The government now installs warning signs on its own history museum.

…(cont) Eleven days after the letter went out, on Sept. 8, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch III announced he would retire. Bunch, 73, was the Smithsonian's first Black leader and the founder of its National Museum of African American History and Culture; he had run the world's largest museum complex through the years the letter was now grading him on.

Three days after that, in social media posts late on Sept. 11, the president asked the museum to install a 30-foot statue of George Washington outside the American history building and to replace the "Infinity" statue standing there now with an exhibit honoring the founding father. How many things were wrong with the statue already on the lawn was not a figure the posts supplied; they gave a height instead — 30 feet — and let the rest go unmeasured, penny-ante arithmetic for an argument this large.

On Sept. 16, the Interior Department delivered the receipts: twelve warning signs, to be installed outside the museum, laying out for visitors the version of American history they were about to encounter. The Interior Secretary called it necessary to combat ideological bias, which is one way to describe replacing a curator's judgment with a department's plaque. Another way is just shit, stated plainly, next to a gentler fact: the exhibits inside have not, themselves, been changed yet.

Curatorial independence is survived by the building, the pedestal awaiting its statue, and the twelve signs now doing the job the director used to do. It is preceded in death by Bunch's tenure and by the plain fact — no asterisk required — that a museum which has to post a sign explaining itself has already told you the whole story.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that visitors read the exhibit before the sign does the reading for them.