In a nation long accustomed to debating who controls the telling of its own story, the Trump administration has moved to place ideological warning labels on exhibits throughout the Smithsonian Institution — one of the world's great repositories of public knowledge. The Interior Secretary frames the initiative as a transparency measure against institutional bias, while critics see it as an unprecedented intrusion of political authority into the realm of scholarly and curatorial judgment. The proposal surfaces an enduring tension in democratic life: who holds the right to curate collective memor