The scholars behind a Smithsonian exhibition targeted by the Trump administration have built their careers around the same race, gender, sexuality and social-justice themes now fueling accusations of ideological bias at the museum, a Fox News Digital review found.
Entertainment Nation, which opened in December 2022, is an ongoing exhibition at the Smithsonians National Museum of American History that uses artifacts from music, film, television, theater and sports to examine how popular culture has shaped American life.
Every member of the exhibits seven-person curatorial team has incorporated themes involving racial injustice, gender inequality, sexuality or other progressive social causes into their academic work, public commentary or prior museum projects. Fox News Digitals review found praise for communist-linked figures, alignment with progressive activist movements and explicit statements connecting museum work to social justice.
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Speaking to Fox News Digital previously, a senior White House official Entertainment Nation of promoting “fringe or activist ideologies masquerading as history.”
John Troutman, the exhibits lead curator, told The Washington Post in 2023 that the project was meant to do more than present a conventional history of entertainment, saying it was not intended to serve as “a gallery that provides a history of entertainment,” but instead to examine broader social movements reflected in popular culture.
Troutmans colleagues have similarly examined entertainment through themes of racial exclusion, gender stereotypes, homophobia and other social conflicts commonly emphasized by the political left.
Curator Kenneth Cohen, for example, published “They Will Have Their Game” in 2017, a book examining how the development of sports in the United States “produced a sense of democracy while also reinforcing racial, gender, and class divisions,” according to a description from his publisher. The book, per the description, examines how sports contributed to the “creation of the white male republic” in the United States.
“Although competition and risk were central to understandings of sport in early Anglo-America, the formation of a sporting culture based on those elements was not inevitable,” Cohen’s book reads. “It was a purposeful choice, made largely by empowered white men, to construct sporting culture around traits that encouraged engagement within their ranks and helped to define them as a group despite internal class and ethnic divides.”
Cohens colleague on the exhibit, curator Krystal Klingenberg, has similarly focused much of her scholarship on music, race, social justice and the Black Lives Matter movement.
For another Smithsonian project
