Jasmine Crockett Just Bluntly Called Out The GOP-Led Congressional Hearing Targeting The Smithsonian For What It Is—And We're Nodding Hard

Texas Democratic Representative Jasmine Crockett summed up the point of a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform's Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency's hearing on Tuesday about the National Museum of American History's alleged "extreme political activism."

Smithsonian National Museum of American History Director Dr. Anthea Hartig faced scrutiny on Capitol Hill after a White House report accused the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History of becoming a taxpayer-funded center of "ideological capture" and "extreme political activism."

The report concluded "the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Museum of American History in particular, under its current leadership and current interpretive ideology, cannot be trusted to tell America's story honestly and in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic."

Tennessee Republican Representative Tim Burchett claimed during the hearing that the institution has "become infected by a woke ideology that's seeped into public displays, educational materials, and planning documents." He claimed the museum focuses too much on the "power struggle between oppressors and oppressed."

You can hear what he said in the video below.

But Crockett was firm that this pushback amounts to little more than a "white pride rally" for Republicans, saying:

"Welcome to the Republicans' white pride rally disguised as a congressional hearing. It might be uncomfortable for some people on this committee to hear about the true history of America, and I hate that for them. But facts are facts."

"It's a fact that there is a violent, exclusionary, discriminatory, sexist, and racist part of American history, where our indigenous populations were forcibly displaced from their land, where thousands of Black people were unjustly lynched, where Black people were denied the right to vote, and they still trying to do it today."

"Women needed their husbands' permission to open a bank account, where people with disabilities were routinely excluded from schools, workplaces, and public life, where four little Black girls were murdered by the KKK at the 16th Street Baptist Church, and a lot of this wasn't that long ago."

"In fact, three of those girls would be 77 and one would be 74. More than 40 members of Congress serving right now would be older than them. Ruby Bridges, who was the first Black child to desegregate an all-white school, is only 71 years old. More than 100 members of Congress serving right now are older than her."

"So, attacks on the Smithsonian or any other institution that's willing to tell the true history of America is not only an attempt to rewrite history; it's an attempt to erase history."

You can hear what she said in the video below.

Many concurred with Crockett's remarks.

Crockett's points make all the more sense when you recall that President Donald Trump doubled down on his criticism of the Smithsonian museums, saying they've focused too much on "how bad slavery was" instead of promoting his view of American excellence.

Writing on Truth Social last year, he claimed the Smithsonian "is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

Regardless of what Trump says, slavery was in fact a brutal legal institution, comprising the enslavement of Black people who were kidnapped from their homes and families and forced to reside in a foreign land where they served as the economic backbone of the American South.

The treatment of slaves in the United States varied widely depending on conditions, time, and place, but in general it was brutal, especially on plantations. Whippings and rape were routine. The asymmetrical power dynamics between enslaved Blacks and white slaveowners gave whites both de facto and de jure freedoms to bend their property to their will.

Trump's words were criticized as reflective of the wider wave within a far-right movement that has come under fire for presenting a revisionist and misleading view of history, downplaying the profound impact of slavery and omitting key complexities surrounding the Founding Fathers' attitudes and actions toward it.