“Everybody that thought about the 1619 Project … saw that the Smithsonian had fingerprints on it,” Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch III once said with pride, a curious boast given the Project’s many inaccuracies. But a visit to one of his museums reveals that the reverse is also true.

The 1619 Project, published by the New York Times six years ago expressly to “reframe the country’s history,” also has fingerprints all over the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

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That’s alarming. The museum’s mission is to tell the whole story of African Americans. An added bonus would be if, in casting that light, it helped heal racial rifts that have characterized that history.

However, many, though by no means all, of the exhibitions at the African American museum have a political bias, and all lean in the same direction: they cast a pall over, or outright delegitimize, America, its history, capitalism, the West, and even the nation-state.

This is why President Donald Trump, elected at least partly to fight the wokeness animating the museum, has put the Smithsonian’s 21 museums under increased scrutiny, informing Bunch that his administration will review their content to ensure that they tell a less biased story about America.

Bunch, however, has chosen resistance. Egged on by Democrats, he wrote to the administration that the Institution, not the executive branch, would carry out a review.

This would put the fox in charge of the hen house. Studies show that all the professions associated with museums — curators, art historians, conservators, etc. — are heavily left-leaning. That explains what one finds at the African American museum.

The museum, as I saw again during a recent visit, reinforces many exaggerations or outright falsehoods, including: 1. Europe started the practice of slavery in the Americas; 2. The United States, capitalism, and even the Industrial Revolution, are tainted by association with slavery; 3. The U.S. Constitution “defended slavery”; 4. The U.S. expanded West to “extend slavery”; and 5. The Southern states created the convict labor system “as a substitute for slavery.”

Nearly all these are misguided themes of the 1619 Project, which rightly earned scorn from historians on both sides of the aisle.

That the “the race-based system of slavery was fundamental to the founding of the United States,” or that “the national economy relied upon slavery,” or that “profits from the sale of enslaved humans and their labor laid the economic foundation for Western Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas,” to cite but three didactics, all seem to come straight out of the Project.

They share its gross overestimation of cotton’s value to the U.S. economy.

The Project’s essay by sociologist Matthew Desmond relies heavily on the work of historian Edward Baptist. But according to several historians, including Adam Olmstead, Baptist used “double counting and with a wave of his wand” to boost King Cotton’s share of the economy in 1836 from 5 % to “almost half of the economic activity of the United States.”

Cotton was indeed slavery’s chief revenue producer, accounting for about 75% of the value of the staple crops produced by slaves. But overblowing its centrality to the whole U.S. economy has a political purpose. According to historian Phillip Magness, the reason is “anti-capitalism.”

The idea, Magness said in reference to the 1619 Project, is that “capitalism is irreparably tainted by the history of slavery: that it’s linked at the hip, that American capitalism became a success story, that the United States became one of the wealthiest countries in the world because it was all built off of the labor of slaves.”

Another of the museum’s indictments of the U.S. is the claim that the U.S. Constitution “defended slavery,” which the museum bases on pieces of evidence that dissolve upon inspection. One is that three-fifths of each slave was counted for the purpose of electoral apportionment.

Scoundrels and the uninformed, two distinct groups, have long used this clause to pretend that the Framers meant that slaves were worth only three-fifths of humanity. But the clause limited the power of slave states, which wanted slaves to count for all five-fifths. Abolitionists didn’t want slaves to be used to give their owners more political power.

A museum with scholarship pretensions should be above this. The very idea is offensive and shows again that the intent here is to disparage the United States. James Madison wrote that the framers specifically avoided the word “slavery” because it was “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”

I emailed back and forth with my colleague, Chris DeMuth, who wrote:

“The correct position is that the Constitution was a compromise document for preserving the union with an effective national government, but, like the Declaration, it created the conditions for abolition when the causes of union and abolition coincided. If the cause of national union had collapsed at that time, slavery would have continued entirely unopposed under the Articles of Confederation or something like them. An African American history museum should tell this story in full rather than resting on lazy ideological tropes.”

As for the museum’s contention that “the country expanded west to extend slavery,” whoever wrote that falsehood could not have read the Northwest Ordinance, considered fourth only to the Constitution, the Declaration, and the Federalist Papers as one of the nation’s founding documents. The Ordinance was passed by the Confederation Congress in 1787 before the Constitution was ratified, and then again by the First Congress and signed into law by President Washington.

The Ordinance established the template for westward expansion, governing the then-existing western territories. This crucial piece of early legislation expressly banned slavery in those territories or in any states that would ensue from them. In fact, it read, “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory.”

The museum also has a lurid fascination with violent Marxists like Angela Davis and Stokley Carmichael, credits the Communist Party USA for defending the Scottsboro Boys, and doubles down on the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” lie already debunked by even Eric Holder.

The case of the Scottsboro Boys is exactly the type of nuanced tragedy that a museum can delve into and explain, but that would require professionals without a political agenda to curate the material. The evidence shows, however, that that’s not what we get here, and the Soviets’ cynical attempt to use black suffering to split America is not mentioned anywhere.

The Scottsboro Boys were nine young black men who were unjustly accused of raping two white women in 1931 Alabama. They were found guilty and sentenced to death, and nearly lynched by a mob. The Museum didactic on the entry reads, “When the NAACP was slow to take up the case, the Communist Party rallied to the boys’ side.”

What it doesn’t say is that the Moscow bosses of the Communist Party USA had just initiated a campaign to create a Soviet-controlled, separate black republic in the Southern states. As Paul Kengor writes in The Communist, “The Scottsboro Boys became a full-fledged, intense communist campaign,” one that “compounded an already tragic situation, undermining public support for a legitimate civil rights cause.”

The entire history of Soviet attempts at manipulation, and the inspirational rejection of it by black Americans, would be worthy of several displays at a museum supposedly dedicated to “African American History and Culture.” As an FBI report declassified in the 1950s put it, “The activities of the Communist Party, USA, are motivated not by the desire to improve the status of the Negro in our society, but to exploit legitimate Negro grievances for the furtherance of communist aims.”

But patriotic blacks refused to be Soviet patsies, a stirring story that needs telling. NAACP leader Walter White wrote in 1955 that, “the effective use by Communists all over the world of the Scottsboro case to vilify American democracy and to create distrust of it,” tried to damage America, “But Negroes were quick to realize that the Communists were not honestly interested in what happened to the individual and that it was a part of the Communist strategy to create ‘martyrs’.” Blacks, White wrote, “were not willing to be used.”

But you’ll find none of this crucial context at the museum. You will, however, find entries on how the great contralto Marian Anderson “captivated audiences” in the Soviet Union or how the writer James Baldwin, too, traveled there, among other places, “to heal the wounds inflicted by the discrimination he felt at home.”

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And of course, you get a lot of entries on Carmichael and Davis.

We need a real National Museum, not a 1619 museum. People do need to learn about the role of slave labor in building the United States, and about tragedies like the Scottsboro Boys. But we don’t need to deepen our wounds. Cleaning house won’t fix the entire cultural rot ailing us, but it’s a start.