Bishop E.W. Jackson Sr., a great-grandson of enslaved Americans, is calling out the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History for what he describes as systematic anti-American indoctrination, and a 162-page White House report backs him up.
Jackson, a nondenominational bishop, pastor, and author, sat down with Fox News Digital to lay out his case against the museum he believes has abandoned honest history in favor of ideology. His criticism comes weeks after the White House Domestic Policy Council released a sweeping report titled "Saving America's Story," which concluded that the museum has undergone what it called "ideological capture."
Jackson did not hold back. He framed the museum's approach as a deliberate effort to turn citizens against their own country, and said the problem runs far deeper than one exhibit or one curator.
"It makes me angry when people do this to our country, but it's sad too because what it tells me is that the indoctrination machine is hard at work convincing people [of] this narrative."
The bishop reserved particular criticism for Anthea Hartig, who has led the museum since 2019. Hartig drew scrutiny at recent congressional hearings on Capitol Hill, and a resurfaced video shows her calling "history as a practice" a "prime tool of social justice." In a February 2025 presentation to UCLA students, Hartig went further.
During that February 2025 presentation, Hartig told students that the "United States' long and violent racial history continues to be present in our reckoning, if you will." She then made a case for reparations, stating 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."
Jackson heard those words and drew a hard line. He told Fox News Digital that Hartig's philosophy gets the purpose of history exactly backward:
"She talks about how history should be a tool of social justice. No, history should be facts about what has happened in the past and leave others to draw their own conclusions about what those facts mean."
He added that Hartig "wants to use history to try to get people to think a certain way and respond a certain way and, namely, to be somewhat angry and bitter and resentful of our country because of our past."
That accusation gains weight when measured against the White House report. The 162-page document, released by the Domestic Policy Council, included images of exhibits and placards as well as information about museum curators and leaders. Its central finding, that the museum had been ideologically captured, prompted a House Oversight subcommittee hearing titled "Rewriting American History: Examining the Smithsonian's Efforts to Reshape the Past."
Jackson's fight with the Smithsonian is not new. In 2015, he confronted the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery over its decision to include Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger in an exhibit on civil rights leaders. Jackson's objections were blunt. He described Sanger as "an elitist," "a eugenicist," and "racist" who "admired Adolf Hitler [and] she spoke for the Ku Klux Klan."
That 2015 confrontation drew support from a national group of Black ministers led by Jackson, who wrote to the gallery calling the inclusion an obvious contradiction. As Breitbart reported, the ministers stated: "Perhaps the Gallery is unaware that Ms. Sanger supported black eugenics, a racist attitude toward black and other minority babies...The obvious incongruity is staggering!" The Smithsonian's response at the time acknowledged only that "while eugenics was popular in Sanger's time, today such ideas are offensive for devaluing certain lives."
Yet the institution kept finding ways to soften Sanger's record. A later Smithsonian exhibition at the National Museum of American History, titled "Girlhood (It's Complicated)," included a section on Sanger that described her only as "complicated", without explicitly mentioning her racist attitudes toward Black Americans or her "Negro Project," which aimed at limiting Black births. The pattern Jackson identified in 2015, a willingness to sanitize certain figures while weaponizing history against the country itself, had not changed.
Jackson traced the museum's ideological drift to a deeper current in American education. He pointed to Howard Zinn, author of "A People's History of the United States," whom Jackson described as "a professed anarchist" who "wrote that book as a polemic against America."
The bishop argued that Zinn's influence on public schools and colleges has been far more corrosive than most Americans realize:
"I am amazed at how few Americans understand that book has been more influential in teaching American history than any other book that the public schools or colleges have ever used. And it's still being used."
Jackson connected that classroom influence directly to the kind of activism now visible in public institutions. He told Fox News Digital that after years of absorbing that version of history, the results are predictable:
"If you're learning that from the very beginning of your education, my goodness, by the time you're an adult and you've been through 20,000 hours of that, no wonder we've got people protesting outside of [ICE facilities], and no wonder you've got people at the Smithsonian talking about America as if we're the worst place on earth to live. They frankly have been brainwashed and indoctrinated into it."
The Zinn Education Project, which promotes classroom materials based on Zinn's work, currently offers resources that draw a line between modern deportation operations and Great Depression-era deportations, describing those earlier removals as part of "a program of 'racial expulsion,' rooted in racism." Fox News Digital reached out to the Zinn Education Project, the Zinn Trust, Planned Parenthood, the Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Portrait Gallery, and the museum itself for comment. No responses were reported.
What gives Jackson's criticism its force is not just the policy argument. It is his biography. He is the great-grandson of enslaved people. He grew up in a broken home and spent time in foster care. By the logic of the grievance framework he criticizes, he would be its ideal spokesman. Instead, he rejects it entirely.
"I think loving America is easy because, you're right, I'm the great-grandson of slaves, I am a product of a broken home and foster care, and yet my life has just been wonderfully blessed. First, of course, by the grace of God, but also because I live in a country where anything is possible, where you're free, where you can dream, you can strive to fulfill your God-given gifts and talents and abilities."
Jackson told Fox News Digital that Americans who were born in this country "hit the proverbial lottery because you have more opportunity and hope than any people living anywhere else on the planet." He pushed back against the racial and economic categories that he says institutions like the museum use to divide citizens:
"This is a wonderful country; it's the greatest nation on earth. And you've got people so indoctrinated into seeing our country sliced and diced into race and ethnicity and class and income and so forth that they fail to understand the blessing of the [United States of America]."
He offered a broader defense of the country's character, one rooted not in denial of past wrongs but in an honest accounting of the full record: "There is no place on earth that has been more affirming of human dignity, offered more opportunity for human flourishing. And frankly acknowledged in spite of the apparent differences that we have, that we are ultimately one nation under God."
The White House report and the congressional hearings that followed have raised a question that Jackson's criticism sharpens: Should taxpayers continue to fund an institution whose leadership openly describes its mission as advancing social justice rather than presenting history?
Hartig's own words, captured on video and in her UCLA presentation, make the case against her stewardship more effectively than any outside critic could. She did not describe the museum's role as preserving artifacts, presenting facts, or letting visitors form their own judgments. She described it as pursuing "restorative justice through history." That is not a museum's job. It is an activist's.
The Smithsonian sits on the National Mall, funded by the American public, visited by millions of families and schoolchildren every year. When its director treats the institution as a platform for a political agenda, and when a 162-page federal report documents the results, the question is no longer whether the museum has a problem. The question is what Congress intends to do about it.
A man whose ancestors were held in bondage looked at the institution and saw not honest reckoning but manipulation. When the people with the most reason to resent this country's past are the ones defending it, the indoctrinators have a credibility problem no exhibit can fix.
