Blight At the Museum

Culture Left-wing curators make exhibits of their own stupidity. You just can’t trust archaeologists anymore. Earlier this year, some claimed to have found the bones of Ivar the Boneless. It can’t have been him, then, can it? Dead Viking warlords aren’t the only ones having their remains dug up and rearranged into new and misleading forms. On July 4th, which I'm told is historically significant in some way or other, the Trump administration released a scathing new report on the politicization of museums. Called “Saving America’s Story,” the document reveals how the Smithsonian Institution—particularly its National Museum of American History—has, by the open admission of its director Anthea Hartig, endeavored to turn the preservation of the past into “a tool of social justice.” Hartig, as the report also notes, has claimed that she was “propped up” in life “by the cushions of whiteness and the pillows of the bourgeoisie,” so naturally Trump has decided to pick a large public pillow-fight with her in return. This doesn’t sound like a very difficult thing to do, as Hartig has openly stated her intention to “problematize” this year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by moving away from a traditional “Anglo-centric” focus on the event, perhaps by claiming the US actually gained its independence from China or Uruguay. Trump’s latest salvo in this duel has been the placement of large signs outside Smithsonian sites, alerting visitors to the fact many of the displays within are intentionally misleading, and directing them toward unnamed alternative sources of “accurate information regarding American history” instead. As Trump is the same man who once said America’s Continental Army successfully “took over the airports” in 1775, perhaps his signs will redirect tourists toward Washington’s Museum of Science Fiction (admittedly, this whimsical destination hasn’t actually opened yet, but to those with such a profound grasp of chronology as Trump and Hartig, surely such a tiny quibble won’t matter). To return to the report: it notes that visitors to the Smithsonian will find “no major exhibit” relating to the Founding Fathers in which they are not “introduced chiefly through their connection to slavery.” And if they don’t really have much connection to slavery, then why not just make one up? An exhibit devoted to Benjamin Franklin’s discoveries about electricity arbitrarily wonders whether he ever decided to stage experiments in running high-electric voltage through the body of “an indentured servant or an enslaved person.” If so, the exhibition reluctantly admits, “he never mentioned them in reports of his work.” Hard to prove a negative, I suppose. Within Hartig’s expertly problematized Smithsonianland, absolutely everything that exists in America now, or has ever existed in the past, is condemned as racist, sexist or homophobic, no matter how trivial it may be. Visitors are solemnly informed that "ukuleles are both a product of U.S. imperialism and a potent symbol of Native Hawaiian resistance” and that Mickey Mouse carries the “vestiges of longstanding traditions of blackface minstrelsy.” The museum has also selected weird new talismans to place in Perspex cases for its visitors to gaze upon. One such artifact is a gown with giant butterfly wings sewn onto the back, which someone named Jairo Javier Morales wore to his college graduation ceremony in 2020 in order to “expand the boundaries of belonging” by publicly “coming out” as “queer, Mexican and undocumented” in it. (One wonders whether ICE has lepidopterists on staff). Trump’s report frames all this as being specifically about undermining age-old straight American values in favor of brand-new gay Mexican ones, but it is in fact part of a wider movement to convert museums all over the world into vehicles for anti-Western sentiment. The winner of the European Museum of the Year Award for 2025, for instance, went to England’s Manchester Museum, and not just because it contained an entire gallery full of Andy Burnham’s favorite vintage 1980s Smiths t-shirts. The Museum reopened after a major refit in 2023. I would have guessed this was meant to spruce the place up, maybe give the staff a chance to sharpen the T-Rex teeth and bleach the mummy bandages. Apparently not. When the museum reopened, it had been transformed into a giant monument to the modish political preoccupations of the present. Yes, the dinosaurs and the dead are still there, but radically repurposed. Manchester Museum’s director, Esme Ward, emoted that: Manchester Museum was born of incredible civic spirit, but it was also born of empire and of racism and we have to grapple with the legacy of that. We want to do that in a way that recognizes the harm, but also encourages healing. One way of doing this was to give away many of the building’s exhibits in acts of “cultural repatriation”, such as the 174 “ritual objects” it returned to Australasian Aborigines in 2023. “We believe this is the future of museums,” said Esme Ward at the time: becoming empty buildings. Manchester Museum does actually contain some literal empty glass boxes, said to “contain” species driven extinct by evil white industrialism. So, not the Giant Moa (killed off by New Zealand’s Maori) then. Even stuffed birds, Giant Moa or otherwise, are denounced in Manchester; there are more male avian samples than female ones in their inventory, curators lament, because the Victorian “cis, white, straight men” who collected them were all sexists. This can also be seen in how the antique taxidermy displays are arranged with a mommy bird, a daddy bird, and nests of baby birds, in queerphobic attempts to reproduce the oppressive heterosexual “nuclear family”. The remodeled Museum also has a special “Decolonize! Trail”, described as being “an intervention”. Sounds like the curators are in need of one of those themselves. Staff have even sought to somehow “decolonize” their mineral collection: too much alabaster, not enough coal. Manchester Museum aims to be “the most inclusive, imaginative and caring museum you’ll ever visit”. To this end, it contains special “safe spaces” for those who feel too overwhelmed by its exhibits to be able to cope with them. Like anyone at all who happens to possess any genuine knowledge about real-life history, for example. Nor is this mania limited to Manchester. In 2021, Holland’s Rijksmuseum organized an exhibition of paintings all “about” colonialism, most of which were not really about colonialism at all. One, The Pipe Smoker, just showed a man smoking a pipe. But, as a censorious caption helpfully noted, he could only smoke this pipe because, somewhere, many thousands of miles away, some black slaves (who were nowhere pictured by the artist) had probably picked his tobacco for him. A 2022 Hogarth retrospective at England’s Tate Gallery went even further in finding random fictional “connections” between artwork and slavery. One painting showed a white man (Hogarth himself) sitting on a brown chair. Two years after George Floyd, that may as well have been a white man kneeling on a brown chair’s neck, according to the associated caption: The curvaceous chair literally supports him … The chair is made from timbers shipped from the colonies, via routes which also shipped enslaved people. Could the chair also stand in for all those unnamed Black and Brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity? It could, I suppose, be an elaborate, all-encompassing symbol of racial hierarchy and oppression… or it might just be a chair. Another contemporary curatorial trick is to spuriously imply everything within an exhibition space is secretly gay. London’s Imperial War Museum is a prime candidate for such wokeification, as left-wingers tend to be keen on neither war nor imperialism. Far better to transition the institution into the Anti-Imperialist Queer Museum instead, by hijacking captions describing a display about the plastic surgery techniques developed during wartime to give soldiers new lives after literally having their faces burned off on the battlefield to turn it into a musing as to how such techniques could also be used to give male combatants bespoke vaginoplasties. Subscribe Today Get daily emails in your inbox What kind of twisted mind sees the face of a tragically disfigured soldier, and immediately thinks “Give him a new wound down below too?” The kind of twisted mind which now runs many of the West’s most prestigious museums and art galleries. Alongside all the weird, Orwellian ideologues like Anthea Hartig, outfits like the Smithsonian, the Tate and the Rijksmuseum must also employ numerous sane and knowledgeable experts who can see how ridiculous and damaging this all is. So why won’t they stand up and say so? Perhaps, some far future day, someone will dig up all their coffins and announce he’s found the family of Ivar the Spineless.