The Smithsonian director swore to Congress that her museum never takes sides in America's political debates.
Then a video surfaced from a UCLA lecture she gave just months before.
Now the great-grandson of slaves has named exactly what she's doing to American history.
Anthea Hartig Caught on Camera Contradicting Her Own Congressional Testimony
At a July 21 House Oversight subcommittee hearing titled "Rewriting American History: Examining the Smithsonian's Efforts to Reshape the Past," National Museum of American History Director Anthea Hartig looked lawmakers in the eye and said the museum "does not take sides in America's political debates."
She said her work was "governed by Smithsonian standards of scholarship, accuracy, independence and nonpartisanship."
Then the video from UCLA surfaced.
In a February 2025 presentation to University of California, Los Angeles students, Hartig described history itself as "a prime tool of social justice."
She opened that same presentation with a slide showing an American flag defaced with the words "Defund the Police."
She spoke about reparations, restorative justice, and what she called "the United States' long and violent racial history."
That's what $1.09 billion in taxpayer money buys every year at the Smithsonian Institution.
Bishop Earl Walker Jackson is a great-grandson of slaves from Orange County, Virginia.
"It makes me angry when people do this to our country," he told Fox News Digital.
"But it's sad too because what it tells me is that the indoctrination machine is hard at work."
He grew up in a broken home and spent time in foster care.
Today he calls America "the greatest nation on earth."
"If you were born an American, you hit the proverbial lottery because you have more opportunity and hope than any people living anywhere else on the planet."
The Smithsonian Woke Indoctrination Didn't Start With Anthea Hartig
Jackson didn't come to this fight last week.
He confronted the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery back in 2015 over its decision to include Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger in an exhibit on civil rights leaders.
Sanger, Jackson noted, "was an elitist, she was a eugenicist, she was racist, she admired Adolf Hitler and she spoke for the Ku Klux Klan."
That was eleven years ago.
Jackson traces the ideological capture at the Smithsonian – and in schools, entertainment, journalism, and sports – back to one book: Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
Zinn, Jackson said, "was a professed anarchist" who "wrote that book as a polemic against America."
It became the most widely used American history text in public schools and universities.
It is still being used today.
The Zinn Education Project currently draws a line between Trump's deportation operations and Depression-era mass deportations, framing both as products of the same racial hatred.
That's the material shaping students before they ever set foot in a Smithsonian museum.
The White House didn't miss it.
On July 4, 2026 – the 250th birthday of the United States – the Domestic Policy Council released its 162-page "Saving America's Story" report documenting exactly how the NMAH abandoned its mission.
The report found the museum had built no major exhibit on the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolutionary War, or the Second Continental Congress.
It did find exhibits on gender ideology, Black Lives Matter, and defaced American flags.
Congress put Hartig under formal oversight.
She left without a single satisfying answer.
The people running the Smithsonian aren't confused – they're deliberate.
When the director opens a presentation with a "Defund the Police" flag and talks reparations to college students, then tells Congress she's completely neutral, that's not a slip.
That's the playbook: capture the institution, use the credentials, lie about it when the cameras are on.
Trump's White House caught them in the document.
Jackson caught them with his life.
His great-grandparents picked cotton in Virginia.
He served his country in the Marines and spent fifteen years practicing law.
Then he became a bishop.
And today he's defending America against the people paid to protect it.
"I live in a country where anything is possible, where you're free, where you can dream," Jackson said.
Every dollar spent teaching American children that their country is a story of regret and shame is a dollar spent telling Earl Walker Jackson he's wrong.
He's not wrong.
And he's not backing down.
Sources:
- Peter Pinedo, "Descendant of Slaves Shames Smithsonian's Woke 'Indoctrination,'" Fox News, August 10, 2026.
- Staff, "Smithsonian Director's Social Justice Remarks Contradict Testimony," Fox News, August 4, 2026.
- Staff, "Smithsonian's National Museum of American History Promotes 'Extreme Political Activism,'" Fox News, July 6, 2026.
- Jennifer Van Laar, "Conservative Blacks Call Out the Smithsonian's Terrible Take on Black American History," RedState, August 10, 2026.
- White House Domestic Policy Council, "Saving America's Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage," July 4, 2026.