National Geographic is opening a glittering new museum in Washington next year. The 100,000-square-foot Museum of Exploration will host interactive exhibits on wildlife, cultures, and technology. In a video museum rendering, a narrator says the attractions will “educate, engage, and inspire visitors.” An 11-foot yellow rectangle will welcome visitors at the entrance.

“The Museum of Exploration marks a historic chapter in the Society’s mission to advance exploration, science, education and storytelling, bringing these experiences to life in ways that spark curiosity, create lasting memories and invite everyone to embrace their inner Explorer,” National Geographic Society CEO Jill Tiefenthaler said in a news release.

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My father worked as a writer and editor at National Geographic from the early 1960s to the 1990s. I’m tremendously excited about the new museum, but I have one question: Will the new exhibits avoid the wokeness that has undermined its mission over the last few decades?

Today, National Geographic is gripped in a mania focused on guilt over race and gender. As part of the magazine’s April 2018 “The Race Issue,” editor Susan Goldberg offered this headline: “For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.”

Goldberg hired a scholar, John Edwin Mason of the University of Virginia, to dig through the archives and find white supremacy. Interviewed by Vox, Mason announced that “the magazine was born at the height of so-called ‘scientific’ racism and imperialism, including American imperialism. This culture of white supremacy shaped the outlook of the magazine’s editors, writers, and photographers, who were always white and almost always men.”

Responding to a 2018 cover featuring a cowboy on horseback, Mason argues that “the image of the white cowboy reproduces and romanticizes the mythic iconography of settler colonialism and white supremacy.”

Then there was the ridiculous hagiographic Fauci, a NatGeo documentary that gives the impression that the proper response to public authority and scientific expertise is unquestioning obedience.

Worst of all, National Geographic produced a special issue and a companion TV series on “the gender revolution.”  In a special 2017 edition, NatGeo announced that the black-and-white “binary world” was crumbling, replaced by the new world of gender fluidity. The cover featured a 9-year-old “transgender girl.”

One article offers a full-page picture of a shirtless 17-year-old girl who underwent a double mastectomy to transition to being a boy.

My father would have been shocked and saddened by the “gender revolution.” He was a JFK liberal and not a political conservative, but that was before liberalism had lost its mind. My father wanted National Geographic to reflect the real world while keeping to its tradition of great photography and uplifting travelogues to exotic places. NatGeo President Gilbert Grosvenor fought for his idea on an entire edition dedicated to the 200th anniversary of France, an issue that ended up winning the 1989 National Magazine Award.

The people he worked with were not conservative Republicans or radical leftists, but disciplined and open-minded writers who went where beauty, science, and a good story led them. My father and his colleague, the top editor Wilbur E. Garrett, always wanted to do more relevant stories — not advocacy journalism, just stuff that engaged with grittier subjects such as AIDS and life in Harlem.

My father wrote articles on Ireland, Jerusalem, Hong Kong, Australia, and South Africa. He ran the rapids in the Grand Canyon and produced a record on the space program for the magazine. In November 1986, National Geographic published the results of his five-year study to determine the location of Christopher Columbus’s landing place in the New World. He had discovered that the site was Samana Cay, a small isle about 65 miles from the traditional location, Watling Island.

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The biggest press conference in the magazine’s history was held in the Grosvenor Auditorium, which will be included in the new museum. It was for the Columbus issue, in which my father discussed the importance of knowing the truth about our history. He mentioned George Orwell and why it was important that our leaders not deceive us.

Hopefully, that spirit will fill the new Museum of Exploration.