Excellent: House Republicans have called National Museum of American History Director Anthea Hartig to testify Tuesday about the NMAH’s “political tendentious” exhibits — in what should be the next step in breaking our cultural institutions out of their painfully woke fever.

Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) Chairman Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) summoned Hartig in the wake of the damning July 4 report laying out how far left her institution has swung.

A small sample:

• It holds “no major exhibit dedicated to America’s Founding era, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, other Founding Fathers, the Continental Congress, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, or major moments of the American Revolution.”

• Museum leaders axed the phrases “infinite richness” and “American history” from its mission statement in order, per Hartig, to “get out of the ‘America First’ mentality.” 

Yes: The National Museum of American History took “American history” out of its mission statement.

• Staff are under orders to tie exhibits back to seven “core issues of our time”: race/identity, gender/sexuality, climate change, immigration/migrations, economic inequality, technological change, and nationalism/globalism.

Central facts of US history and anything that might bring pride in our country, out; lefty obsessions and America-is-monstrous nonsense, in: It couldn’t be more black and white.

This, in a branch of the Smithsonian that gets 62% of its funding from tax dollars.

Worse, museums across America have gone down this demented path.

In 2020, during the heights of Floyd-a-mania, the National Museum of African American History and Culture produced an online exhibit about “whiteness” insisting that individualism, hard work, respect for authority, and delayed gratification are all somehow “aspects of whiteness.”

In 2024, the National Park Service moved to take down a statue of William Penn from a key historical site in Philadelphia in favor of an exhibit on Native Americans — William Penn, Pennsylvania’s namesake and the guy who fathered the modern idea of pluralism.

Here in New York City, the Natural History Museum famously took down a statue of Theodore Roosevelt as a sop to BLM activists; in 2023 it started warning pregnant and menstruating women to stay away from certain indigenous “objects of power” entirely so as not to offend Native Americans. Other visitors got told not even to look at whistles made from bird bones because they might summon spirits — and then the museum began killing whole exhibits over these issues.

Museums from New Orleans to Indianapolis bent the knee and scurried to engage in race-based hiring and acquisition quotas under the guise of “equity” starting in 2020, and that trend hasn’t stopped: At the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the world’s biggest contemporary art museum, a February show highlighted artists with grade-school skills and insights but DEI-approved identities. 

Behind this madness is the left’s long march through academia, washed through the vapidity of the top ranks of the high-culture-nonprofit world.

The public needs to take these institutions back from the lunatics who’ve colonized them.

Congress needs to make it clear that the purpose of taxpayer-funded museums is to educate, not to indoctrinate, and that admins and staff who refuse to follow that basic principle will face fiscal and professional consequences.

A wider DOGE-style audit of just where tax dollars end up at museums across the country is very much in order as well.

Crucially, all this might begin to address another civic crisis — the total collapse of pride in country among independents and Democrats, one of the biggest casualties of the Great Awokening and clearly driven by changes in pedagogy.

Museums are one important index of a nation’s health. It’s long past time to cure ours of this woke sickness.