On July 4, the White House Domestic Policy Council issued a 162-page report titled Saving America’s Story. The authors of the report are not named, but Vince Haley, who chairs the Council, and Russel Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, were involved in its making. A letter from Haley and Vought to the Secretary of the Smithsonian, December 18, 2025, makes this clear. 

Saving America’s Story treats the Smithsonian Institution, “one of the Nation’s greatest civic treasures,” as having failed “in the basic task of illuminating our heritage.” What follows is not a polemic but an indictment in the form of closely documented scholarship. The central point of Saving America’s Story is that the Smithsonian “has abandoned historical scholarship for political activism.”

The Smithsonian, however, has many defenders, among them the leadership of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), who rightly point out that the museum’s account of American history sits happily with the views of most academic American historians. That, in turn, validates the thesis of the “Vanderbilt report,” the recently released study of the humanities, including history, decrying the politicization of these fields. The 10 scholars who wrote the Vanderbilt report, titled The State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences, provided a very cautious account. I don’t expect they will declare themselves on the side of Saving America’s Story, though in many respects it makes their point better than they made it themselves: the OAH historians, at least, have committed themselves to an agenda of subordinating American history to their effort to define American experience as the story of “conflict, struggle, and diversity” among identity groups. 

Such “conflict, struggle, and diversity” are surely part of our history. The question is whether that lens is wide enough to capture America as a whole. Saving America’s Story makes a powerful case that it is not. The Smithsonian, like the OAH historians, has fallen into the habit of foregrounding complaint over achievement, grievance over gratitude, and injustice over all. The common history of a nation that built itself out of the wilderness to become the freest and most prosperous nation in human history.

Voices raised in anger against Saving America’s Story have plenty of access to the channels of public communication. Those raised in support of Saving America’s Story are fewer. So few in fact that Google AI asserts, “There are no writers defending the White House’s claims.” Ha. Google, you may not like Roger Kimball, but he is indubitably a writer and plainly a defender of the White House’s claims. I suggest you Google The Spectator, where he succinctly explains that “The Smithsonian Hates America.”

Readers who are not Google might find spending a few hours reading the report itself to be time well spent. Saving America’s Story provides a cornucopia—what might say a Smithsonian—of detail on the museum’s “shift from history to activism.” You may think you have heard enough preposterous claims from the political left to last a lifetime, but make room for a few more. 

Rather than cite the numerous outrages, let me conclude by citing Smithsonian Director Anthea M. Hartig’s “favorite things” in the museum’s collection of 1.8 million objects. These include—page 25 of the report:

1. The “outfits worn by childbearing servants in Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale” because the “costumes have been worn by activists in several high-profile demonstrations, including those for women’s reproductive rights”;
   
2. The “homemade and hand-painted butterfly wings … collected from a young Nebraskan activist who was marching on Capitol Hill in 2018” because “Monarch wings are an important symbol to undocumented organizers as their annual journey across the North American continent speaks to the migration, survival, and transformation of many immigrants”;
   
3. Billie Jean King’s tennis outfit because she was a “social justice pioneer” who defeated a man in “the battle of the sexes tennis match”; and
   
4. A statue created by “agricultural activists” depicting Lady Liberty as a Hispanic immigrant worker carrying a basket of tomatoes.

These should summon not outrage but contempt. To preside over the physical artifacts of all American history and find yourself enamored of such trifles is sad. Hartig’s fondness for images of Monarch butterfly wings, I might add, is not a one-off. As a symbol of illegal aliens crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S., it appears in numerous places in the museum and is part of the Smithsonian’s effort to redefine American identity to include non-citizens. 

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