A resurfaced video shows the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History telling UCLA students that history is a "prime tool of social justice," months before she assured Congress the institution stays nonpartisan.
Anthea Hartig, the first woman to lead the National Museum of American History, delivered the remarks during a February 2025 presentation hosted by UCLA's Luskin Center for History and Policy. In the video, reviewed by Fox News Digital, Hartig laid out a sweeping vision for the taxpayer-funded museum, one built around equity, reparations, restorative justice, and the celebration of activist movements including Black Lives Matter.
Roughly seventeen months later, seated before the House Oversight and Government Reform Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee, Hartig offered a starkly different portrait of her institution. "Our work is governed by the Smithsonian standards of scholarship, accuracy, independence and nonpartisanship," she testified. The museum, she told lawmakers, "does not take sides in America's political debates."
The gap between those two performances is now at the center of a congressional investigation into whether one of the nation's most prominent cultural institutions has been turned into a vehicle for left-wing ideology, funded, in large part, by the American taxpayer.
The UCLA presentation is striking for how openly Hartig described the museum's transformation. She began with a land acknowledgment and told the student audience that the museum was pursuing "an equity-based, justice forward, community driven and necessarily humble approach to public history and to service."
She then turned to the museum's origins. The National Museum of American History opened in 1964, and Hartig characterized its original purpose dismissively, "this kind of Cold War, you know, 'We're going to be the best and most technologically advanced country in the nation, and we're going to show everyone how we did that.'" She added plainly: "We clearly have moved away from that."
What replaced it, in Hartig's telling, is a "bold new vision" to become the "most accessible, inclusive, relevant, and sustainable public history institution in the country." She described a museum-wide push to make all exhibitions, signage, and digital projects at least bilingual in English and Spanish, a policy she said began in the fall of 2019. "The idea, of course, [is] that everyone has the right to communicate in the language in which they feel most comfortable to be understood and to understand," Hartig said.
She spoke approvingly of reparations and restorative justice:
"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, restorative justice through history."
And she offered the line that has drawn the sharpest scrutiny: "History as a practice... is for me a prime tool of social justice."
Hartig told the UCLA audience that the museum "joined a very collaborative Smithsonian-wide collecting effort around Black Lives Matter... to document and preserve and share objects focused on Black Lives Matter to show the history of the movement starting in 2012." She showed slides of protest signs from outside the White House during the summer of 2020, calling them "phenomenal, ephemeral statements" that were "incredibly poignant."
One slide appeared to show a defaced American flag with words that appeared to read "Defund the Police." A separate photo caption in the Fox News report referenced activists burning a U.S. flag at Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House on July 4, 2020.
Hartig also praised Tsuru for Solidarity, which she called "a truly remarkable group." The organization describes itself on its own website as "a nonviolent, direct action project of Japanese American social justice advocates and allies working to end detention sites and support directly impacted immigrant and refugee communities that are being targeted by racist, inhumane immigration policies." Fox News Digital reached out to Black Lives Matter, Tsuru for Solidarity, the museum, and the Smithsonian Institution for comment. No responses were reported.
Near the end of the presentation, Hartig told the students, "We're under attack for speaking complicated truths," and urged them to "raise your voices and speak them together."
When Hartig appeared before the House Oversight subcommittee at a July 21, 2026, hearing titled "Rewriting American History: Examining the Smithsonian's Efforts to Reshape the Past," her language shifted. She told lawmakers the museum's work is governed by "scholarship, accuracy, independence and nonpartisanship." She said the institution preserves "the evidence of American life in all of its breadth, so that the public can encounter the past and draw their own conclusions."
That testimony came during what AP News reported was a broader push by the White House and congressional Republicans to examine whether federally funded cultural institutions had drifted into ideological advocacy. The White House Domestic Policy Council released a report on July 4 arguing the museum does not tell history "in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic."
Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican who chairs the subcommittee, was blunt. "In the museum's current telling, history is just an ongoing power struggle between oppressors and the oppressed," he said during the hearing.
The hearing did not materialize from thin air. The New York Post reported that Burchett had formally demanded Hartig's testimony after the White House report accused the museum of treating "traditional patriotic narratives with suspicion" and downplaying the Founding Fathers. The Smithsonian Institution receives 62 percent of its funding from the federal government, a fact Burchett invoked directly.
"As an organization that receives 62 percent of its funds from the federal government, the Smithsonian Institution should serve the American people, not promote an ideologically charged agenda."
The White House Domestic Policy Council report, described as 162 pages, went further. Breitbart reported that the document concluded the museum "fails in the basic task of illuminating our heritage" and had "adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens."
Under Hartig's leadership, the museum's mission statement was changed to remove the term "American history," and its interpretive plan shifted focus toward race, identity, gender, sexuality, environmental change, immigration, and economic inequality.
The Washington Examiner reported that during the hearings, Hartig was repeatedly accused of evasiveness when confronted with questions about her past statements and the museum's exhibits. She had previously stated that "loving America is very complicated" and that history should be used for activism, but she avoided confirming those positions under oath.
When pressed, she offered a careful reframing: "My personal belief is that loving America is not complicated. But as an historian, I can tell you that over time it has been very complicated for many people."
Lawmakers also raised questions about a museum exhibit called "Girlhood Is Complicated," which featured content including what was described as a sadomasochistic "crotch harness" and a "chest binder." Rep. Stephanie Bice, an Oklahoma Republican, said flatly: "Sexually explicit material should never be near youth content. The answer should be no." Hartig was accused of contradicting herself about whether the exhibit was designed for children.
Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez and Hillsdale College professor Matthew Spalding also testified at the July 21 hearing, adding outside scholarly voices to the congressional examination.
The contrast between Hartig's UCLA presentation and her congressional testimony is not a matter of interpretation. In February 2025, she told students that history is a "prime tool of social justice," praised an anti-ICE organization, celebrated a Smithsonian-wide effort to collect Black Lives Matter artifacts, and declared the museum had abandoned its Cold War-era mission of showcasing American achievement. She urged students to "raise your voices" because "we're under attack for speaking complicated truths."
Seventeen months later, she told Congress the museum does not take sides, follows nonpartisan standards, and simply lets the public "draw their own conclusions."
Both statements are on the record. Both came from the same person. The museum she runs opened in 1964 to celebrate American innovation and progress. Under her direction, it removed "American history" from its own mission statement and reoriented around equity, identity, and social justice, all while drawing the majority of its budget from federal funds.
Hartig told the UCLA audience that history "is the key that unlocks the mysteries of humanity, of meaning, of place, of conquest, of love, power, authority and self." She called historians "seekers of truths" and "defenders of inalienable rights." Those are fine words. But when a museum director tells one audience that history is a weapon for social justice and tells another audience that the museum is strictly nonpartisan, at least one of those audiences is not getting the truth.
Taxpayers who fund 62 percent of the Smithsonian's budget deserve to know which version of Anthea Hartig is running their museum, the activist at UCLA, or the careful witness on Capitol Hill.
