One of the first things any proud tourist to Washington, D.C., does is tour the Smithsonian museums. Supposedly, these museums are home to the accumulation of American exceptionalism and impact in history, art, culture, and science. Unfortunately, that is no longer true.
To expose the truth, on July 4, the White House released “Saving America’s Story”; the report presented an objective observation of the degree to which biased liberal propaganda has parasitically burrowed itself into our national museums. Stating that “Rather, it is that Museum leadership has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”
The report solely focuses on the Museum of American History — which has more sections on drag queens than the founding fathers — so, living just a mile away from the National Mall, I wondered, “How politically biased are the other Smithsonian museums?” That afternoon, I decided to see if I could trust the National Museum of the American Indian, and the short answer is: no.
The National Museum of the American Indian decides to focus more on pseudo-historical divisive controversies than actual history. The Smithsonian’s new liberal, revisionist history appears to have shifted the institution’s attention toward anti-American propaganda. Simply walking around, you can sense that the museum is more interested in promoting racial division and anti-American sentiment than in presenting the history of the United States and the many American Indian nations.
For months, the Trump administration has expressed its disapproval of the liberalization of American history at the Smithsonian museums. In March 2026, President Donald Trump released an exxecutive order titled, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which demanded that the Smithsonian stop “replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” Despite the administration’s glare sternly focused on the Smithsonian parading around propaganda, the Smithsonian has made no efforts to mitigate its public-relations disaster or correct its falsehoods and errors.
Ironically, the Smithsonian Institution’s mission statement includes the phrase, “shaping the future by preserving heritage.” Yet the Smithsonian museums have objectively failed in their own mission to preserve American heritage. Their mission is flatly denied by a contradicting plaque in the museum that reads, “Each generation of Americans decides all over again what the events mean.” The museum is more infatuated with narrating a subjective history than the patriotic, objective history it stated as its mission.
Opening the doors of the museum, you are greeted by an advertisement for their magnum opus, Nation to Nation, with its plaque summarizing the new exhibit as “Nation to Nation details how treaty making evolved from the exchange of ceremonial gifts to complex negotiations in which Native Nations sought to protect their sovereignty, and the United States sought to confiscate Native lands.” Just one sentence in, Nation to Nation describes itself as an atrociously revisionist exhibit. It has become undeniable that the purpose of these museums is to demonize U.S. history.
Entering the exhibit, you are bombarded with inaccurate statements such as, “They [Europeans] relied on Indian generosity. … The favor, ultimately, was not repaid,” and “Colonists indifferent to Indian rights illegally settled on lands that had been set aside for our ancestors in treaties with the English government.” These blatant half-truths line the exhibit, ultimately naively assuming people will just accept fanciful lies over the complex history between the U.S. and American Indians.
Egregiously, the Smithsonian Museum of American History forgot about the Founding Fathers, but the Smithsonian conveniently remembered to find cherry-picked quotes from them for the Museum of the American Indian. They state that Thomas Jefferson proudly wrote about Indians, “The end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal.” It is impossible that the same man who wrote, “all men are created equal” wanted to exterminate an entire race of people. What is most likely is that a portion of a writing was removed from its context and perverted for their own use.
AMERICA’S HISTORY MUSEUM FORGOT TO MENTION THE FOUNDING
Continuing to promote the lie of systemic extermination, the Smithsonian adds, “Even well-meaning advocates of American Indians believed that the modern world had no room for Native Nations. … They believed that Native Nations had to be absorbed into an American notion of Civilization at whatever cost.” General assumptions about American-Indian history ignore the countless intricacies found and narrated across centuries, unlike their one-sided presentation.
Unfortunately, it did not surprise me that the Museum of the American Indian was propagandized. Throughout the museum, there was nothing positive said about the U.S., while important, positive American Indian figures such as Sacagawea and Juan Diego were absent from the museum. With the Museum of American History already rotted with liberalism, it is no surprise that the Museum of the American Indian was the same. The only way to fix this liberal fiasco is with a complete Smithsonian overhaul. The Trump administration must restore these museums to their intended purpose. It is a national tragedy to have an anti-American museum on the National Mall.
Grayson Ryland is a regional field manager at the Leadership Institute.