Former Democratic staffers, DEI leaders shape Smithsonian leadership amid political firestorm
A Fox News Digital review of biographies and social media profiles identified roughly two dozen people employed by the Smithsonian with ties to the left.
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Two dozen people. Out of how many thousands of employees at one of the largest museum complexes in the world. Fox News had their team comb through LinkedIn and Instagram to produce this and that is the number they landed on. That is the investigation. That is the firestorm.
The Smithsonian employs historians, curators, scientists, educators. People who have spent their careers in public service and academic institutions tend to lean left. That is not a conspiracy, that is just what happens when you work in fields that value evidence and context. Fox has been running this same piece for thirty years with different institutions in the headline.
And DEI leaders specifically getting named like that is not an accident. That framing is meant to signal something to the audience without saying it directly. The Smithsonian has collections that document the history of people who look like my parents, people who built this country and got written out of the version Fox wants taught. That is what this is actually about.
Scully has the Epstein Files right next to thirty years of Fox "institution captured by radical leftists" headlines with a different building in the photo each time and keeps asking me why the same network that mainlined Seth Rich conspiracy theories for two years thinks two dozen LinkedIn profiles is journalism. The Smithsonian literally preserves the evidence these people want buried. The Truth is out there.
Charlie Kirk used to say the Smithsonian was one of the institutions the left decided to take the long way around on, real patient Gramscian stuff, and we'd all laugh it off as too slow to matter. He's gone now and here we are, two dozen LinkedIn profiles documenting exactly the capture he warned about, and you're over here doing the Seth Rich whatabout to avoid engaging with the evidence in front of you.
The Epstein files thing is genuinely painful to watch conservatives use as a thought-terminating cliche against other conservatives. Charlie would have had something to say about that too. He believed in following the evidence wherever it went, including on Epstein, including on the Smithsonian, all of it.
What's actually buried in the Smithsonian right now is the honest history of this country, being quietly replaced by people whose LinkedIn profiles read like a DEI conference speaker list. That's not a conspiracy theory. That's documentation. The fact that Fox has covered institutional capture before doesn't make THIS instance of institutional capture false. That's not how logic works.
Two dozen people with ties to the left running a federally funded national institution. That's not a coincidence, that's a pipeline.
DEI consultants and Democratic staffers don't just bring their politics to work in their lunch bags. They embed it into hiring, programming, exhibits, curricula. Every kid who takes a field trip to the National Museum of American History gets a curated version of America filtered through this lens.
The Smithsonian gets roughly a billion dollars a year from taxpayers. ALL taxpayers. Half this country is conservative. You'd never know it walking through those halls.
And yes, Fox dug through LinkedIn profiles. Good. Someone had to. The legacy press sure wasn't going to do it.
The "review" of "social media profiles" always makes me suspicious. These reports are often just opposition research packaged as journalism. I've seen it from both sides.
Fair skepticism, but the sourcing here matters more than the method. If Fox found actual public hiring records and board appointments, that's verifiable regardless of who compiled it. If it's screenshots of old tweets strung together to imply a pattern, that's a different animal. The "both sides do it" framing is accurate but it can also let you off the hook from evaluating the specific claim in front of you.
Federally funded institutions are not supposed to be partisan fiefdoms, and the Smithsonian receives hundreds of millions in taxpayer appropriations every year. When the leadership pipeline runs through Democratic offices and DEI bureaucracies, that is a structural problem, not a coincidence. The question is not whether these individuals hold political views, everyone does, but whether the institution's programming, hiring, and curatorial decisions reflect a consistent ideological tilt that would never survive scrutiny if it ran the other direction. Imagine Fox reporting that two dozen former Republican staffers were shaping exhibits and you know exactly what the headlines would say. The asymmetry in outrage is the tell.
This isn't about numbers, it's about direction. The Smithsonian is a national museum, not a place for some woke ideology to reshape history. People pay taxes for these places. It's supposed to be about preserving our heritage, not turning it into some kind of political lecture. Nobody wants that.
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Fox News did a deep dive on Smithsonian LinkedIn profiles to find the real threat to America while Trump is handing $300 billion to Iran and blocking the Epstein files. Kamala Harris warned us these MAGATs would rather witch-hunt museum curators than govern, and here we are.