By Tyler O’Neil (This article originally appeared in The Daily Signal)
Under President Joe Biden, the federal government spent millions pushing what critics call a negative narrative about America in the museums meant to celebrate and commemorate the country’s history. Now, the Trump administration has reversed course, using the same agency to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services now supports “Freedom Trucks,” mobile museums that tell the story of the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, and the Constitution.
Marissa Streit, president of the education institution PragerU, told The Daily Signal how a veteran reacted when he saw one of these museums.
“I honestly just feel relieved,” she recalled the veteran saying. “I lost friends defending this country. I sacrificed defending my great country, and what do I come back to? An education system that is teaching my kids that everything I sacrificed was not worth it because this country is bad, this country is racist.”
“What a disgrace it is that these museums make veterans feel what they’ve done for our country was in vain,” Streit said.
President Donald Trump attempted to shut down the institute and halt many of its grants, but a federal judge blocked his efforts in November. Now, the agency has applied new standards, seeking applications for projects that foster “a greater appreciation” of America “through uplifting and positive narratives of our shared American experience.”
“President Trump is committed to ending—once and for all—the extremist attempts to rewrite American history that sow division and undermine the moral legitimacy of our founding principles,” IMLS spokesman Rick Manning told The Daily Signal.
He cited Trump’s executive order on “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” noting that it directs the agency to “not only reject historical revisionism” but also to “tell the true story of how America came to be the greatest nation in the world.” He said the new institute aims to spark “a renaissance of patriotism, intellectual rigor, and innovation in our cultural institutions.”
What Biden’s IMLS Funded
Under Biden, the institute funded “woke” causes that often present American history in what critics consider far too negative a light.
In September 2021, IMLS awarded $170,590 to Historic Hudson Valley for a “library” of “classroom engagement strategies … for teaching about slavery.” The grant involved a “partnership with the Hard History Project,” a now-defunct initiative that IMLS described as “a spinoff of [the Southern Poverty Law Center’s] Teaching Tolerance’s Teaching Hard History Initiative.” When Hard History Project head Kate Shuster recruited teachers, she described herself as the “long-time manager of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Hard History Initiative.”
SPLC, a left-leaning activist group best known for putting mainstream conservative and Christian organizations on a “hate map” with Ku Klux Klan chapters, changed the name of its education program from “Teaching Tolerance” to “Learning for Justice” in 2021. The program makes no bones about promoting critical race theory.
Critical race theory teaches that America is systemically or institutionally racist, despite the progress of civil rights laws, and trains students to see racism everywhere. This theory rests behind claims that America needs an “antiracist” movement to fundamentally reshape institutions.
In September 2024, IMLS awarded another $249,906 to the Woodland Park Zoological Society in Washington state. The grant states that the zoo will create a program “to apply equity, inclusion, and antiracist practices to zoo structures, policies, and programs.” The program will enable about 28 “project managers” to “apply an antiracist lens to the zoo’s work.”
Also in September 2024, IMLS awarded $249,992 to the Montpelier Foundation, which runs President James Madison’s home in Virginia. The Montpelier Foundation uses SPLC materials to emphasize slavery. The grant states that Montpelier will create a “new interpretive plan for the site,” engaging in “truth-telling about slavery’s role in the shaping of the United States, the legacy it continues to have on race relations in America, and the lingering institutional disparities that prevent Americans from realizing the ideals expressed in our founding documents.”
The IMLS also awarded $49,315 to the New York-based Pratt Institute’s graduate program for library, archive, and museum professionals. The November 2021 grant backs the institute’s partnership with LGBTQ+ activist groups to provide paid internships to “better serve diverse communities and collections including BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities in NYC.” (BIPOC stands for black, Indigenous, and people of color, and it represents an umbrella term for the people critical race theory intends to help.)
Other grants also focused on promoting people on the basis of skin color, sexual orientation, or other characteristics the Left claims are “underrepresented” or disadvantaged.
IMLS awarded the Association of Art Museum Curators $158,831 to “support two cohorts of early career curators from underrepresented backgrounds” in September 2023.
The agency awarded $250,000 to the Heckscher Museum in New York for “educational programming showcasing major works by LGBTQ+ artists” in September 2024.
It dedicated $740,320 for the American Association of Museums in September 2022 to “embed the principles of diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion into its fieldwide assessment and accreditation programs,” aiming to “embed DEAI fundamentals at a structural level.”
Trump’s Changes
While a judge blocked Trump’s order to eliminate many IMLS functions and grants, Keith Sonderling, deputy secretary at the Department of Labor, is directing the agency to carry out Trump’s policy goals. The agency retained enough career civil servants to carry out core functions.
Last year, IMLS awarded $10 million to the National Park Foundation for Freedom 250, which created the six Freedom Truck mobile museums. The museums are touring the country to celebrate the 250th anniversary.
Two conservative organizations, PragerU and Hillsdale College, advised Freedom 250 in developing the museums, but neither organization took any federal funding.
“Our policy is we won’t take any money from the government,” PragerU’s Streit told The Daily Signal. Hillsdale also confirmed that it did not receive any funding.
While the Freedom Trucks do not promote critical race theory, they do not shy away from mentioning slavery or highlighting how former slaves contributed to the patriot cause.
The trucks also feature a “Wall of American Heroes,” which highlights black icons such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Jackie Robinson, alongside military figures like George S. Patton, Christian leaders like evangelist Billy Graham and Bishop Fulton Sheen, inventors like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, and actors such as Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Stewart, and John Wayne.
