The Smithsonian Association’s entry into Smithsonian Castle in Washington, DC
Manuel Bals Cenetta/AP
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Manuel Bals Cenetta/AP
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to oversee Vice President J.D. Vance to remove “divisive, racially-centric ideology” from the Smithsonian Museum, the Center for Education and Research and the National Zoo.
The order, entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” states, “Once widely respected as a global icon of American excellence and cultural achievements, the Smithsonian institution has been under the influence of divisive, racially centred ideologies in recent years. “The museums in our nation’s capital should be a place where individuals learn – not to be exposed to indoctrinated or divisive narratives of ideological tranquilities that distort our shared history.”
The order, along with Vince Haley, the president’s assistant to domestic policy, and Lindsay Harrigan, special assistant to the president and senior assistant staff secretary, calls for Vance to work with Congress to ban the Smithsonian from receiving budgets for exhibitions and programs. It also calls for future spending to “celebrate women’s achievements at the American Museum of Women’s History and not to recognize men as women in any respect in the museum.”
NPR contacted the Smithsonian for comment but received no response.
The executive order also calls for the appointment of citizen members of Smithsonian, who have pledged to advance the order’s policies.
This is the latest in a series of executive orders issued by the president since he took office in January that aimed to roll back diversity and inclusion (DEI) efforts previously promoted by federal agencies. Challenge America Program. It mainly supported small nonprofits reaching “historically underserved communities with limited access to the arts compared to geography, ethnicity, economics, and/or disability.”
The latest executive order accused the Biden administration of moving forward with a “corrosive ideology” that attempted to correct historical truths. “For the past decade, Americans have witnessed a coordinated and broad-ranging effort to rewrite our country’s history and replace objective facts with distorted stories driven by ideology rather than truth,” says Order. “Under this historical revision, our country’s unparalleled legacy of advancing freedom, individual rights and human happiness will be rebuilt as essentially racist, sexist, oppressive, or irreparably flawed.”
The order includes additional provisions that seek to revive public monuments, memorials and statues to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, to inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or to include other inappropriate partisan ideologies.
