Miranda Devine: The Smithsonian reeks of communist ideologies that our Founding Fathers would be ashamed of

If you wondered how communism has grabbed a foothold in the United States of America of all places, look no further than the Smithsonian Institution.

The world’s largest and most influential museum has been hijacked by Marxist ideology to teach self-loathing anti-American woke propaganda to its 20 million annual visitors plus 20 million students a year.

The Smithsonian teaches that “politeness,” “punctuality,” “objectivity” and “hard work” is white supremacy, and that Mickey Mouse is a form of blackface, while devoting not one major exhibit to ­George Washington or any of the Founding Fathers.

It does teach that Benjamin Franklin was a vile slave owner who owed his discoveries to his slaves and that Christopher Columbus was a psychopathic killer and racist and that we live on ­stolen land.

Meanwhile, it celebrates transgenderism, bondage and sadomasochism in various sexually explicit exhibits. It says illegal migrants deserve the right to vote.

During the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, the Smithsonian’s woke Secretary Lonnie Bunch sent curators onto the streets to collect trash left behind by arsonists, vandals, looters and useful idiots as “historical artifacts that need to be collected and saved for posterity,” according to the Heritage Foundation, which has been chronicling the downfall of a once-great 179-year-old institution.

Generations of American children have been brought up to revere the Smithsonian.

Yet it abuses its $1.3 billion annual budget — 62% from the taxpayer — to persuade impressionable minds that everything about America is irredeemably racist and evil and must be dismantled.

And the supercilious congressional testimony this week of Smithsonian boss Anthea Hartig shows that she has no intention of changing a thing.

A California transplant who once described herself as “propped up . . . by the cushions of whiteness and the pillows of the bourgeoisie” has described history as a “prime tool of social justice” and noted how “we work to reframe the traditional celebratory narrative of US history for visitors.”

Grilled by Texas Republican Rep. Brandon Gill Tuesday, she dripped with arrogance, defiance and elitist contempt.

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“Is Mickey Mouse racist?” Gill asked her.

“Mickey Mouse is not racist,” she replied.

“According to . . . one of your exhibits, Mickey Mouse represents ‘vestiges of long-standing traditions of blackface minstrelsy.’ Would you describe that as racist?” Gill asked.

Hartig then launched into a waffling mini-dissertation of Mickey’s “historical trajectory” to avoid the question before Gill forced her into admitting she believes that the beloved mouse is “rooted in minstrelsy [with] certain obvious racial overtones.”

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There was a lot more.

“Is it important to be polite?” Gill asked her silkily.

“Yes, sir.”

“Your organization . . . references politeness as a defining characteristic of white-supremacy culture. Ma’am, are you a white supremacist?”

“Hmmm. No, sir,” she said snootily, as if his question were absurd, when it is her museum that she has turned into an expensive laughingstock.

“Would you say the goal of history is to be objective?” Gill asked.

Hartig waffled about “many goals of history.”

Gill then quoted from “a white-supremacy document your organization has promoted for many years under your leadership [that] references objectivity as a defining characteristic of white-supremacy culture.”

Hartig tried to feign ignorance about the document, despite the fact that the Smithsonian has adopted and promoted the MASS Action Toolkit in staff development and educational material since the start of her tenure in 2019.

The screed was developed by a left-wing activist coalition, Museums as Sites for Social Action, that is dedicated to using museums as platforms for social justice, “anti-racism” and “equity” and funded by the DEI-obsessed Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. Smithsonian staffers were even ­involved in its inception.

“It’s not our toolkit,” Hartig said.

Gill pressed her.

“We did not come up with the toolkit.”

Finally she admitted the document has been “used as a reference.”

It doesn’t get much more disingenuous than Hartig’s feigned surprise, unless she has the memory of a goldfish.

In July 2020, it was big news when she was excoriated by the first Trump White House for a Smithsonian exhibit that listed the evils of “whiteness” as “rugged individualism, self-reliance, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification” and so on.

The nuclear family “father, mother, 2.3 children is another dreadful symptom of “whiteness.”

As is the “Scientific Method: Objective, rational linear thinking.”

Whiteness also holds that “Christianity is the norm” and “anything other than Judeo-Christian tradition is foreign.”

You get the drift.

And of course, the unspoken goal is that “whiteness” must be eradicated.

A more depressing or demoralizing message you could not imagine.

Poor James Smithson — the British scientist and 18th-century creature of the Enlightenment who bequeathed his fortune to the US to establish the Smithsonian Institution — must be rolling in his grave.

His instructions were that it be “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” How Hartig and pals must hate that motto.

President Lyndon Johnson later expanded the Smithsonian to include the National Museum of American History in 1964 to focus on American achievement and ­patriotism.

Today it does the ­opposite.

Back in 2020, the White House Domestic Policy Council issued a 162-page report saying the Smithsonian had been captured by a “radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of” ­America.

Hartig’s leadership was blamed for forcing Smithsonian exhibits to be all about “race/identity, gender/sexuality, climate change, immigration/migrations, economic inequality, technological change and nationalism/globalism.”

But nothing was done, and during the Biden years the Smith­sonian only further entrenched its sick wokery.

It’s beyond time that Congress defunds the Smithsonian unless it reverts to its founding principles.