President Donald Trump’s decision to clean house at the Smithsonian Institution is a necessary next step in his ongoing crusade to claw back cultural ground that the Left has spent decades capturing. This new action should be far-reaching and profound and sweep away such dangerous ideas as the Latino Museum.

The executive order the president issued late last week, on March 27, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” couldn’t have been clearer regarding Trump’s intent.

“The Vice President and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget shall work with the Congress to ensure that future appropriations to the Smithsonian Institution prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy,” it said.

That is a sadly accurate description of the mission of the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of the American Latino, colloquially called the Latino Museum. Approved by Congress in the monstrosity that was the $1.4 trillion 2020 omnibus bill, and still without an assigned building, the Latino Museum has already proved to be what many warned it would become: a hothouse for incubating grievances against the United States among a large group.

>>> Defund the Smithsonian’s Latino Museum—A Woke Indoctrination Factory

Of course, the entire Smithsonian Institution needs an overhaul. Under present leadership, starting with Secretary Lonnie Bunch, it aims to, as the woke Left likes to say, “decolonize” American society.

Bunch knows how to turn on the charm, and has successfully ingratiated himself to Democrats and far too many Republicans. But he has, at times, been very candid with his intentions.

From the get-go, Bunch made sure that the Smithsonian was closely associated with the New York Times’s mendacious portrayal of American history, the 1619 Project. 

“We call ourselves the Great Convener,” Bunch told Smithsonian Magazine in 2019, just as the project was getting underway, “but really, we’re a Great Legitimizer. And I want the Smithsonian to legitimize important issues, whether it’s 1619 or climate change. We help people think about what’s important, what they should debate, what they should embrace. Everybody that thought about the 1619 Project, whether they liked it or disagreed with it, saw that the Smithsonian had fingerprints on it. And that, to me, was a great victory.”

The 1619 Project was riddled with inaccuracies about our nation’s history and was a naked attempt to make Americans hate their past by restating the country’s beginning not as 1776 with the Declaration but the arrival in Jamestown of a group of slaves from Angola in 1619. The New York Times explicitly stated that it sought to change the way America saw itself, to, in its own words, “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding.”

And Bunch did not just embrace 1619 but also the mayhem visited on the country by Black Lives Matter. He was an early supporter of BLM, starting with the Ferguson riots in 2014. 

After the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the ensuing nationwide riots, Bunch urged BLM to organize and seek to have a political impact so “we could really see change that endures.” He then created the platform Talking About Race, a teaching tool for grades 3-12, which appears to have changed its name to Teaching and Learning. At its height, it included among its foundational subjects such lines as, “Whiteness: an ideology that reinforces power at the expense of others.”

And needless to say, Bunch hugged DEI as tightly as he could. “I want the Smithsonian to make diversity and inclusion so central that it’s no longer talked about,” he said at one point.

>>> Post-Modern Mischief at America’s National Parks and Museums

In other words, the ideas that Bunch set out to legitimize through his misappropriation of the Smithsonian perfectly fit Trump’s description of what has taken place with our cultural institutions: “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” the executive order said.

I have personally been sounding the alarm against what the Smithsonian wants to do now with the Latino Museum since at least 2016, when I published an op-ed in the Washington Post warning Congress not to vote to create it.

When the museum opened its first exhibit at the National Museum of American History in 2022, my worst fears were confirmed. I joined Joshua Trevino of the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Alfonso Aguilar of the American Principles Project to write in the Hill that the exhibit “offers an unabashedly Marxist portrayal of history, religion, and economics. … It elevates only leftist ideologues, celebrates transexual activists, denigrates Christianity, denounces capitalism, condemns the West, portrays the United States as iniquitous and oppressive and badly distorts history. It advances the classic oppressor-oppressed agenda of textbook Marxism.”

After our piece appeared, a second exhibit, which was curated by two left-wing professors, was scrapped by the Latino Museum’s leadership. It was going to argue, among other things, that capitalism was bad for Hispanic Americans.

Vice President JD Vance, who is now in charge of the Smithsonian cleanup, has a pretty straightforward start to his task. He must deal with Bunch—and defund the Latino Museum.