Lindsey Halligan, the White House official leading President Donald Trump’s overhaul of the Smithsonian, thinks its museums overemphasize slavery when they should be emphasizing “how far we’ve come since slavery.”
Halligan appeared on Fox News Wednesday to discuss her effort to make the Smithsonian’s content align with the president’s version of history ahead of the U.S. Semiquincentennial.
So far, it remains unclear which specific content will be targeted for removal and replacement, but a March executive order claimed that the Smithsonian is overrun by “a divisive, race-centered ideology,” citing an exhibit that described race as a social construct (rather than promoting the fringe notion that it is “a biological reality”). In a Tuesday Truth Social screed, Trump lamented that the museums focus too intently on “how bad Slavery was.”
Halligan expressed similar sentiments on Fox, saying the institution has become a “platform” for “ideological narratives,” whereas it should be a (presumably somehow nonideological) means of representing “our country in a positive way.”
Asked by Fox anchor John Roberts whether she believes America’s “checkered past” should be minimized in museums, Halligan replied that, while slavery was “awful,” she believes the museums exhibit “an overemphasis on slavery, and I think there should be more of an overemphasis on how far we’ve come since slavery.”
Espousing a feel-good version of history that would please Orwell’s Big Brother, Halligan continued, “We should be able to take our kids, our students through the Smithsonian and feel proud when we leave.”
American history, she concluded, is “both positive and negative, but we need to keep moving forward” and “focus on all the positive as we approach America’s 250th birthday.” It’s a suspicious credo for an official tasked with radically transforming the world’s largest museum system.
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