The Ben Shapiro Show - July 09, 2026


Mickey Mouse 'Blackface' Is Why Trump Needs To Fix The Smithsonian


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

175.75

Word count

1,447

Sentence count

91

Harmful content

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

27

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the year of America s 250th birthday, the National Museum of American History in our nation s capital says that Mickey Mouse represents vestiges of long-standing traditions of blackface minstrelsy. Is this right?

Transcript

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Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I'm going to read you something now.
00:00:01.000 It's a placard in the National Museum of American History, the taxpayer funded museum in our nation's capital in the year of America's 250th birthday.
00:00:08.000 Here's what it says about Mickey Mouse. 0.97
00:00:10.000 Quote, Mickey Mouse, with his outsized facial features, white gloves, and trickster temperament, represents vestiges of long standing traditions of blackface minstrelsy. 0.98
00:00:20.000 Smithsonian is saying that Mickey Mouse is about blackface. 0.95
00:00:23.000 Like that, of all the things about Mickey Mouse, that's the thing you need to know. 0.99
00:00:26.000 It's not just Mickey, by the way, who's on the target list.
00:00:29.000 The ukulele is a, quote, product of U.S. imperialism.
00:00:33.000 The ukulele.
00:00:33.000 Have you ever played a ukulele and thought, my God, the imperialistic capacity of this instrument?
00:00:40.000 Wild West shows, quote, turned the subjugation of indigenous people into theater.
00:00:44.000 The same museum could not be bothered to schedule a single event for the 4th of July or the 250th anniversary of the country it exists to celebrate.
00:00:51.000 Well, this week, the Trump administration released a report calling the place ideologically captured. 0.67
00:00:55.000 And President Trump is correct.
00:00:56.000 Somebody had to say it.
00:00:58.000 For his next trick, he should fix it.
00:00:59.000 The National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian is a taxpayer funded museum.
00:01:06.000 And it is increasingly crazy.
00:01:10.000 President Trump has been calling out the fact that their exhibits are wildly anti Western.
00:01:18.000 And he is not wrong.
00:01:20.000 Yesterday, the White House Domestic Policy Council put out a 162 page pamphlet study called Saving America's Story.
00:01:28.000 And it pointed out how the Smithsonian offers a view of American history that, quote, no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated.
00:01:37.000 Instead, the idea is.
00:01:40.000 That the United States was founded only for some, that it is a sectarian and terrible place.
00:01:46.000 In one exhibit, for example, the Pledge of Allegiance is described as a tool to, quote, instill American nationalism through flag ceremonies.
00:01:53.000 I mean, I'm confused as to why that would be a bad thing.
00:01:59.000 How about the Pledge of Allegiance is a ritual designed to allow children to understand why it is that it is good to be American?
00:02:11.000 The museum.
00:02:13.000 Says that Benjamin Franklin is both racist and anti immigrant, points out that Alexander Hamilton owns slaves, ignores the fact that both of them were actually quite abolitionist in their time.
00:02:27.000 One Smithsonian study about the Broadway musical Hamilton described Hamilton as influential and flawed.
00:02:35.000 It did not note that he was a drafter of the Federalist Papers, and also it didn't note that he also helped found the anti slavery New York Manumission Society in 1785.
00:02:49.000 The Smithsonian Undersecretary for Museums and Culture, a guy named Kevin Gover, said in 2016 at Brown University that he wanted to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day because Christopher Columbus was a slaver and a killer.
00:03:03.000 Also, the Smithsonian Undersecretary for Education, a person named Monique Kism, and Museum Director Anthea Hartig, began museum speeches with land acknowledgements.
00:03:12.000 And land acknowledgements is the dumb thing where people get up at the beginning of an event and they say, We are now standing on Iroquois land.
00:03:19.000 To which the normal response is, okay, so why don't you give it back? 0.98
00:03:23.000 Because this is dumb. 0.95
00:03:24.000 Acknowledging that you, quote unquote, stole the land from somebody is usually the precursor to giving it back to them. 0.98
00:03:30.000 Or alternatively, land changes hands over the course of human history.
00:03:34.000 And we should stop with this nonsense.
00:03:36.000 The Smithsonian Art Museum and Smithsonian Learning Lab created a poster that says, quote, whiteness as a concept is foundational to the history of the United States, actively shaping this country's social, cultural, political, and economic structures.
00:03:50.000 And of course, the museum has a We Belong Here exhibit in which we are told that, quote, the struggle for equal opportunity in sports began long before Title IX became law in 1972.
00:04:02.000 And it continues today as transgender, non binary, and cisgender female athletes demand equality.
00:04:10.000 The feds fund about 62% of the Smithsonian budget, some $1.1 billion in fiscal 2026.
00:04:17.000 So the recommendation by the Trump administration was maybe we shouldn't do the America hating routine.
00:04:21.000 By the way, they also call. 0.68
00:04:22.000 Mickey Mouse, they say that Mickey Mouse, quote, with his outsized facial features, white gloves and trickster temperament represents, quote, vestiges of longstanding traditions of blackface minstrelsy. 0.75
00:04:32.000 I have a question. 0.95
00:04:33.000 Have you ever watched Mickey Mouse and gone, hey, that reminds me of blackface? 0.99
00:04:37.000 Has that been a thing you do? 0.99
00:04:38.000 Maybe the key about Mickey Mouse is that Mickey Mouse was the foundational character in the creation of an entertainment enterprise that spans the globe.
00:04:46.000 Literally every child on planet Earth knows who Mickey Mouse is.
00:04:51.000 And yet somehow the Smithsonian's key lesson is it must have been racist.
00:04:55.000 Somehow.
00:04:56.000 Yeah, it turns out that all of these career staffers at government institutions like the Smithsonian need to be reexamined in terms of their politics because how you educate the next generation makes an awful lot of difference in terms of how they think about the country. 0.96
00:05:11.000 And you may think that it's minor or you may think that it's stupid or that it doesn't matter very much. 0.85
00:05:16.000 It's not true. 0.97
00:05:18.000 Millions of school children this year will go to the Smithsonian.
00:05:21.000 And if the place is overwhelmingly oriented toward a vision of America that is left wing, that does have an impact.
00:05:27.000 And there have been studies suggesting that one of the best indicators as to whether a child grows up conservative or liberal in the United States is whether they go to a 4th of July parade when they're a kid.
00:05:38.000 Experiences determine how you think.
00:05:40.000 And if you go to the Smithsonian, you read a bunch of exhibits about how America is racist, transphobic, terrible, that's going to make a difference.
00:05:49.000 And no, we should not be spending our taxpayer money on that. 0.99
00:05:51.000 And again, it is not as though the Smithsonian hasn't done this crap before. 0.86
00:05:54.000 So if you go all the way back to BLM summer, you remember it? 0.98
00:05:57.000 It was really, really terrible.
00:05:59.000 Well, the Smithsonian put out an exhibit at the time.
00:06:02.000 That was titled Talking About Race.
00:06:04.000 And this is for the National Museum of African American History.
00:06:08.000 And if you remember that exhibit, I mean, it is just emblematic of what the left thinks about race because the left's view of race is exactly the same as white supremacists, only the sides disagree on which side is bad.
00:06:19.000 So the woke put out an exhibit.
00:06:22.000 Again, this was funded by the taxpayer titled Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture.
00:06:27.000 And those aspects and assumptions of whiteness and white culture included rugged individualism. 0.55
00:06:32.000 They said this is about whiteness, rugged individual.
00:06:34.000 Like, if you believe that the individual is the primary unit and that independence and autonomy should be highly valued and rewarded, you must be white or be ensconced in whiteness.
00:06:44.000 Family structure, because apparently it was like a white thing to have a father and a mother and a couple of kids. 0.81
00:06:51.000 The emphasis on the scientific method is a white people thing. 0.70
00:06:55.000 Objective, rational, linear thinking, said this exhibit, was like a whiteness thing. 0.86
00:07:01.000 The Protestant work ethic. 0.72
00:07:02.000 The idea that hard work is the key and you ought to work before play.
00:07:05.000 And if you didn't meet your goals, you didn't work hard enough. 1.00
00:07:07.000 That, too, is an aspect of whiteness. 0.81
00:07:10.000 Religion is an aspect of whiteness, in which Christianity is the norm and anything other than the Judeo Christian tradition is foreign. 0.87
00:07:19.000 Status, power, and authority that you ought to put value on the ownership of goods, space, or property. 0.98
00:07:26.000 Time that you follow rigid time schedules. 1.00
00:07:29.000 This was an aspect of whiteness. 1.00
00:07:33.000 That justice ought to be based on whiteness, right? 0.92
00:07:36.000 Meaning protect property and entitlements and intent counts. 0.94
00:07:38.000 So intent should apparently not count.
00:07:42.000 Those guidelines are insane, of course, but the Smithsonian put that out in 2020.
00:07:45.000 Now, it ended up being withdrawn.
00:07:47.000 But the fact that it was ever a part of an exhibit funded by the taxpayer tells you the kinds of people who are running these museums in the first place. 0.92
00:07:56.000 Somebody's dream was to run this museum and decide that it was time to tell black people that somehow timeliness was an aspect of whiteness. 0.93
00:08:04.000 What an amazing video you just watched. 0.97
00:08:06.000 Wasn't that amazing?
00:08:07.000 Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.