1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

in conjunction with Executive Order 14253 “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” a report titled Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History was released by the administration on the Fourth of July. The purpose of the Report is to discredit the National Museum of American History and demand that it propagate a falsified view of the nation’s founding and its past that omits the very disagreements and conflicts, not to mention most of the people, who brought it into being and have shaped it ever since. Such a view is of course false, but that view is more than just mistaken or a case of academic disagreement. That view is dangerous, because erasing and omitting people and groups from the nation’s past serves as legitimation for erasing or omitting them from who counts, who has rights, and who the nation has an obligation to in the present and in the future. It is also, not a view that the Report itself can support with reason, logic, or evidence. I support the way the National Museum of American History has followed its mission to the point, and I am against this effort by the administration to censor our history in support of (as always) Christian White Nationalism.