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The man most responsible for transforming the Smithsonian Institution from America’s attic into American revision has resigned. Lonnie Bunch, who has served as Smithsonian secretary since 2019 and has been affiliated with the institution for nearly thirty-eight years, announced his departure last month amid an escalating clash with the Trump administration over the direction of the nation’s premier cultural complex.
Bunch’s fingerprints are on nearly every element of the Smithsonian’s leftward ideological drift. Before becoming secretary, he founded the National Museum of African American History and Culture — a museum that sparked its own controversy for an exhibit describing traits like self-reliance, hard work, and objective thinking as characteristics of whiteness. Under his leadership as secretary, the Smithsonian added to the systematic anti-American propaganda of its museums.
The National Museum of American History — the flagship institution we reported on this summer — saw its mission statement rewritten to remove references to the richness of American history and replace them with intersectional critical theory language. Its director repeatedly delivered land acknowledgments claiming the United States sits on stolen ground. A Smithsonian video production called The Indian Problem asserted that the U.S. government committed genocide against American Indians. Flag Day and Independence Day programming went dark during America’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary year. The Founders were “problematized,” while drag queens got exhibit space.
Lonnie Bunch and his allies consistently claimed they were presenting a nuanced, neutral, unbiased narrative of America’s story, but we all knew better. Hillsdale College’s Matthew Spalding, who testified before Congress on this earlier this year, said it well: that the Smithsonian bureaucrats killed America’s story. What they replaced it with was not nuance, but propaganda.
A healthy love of country neither overlooks our past and flaws, nor do we celebrate them. Over the course of our 250 years, each generation (until now) has been equipped with the knowledge of America’s founding principles, a deep reverence for our liberties, and a love for our nation. That’s what the Smithsonian was built to cultivate, but under Lonnie Bunch it has been doing the opposite. It has served as an arm of the radical Marxist erasure of our past.
Bunch’s departure is an opportunity to return to a love of country. Whether or not the Smithsonian seizes that opportunity depends entirely on who comes next.
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