WATCH: Smithsonian director admits she sees history as ‘tool’ of ‘social justice’ in resurfaced 2025 clip
After an explosive series of congressional hearings on alleged woke "ideological capture" at the Smithsonian, a resurfaced video of a presentation by National Museum of American History Director Anthea Hartig...
By Fox News · Fox News
After an explosive series of congressional hearings on alleged woke "ideological capture" at the Smithsonian, a resurfaced video of a presentation by National Museum of American History Director Anthea Hartig shows her calling "history as a practice" a "prime tool of social justice." In a series of July hearings on Capitol Hill , Hartig defended the Smithsonian’s record of objectivity and nonpartisanship. However, in a resurfaced presentation to University of California, Los Angeles students in February 2025, Hartig described "a number of ways in which your National Museum of American History is taking an equity-based, justice forward, community driven and necessarily humble approach to public history and to service." Later in her presentation, Hartig asserted that the "United States’ long and violent racial history continues to be present in our reckoning, if you will." She said that "redress in the form of reparation, of course, goes beyond acknowledgement of wrongdoing; it should leverage responsibility, it should think about the act of correction, as we pursue restorative justice and, for us [on the call], restorative justice through history." TRUMP V. SMITHSONIAN: A TIMELINE OF HOW THE WHITE HOUSE FIGHT OVER 'WOKE' HISTORY UNFOLDED During her testimony on Capitol Hill last month, Hartig stated: "Our work is governed by the Smithsonian standards of scholarship, accuracy, independence and nonpartisanship." She said, "the museum does not take sides in America's political debates," but instead, "We preserve and document the evidence of American life in all of its breadth, so that the public can encounter the past and draw their own conclusions." However, in her presentation to UCLA, she asserted that "history as a practice … is for me a prime tool of social justice." Hartig began her talk with a land acknowledgement and a slide showing a picture of an American flag defaced with words that appeared to read "Defund the Police." Her caption said the photo was from a…