Earlier this week, Right Wing Watch noted the likelihood that Christian nationalist pseudo-historian was involved in convincing the Trump administration to order a review of exhibits within the Smithsonian Institution to ensure that they conform to and reflect the administration's ideology.
This theory gained more credence when Barton himself admitted on today's episode of "The WallBuilders Show" that he "was up at the White House a week ago and I told them, by far, the most racist and most historically inaccurate museum in Washington, DC, by far, has got to be the museum on African American history."
On today's program, Barton and his son Tim claimed that Smithsonian museums are rife with "anti-American bias" and the exhibits are guided by a "modern Marxist approach" designed to portray "America as a fundamentally flawed and evil nation."
The Barton are particularly upset that the museums seem to have "an obsession with slavery."
"Yes, slavery was part of America's story, but that's not the defining part of America's story," Tim Barton said. "When the story is being told that this is the most significant thing for American history, it's a very dishonest and disingenuous approach because there's so much more to the story than the fact that we had slaves for less than 100 years in our nation's history. That should be really something celebrated that we had slavery for almost the least amount of time in any nation's history in the history of the world. That's a pretty big deal."
"The fact that we fought a war where white people fighting as white people at the end of the war, they freed all the black people," he continued. "We can go down the list of why America ending slavery was quite impressive, but that's not the position that any of the Smithsonians take, it's not a position that academics take, and it was that kind of stuff that caught President Trump's attention, saying we don't want to tell the rising generations how bad America is and that America is fundamentally flawed, stained and is not redeemable. That's not a story we want to tell. Instead, we want to show why is America different, why are we special, what's made America great."
As we noted last time, this is typical of the approach taken by the Bartons when it comes to discussing the issue of slavery, using the topic either to attack Democrats or to credit white Christians for ending.
The Bartons seem intent on downplaying slavery's role in American history whenever possible, like when Tim Barton tried to prove that the Founding Fathers were not all "racist, bigoted slaveholders" by delivering a misleading history lesson about the Declaration of Independence, as Right Wing Watch reported in 2023:
The reason that most people are likely unfamiliar with this passage of the Declaration of Independence is because it only appeared in the draft version of the document that was written by Thomas Jefferson, edited by the Committee of Five, and delivered to the Continental Congress.
The passage condemning the slave trade was subsequently removed by the delegates before the Declaration received final approval.
As historian Richard Beeman explained in his book, "Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor: The Forging of American Independence, 1774-1776," Jefferson's effort to blame King George III for the slave-trade was "inaccurate and unfair" and was ultimately removed "because of political pressure from slave-owing or slave-trading colonies."
It is wildly misleading for Barton to assert that the Founding Fathers opposed slavery and the slave trade by citing a passage condemning them when that passage was deliberately removed from and does not appear in the final version of the Declaration of Independence. In fact, what does appear in the final version of the Declaration in an attack on King George III for having "excited domestic insurrections amongst us," which is a reference to the British promise to grant freedom to any enslaved person who escaped and fought for England.
