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The institutional evidence runs deeper than one director's rhetoric. Under current leadership, the museum rewrote its mission statement, removing the phrase American history itself and replacing it with language about empowering people to create a more just and compassionate future. Hartig explained the change candidly: the goal was to get out of the America First mentality when telling history. Think about what that means in practice. The National Museum of American History deleted American history from its mission. If a bank removed the word deposits from its charter, depositors would be entitled to some alarm.

The museum's Interpretive Plan converts that mission into marching orders. It directs staff, whatever the topic, to tie exhibits back to seven core issues of our time: race and identity, gender and sexuality, climate change, immigration, economic inequality, technological change, and nationalism versus globalism. The complaint here is not that these subjects are off limits. A serious history museum should address race, immigration, and inequality, because a serious history of America must. The complaint is that every subject, whether democracy, entertainment, childhood, women's labor, or sports, is now routed through the same ideological grid, one that treats American institutions chiefly as instruments of oppression and treats visitors as recruits. When Alexander Hamilton appears, he is an influential and flawed founding father who owned slaves, with no mention that he helped found the New York Manumission Society in 1785 or that its African Free Schools educated more than 1,400 students. When Benjamin Franklin appears in the Many Voices, One Nation exhibit, he appears once, not as a Founder but as a Philadelphian with allegedly ambivalent views of immigrants. The Pilgrims are framed as colonial oppressors and Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning. This is not history with the hard parts included. It is prosecution with the exculpatory evidence excluded.

Why should the federal government care what a museum's curators believe? Because this is not a private gallery in Brooklyn spending donor money. The Smithsonian is a trust instrumentality of the United States, overseen by a Board of Regents currently led by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and populated by senior federal officials and congressional appointees. It received $1,080,500,000 in appropriations for Fiscal Year 2026, and federal money has covered roughly two thirds of its expenditures over the past two decades. Taxpayers are not being asked to tolerate a point of view they dislike in someone else's institution. They are being compelled to finance, in their own institution, a systematic campaign against the story that institution was chartered and funded to tell. Congress bought a museum of American history. It is entitled to receive one.

Defenders of the museum, including the American Historical Association, argue that the White House is trying to sanitize history and that political pressure threatens institutional independence. But notice what this objection must assume to succeed. It must assume that the only alternative to grievance curation is whitewash, that a museum which centers the Founding must therefore hide slavery, and that honoring Washington requires forgetting the enslaved people at Mount Vernon. Nothing in the report demands any such thing. Its own framework insists the museum should document the failures of the nation alongside its achievements, should tell the story of 750,000 dead in the Civil War, and should explain how Americans came to reject Jim Crow by appealing to the colorblind promise of the founding documents themselves. Telling history honestly is not the same as teaching contempt, and a curriculum of contempt is precisley what the current museum delivers. As for independence, no one proposes that curators take orders on individual label copy; the proposal is that a publicly chartered, publicly governed, publicly funded trust be held to its charter, which is what boards of regents and congressional oversight exist to do, and the notion that an institution can take more than $1 billion a year from the public while remaining accountable to no one but its own staff is not independence, it is capture, and calling capture independence does not make it so.

For decades, complaints about institutional bias in museums, universities, and cultural agencies produced columns and conference panels and little else, a pattern scholars at the Heritage Foundation have long described as conservatives funding their own marginalization. The Smithsonian report models a different approach: read the documents, quote the leadership, follow the money, and then use the legitimate levers of governance, budgets, appointments, and oversight, to restore an institution to its purpose. The report does not order exhibits torn down. It establishes a factual record and invites the Board of Regents, the Chancellor, and Congress to act on it. That is not a culture war stunt. That is what stewardship of a public trust looks like.

The deeper stakes are generational. Parents bring children to the National Museum of American History for the reason President Johnson named at the dedication, so that the young can touch the inheritance and understand the meaning of the past. A child who leaves that building never having encountered Washington's character, Jefferson's pen, Franklin's genius, or the improbable miracle of a republic conceived in liberty has been cheated of a birthright, and no amount of programming about the seven core issues of our time compensates for the theft. A nation that cannot explain to its children why it deserves their gratitude will eventually raise children who feel none. The prediction market currently gives strong odds that the Smithsonian fight becomes a defining cultural story of 2026, and it should, because memory is the ground on which every other political battle is fought.

The museum forgot the one job it had. On America's 250th birthday, the country noticed. The task now is not to burn the institution down but to hand it back its charter, point to the words American history, and insist that it do the job the American people built it, funded it, and trusted it to do.

"The first, and by far the most credible, is that this is the work of the Islamic State," he said. The attack during Macron's visit was "neither the first nor the last attack of this kind. Certainly, the international coalition has defeated the Islamic State territorially. But an Islamic State stripped of its territory remains nonetheless extremely dangerous".

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The second hypothesis put forward by Bakawan "concerns the Lebanese Hezbollah", the Shiite militant movement that supported Assad during the war, and "more broadly, pro-Iranian networks, which have never completely relinquished their influence in Syria".

Bakawan noted that, "Just a week ago, Iran's deputy foreign minister [Kazem Gharibabadi], directly threatened France over its involvement in securing the Strait of Hormuz." Gharibabadi's warning against "any foreign military deployments" in Hormuz came after France and Britain announced plans to lead an international maritime security effort aimed at restoring safe commercial navigation in a vital waterway that has been effectively blocked since the US and Israel launched the Iran war.

Turkish President ⁠Tayyip ⁠Erdogan said Middle East peace efforts ​could not succeed without regional backing and that Israel must not be allowed to "dynamite" the U.S.-Iran peace deal.

"No solution that ​does not take strength from the will and contributions of regional countries can be lasting."

Turkey, a NATO ​member and Iran's neighbour, has repeatedly accused Israel ⁠of ⁠trying to undermine the ⁠U.S.-Iran ​deal mediated by Pakistan, and has condemned Israeli operations ​in Gaza, Lebanon ⁠and Syria.

"We are closely following the Israeli administration's attempts to dynamite the (U.S.-Iran) deal... The current war-addicted Israeli government must not be allowed to ⁠drown our geography in the smell of gunpowder and ⁠blood again."

Erdogan also said Turkey aimed to deepen cooperation with Pakistan in energy, transport, critical minerals, information technology and defence, while pursuing a bilateral trade target of $5 billion.