is celebrated not for its craft but for its identity categories. A gang-affiliated rapper's violent history is erased so he can be repackaged as a community hero. And the museum's own director describes her mission as complicating Americans' love for their country.
None of this happened by accident. These are deliberate curatorial choices, made by people who hold specific political views, funded by taxpayers who were never asked whether they wanted their history museum turned into a progressive classroom.
When the people running a national museum believe that loving America is "very complicated," the rest of us are entitled to ask a simple question: why are we still paying them to teach our kids about it?
