A decision by the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents to designate its Arts and Industries Building the new permanent home of the National Museum of the American Latino is drawing controversy.
The Board made this move to avoid seeking the congressional approval — and specifically the congressional FIGHT — that building a new facility would have required, according to Fox News.
Why a fight? Because many on the right oppose the very existence of the National Museum of the American Latino and other similar exhibits/museums because of their rabid wokeness.
“We need to get rid of the Latino museum. It needs to be de-authorized. It should not exist,” Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez bluntly told Fox News.
Heritage Foundation scholar Mike Gonzalez is calling for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino to be completely de-authorized — arguing its inaugural exhibition was an “incubator of grievances” laced with Marxist messaging rather than a genuine celebration of… pic.twitter.com/MrrM2hibTy
— Fox News Politics (@foxnewspolitics) September 15, 2026
Gonzalez also called for firing the Smithsonian’s insanely woke leadership.
As just one example out of many of the Smithsonian’s sins, Gonzalez pointed to the museum’s 2022 inaugural exhibition, “¡Presente! A Latino History of the United States.” He noted that the exhibition contained an ani-Western, anti-American worldview.
For instance, the exhibit said “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us” as a defense of illegal migration. The exhibit also contained panels on Cuban American drag performer and gay-rights activist José Julio Sarria, and panels on a goon who worked for former Chilean socialist President Salvador Allende.
Gonzalez also pointed to a Heritage Foundation report he filed last year in which he’d noted that the museum’s exhibits portray Latino people as victims of alleged American oppression.
“This means that [if the museum is approved,] American taxpayers will be asked to fork over money for a project that will, by design, denigrate their country and promote separation,” he wrote. “What examples we have seen of the museum’s offerings amply demonstrate that this will be the case”
The Smithsonian Latino museum enshrines the balkanizing views & dreams of the radical groups most hostile to American unity. Despite this, members of the Appropriations Committees of both houses of Congress & both parties voted to fund it.@Gundisalvus https://t.co/7s8g8gd9BB
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) September 19, 2025
Testifying before the House Oversight Committee in July, weeks before the Board made its decision, Gonzalez outright called for both the Latino museum and the American Women’s History Museum to be “de-authorized” before they became official.
“These two museums can never be built,” he insisted. “They have demonstrated, through their forerunning exhibitions, that they will be nothing more than incubators of grievances against the United States. De-authorize them and stop funding them. Only a foolish people will pay $1.1 billion for their own cultural erasure. The American people are not a foolish people.”
Gonzalez appears to have all the right in the world to be critical of the museums: “[H]is father was imprisoned by Cuba’s former ‘tin-pot dictator’ Fulgencio Batista before the leader was overthrown by Fidel Castro in 1959,” according to Fox News.
His criticisms of the Smithsonian echo the criticism of many others, including Cully Stimson, who’s also with the Heritage Foundation. Speaking with Fox News last month, he argued that the modern Smithsonian is pushing a negative, “self-loathing” portrayal of America’s history.
“I think this is part of a broader effort by radicals on the left to redefine the history of the United States and reframe it in an oppressor-versus-oppressed narrative,” he said.
“Instead of looking at American history chronologically with all the triumphs and tragedies, including slavery, and then the things that our country did to eradicate the vestiges of slavery, and then passing the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and the Civil Rights Acts and getting rid of various other laws that were discriminatory in practice or in spirit, they take a very pro-reparations, ‘we’re a bad country,’ oppressor-versus-oppressed narrative,” he added.
His remarks came after the Trump administration’s Domestic Policy Council published a bombshell report accusing the Smithsonian of not being interested in presenting American history but rather twisting it “to advance ideas of social justice and the radical transformation of our society.”
