The Super-Weird Origins of the Right's Hatred of the Smithsonian [View all]

The Trump administration has stepped up its antagonism of America’s treasured museums. But conservative antipathy toward the institution began long ago—with the bones of Bible giants.

https://newrepublic.com/article/199224/right-hatred-smithsonian-bible-giants

https://archive.ph/uBJxD



Did you hear the one about the Smithsonian hiding the bones of Bible giants in the basement? No? Well, Missouri Republican Representative Eric Burlinson did, and he recently said he wants to develop a “strategy” to use Congress’s investigative power to get to the bottom of the mystery. “I do believe [giants] were real,” Burlinson told a Blaze TV program in June, shortly before he gave a speech at NephCon 2025, a gathering of people who are hunting the remains of the Nephilim, or the giants from the Book of Genesis.

Burlinson’s comments on Prime Time With Alex Stein were delivered with laughter, but his attendance at a Nephilim conference was not exactly funny. It came only weeks before the Trump administration sent a letter to the secretary of the Smithsonian demanding a full review to ensure museum exhibits and curatorial processes conform to the president’s vision of history.

With the president declaring the Smithsonian “out of control” on Truth Social, the shape and scope of the growing threat to America’s premier public museum from the right wing is rapidly coming into view. And that shape is increasingly that of an internet fever dream of conspiracy, one that has been fomenting distrust of the Smithsonian for decades in service of a deeply conservative and religious agenda that sees both history and science as its ideological enemies.

For most of the nation’s history, the Smithsonian has served as symbol of national unity, receiving praise from members of both political parties and the public at large. Intermittent efforts to challenge the museum, such as Christian radio host Dale Crowley Jr.’s 1978 federal lawsuit demanding the Smithsonian cancel an exhibition on human evolution, have largely failed to materialize. That all changed in 1994, when veterans’ groups and conservative politicians, including Patrick J. Buchanan, vocally criticized the National Air and Space Museum for highlighting the Japanese casualties of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings in a proposed exhibit tied to the fiftieth anniversary of the Enola Gay. They considered any questioning of the decision to drop the A-bomb as dishonoring veterans, and thus anti-American. It was, in Buchanan’s words, “a sleepless campaign to inculcate in American youth a revulsion toward America’s past.”

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