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WEIRD ORIGINS OF THE RIGHT’S HATRED OF THE SMITHSONIAN  
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Jason Colavito
August 21, 2025
The New Republic
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_ The Trump administration has stepped up its antagonism of
America’s treasured museums. But conservative antipathy toward the
institution began long ago—with the bones of Bible giants. _

, Salwan Georges/Getty Images

 

Did you hear the one about the Smithsonian hiding the bones of Bible
giants in the basement? No? Well, Missouri Republican Representative
Eric Burlinson did, and he recently said
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he wants to develop a “strategy” to use Congress’s investigative
power to get to the bottom of the mystery. “I do believe were
real,” Burlinson told a Blaze TV program in June, shortly before he
gave a speech at NephCon 2025
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of people who are hunting the remains of the Nephilim, or the giants
from the Book of Genesis
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Burlinson’s comments on _Prime Time With Alex Stein _were delivered
with laughter, but his attendance at a Nephilim conference was not
exactly funny. It came only weeks before the Trump administration sent
a letter
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the secretary of the Smithsonian demanding a full review to ensure
museum exhibits and curatorial processes conform to the president’s
vision of history.

With the president declaring the Smithsonian “out of control” on
Truth Social, the shape and scope of the growing threat to America’s
premier public museum from the right wing is rapidly coming into view.
And that shape is increasingly that of an internet fever dream of
conspiracy, one that has been fomenting distrust of the Smithsonian
for decades in service of a deeply conservative and religious agenda
that sees both history and science as its ideological enemies.

For most of the nation’s history, the Smithsonian has served as
symbol of national unity, receiving praise from members of both
political parties and the public at large. Intermittent efforts to
challenge the museum, such as Christian radio host Dale Crowley
Jr.’s 1978 federal lawsuit demanding the Smithsonian cancel an
exhibition on human evolution, have largely failed to materialize.
That all changed in 1994, when veterans’ groups and conservative
politicians, including Patrick J. Buchanan, vocally criticized
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and Space Museum for highlighting the Japanese casualties of the
Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings in a proposed exhibit tied to
the fiftieth anniversary of the _Enola Gay_. They considered any
questioning of the decision to drop the A-bomb as dishonoring
veterans, and thus anti-American. It was, in Buchanan’s words
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“a sleepless campaign to inculcate in American youth a revulsion
toward America’s past.”

“We’ve got to get patriotism back in the Smithsonian,”
conservative Texas Congressman Sam Johnson said, on being appointed to
the museum’s Board of Regents shortly afterward to provide so-called
ideological “balance.” “We want the Smithsonian to reflect real
America and not something that a historian dreamed up.”

The year-long media and political firestorm, and the attacks on
historians as unpatriotic fantasists, helped fuel the politicization
of the Smithsonian, but they did so in tandem with a development
occurring on the nascent internet.

A year before the _Enola Gay _controversy, in 1993, future _Ancient
Aliens _star David Childress, then a self-described “world
explorer,” introduced the world to his new conspiracy theory, that
the Smithsonian was actively trying to suppress the “truth” about
various lost races of white giants, ancient Egyptians, and assorted
what-have-you that allegedly occupied prehistoric America. He wrote
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this in his self-published magazine, _World Explorer__,_ and in the
New Age _Nexus New Times_
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_that year. He dubbed the conspiracy with the not-so-original moniker
“Smithsonian Gate.”

Childress gathered a passel of unconvincing evidence and wrapped it up
in a sort of homage to the 1981 Indiana Jones film _Raiders of the
Lost Ark_, whose final scene showed the U.S. government secreting away
the fabled Ark of the Covenant in a warehouse, never to be seen again.
“To those who investigate allegations of archaeological
cover-ups,” he wrote, “there are disturbing indications that the
most important archaeological institute in the United States, the
Smithsonian Institute , an independent federal agency, has been
actively suppressing some of the most interesting and important
archaeological discoveries made in the Americas.”

Childress’s evidence was about as solid as Indy’s celluloid
adventures. Childress pronounced a 1909 newspaper hoax about an
underground Tibetan city in the Grand Canyon true. He berated the
Smithsonian for discrediting 32,000 ceramic statues, including some of
people having sex with dinosaurs, because he assumed the modern fakes
were ancient and proved evolution a lie. He heard a secondhand story
about the Smithsonian dumping a barge of “unusual” artifacts into
the Atlantic to stop anyone from seeing them. (Possibly this was a
garbled version of the allegation
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apparently dating to the 1990s, that the American Museum of Natural
History dumped unwanted mammoth bones into the East River in 1949.)
The list goes on.

The most important part of Childress’s conspiracy, though, was the
specific claim that John Wesley Powell, the director of the
Smithsonian in the late 1800s, orchestrated a cover-up of evidence for
giants who were part of a lost race that had been in contact with
Europe and built pyramids and mounds across America. The most
spectacular of these mounds, Monk’s Mound at Cahokia near St. Louis,
has a base as large as the Great Pyramid at Giza’s.

Powell wanted to disprove the popular notion that Native Americans
erected these mounds, on the grounds that they were too stupid and
lazy to create these features—something that nineteenth-century
scholars assumed only white people or Bible giants could do. Childress
implied that Powell suppressed the truth because he was too
sympathetic to Native Americans and had chosen to improperly
aggrandize their cultures by suppressing evidence of (imaginary)
ancient European colonists that would have connected ancient America
to the country’s current Caucasian population. He called this the
Smithsonian’s “official dogma.”

Childress relied on Victorian reports about large bones that
Powell’s team, led by Cyrus Thomas, had dismissed
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in 1894 as unevidenced. Hundreds of such reports littered the papers
in the late 1800s, and claiming to find the bones of giants became a
popular appeal to “prove” the Bible’s superiority to Darwin. The
Smithsonian politely informed inquirers that these bones did not
belong to the mythical Nephilim.

We know, of course, what those bones really were. As the onetime head
of the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, Ales Hrdlička, told
_Science News Letter_
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_in 1934, the so-called bones of “giants” the public sent to the
Smithsonian for review fell into three categories: those measured
incorrectly, those misunderstood due to ignorance of anatomy, and
those belonging to mastodons and mammoths. When they arrived at the
museum, they were correctly classified, and thus the bones of
“giants” vanished into the catalogs of normal human bones and
normal animal bones.

Twentieth-century evangelicals and creationists had long cited
sensational newspaper stories of giant bones as proof of the Bible’s
inerrancy, but even the most famous creationist book on the subject,
Charles DeLoach’s 1995 work _Giants: A Reference Guide From History,
the Bible, and Recorded Legend_, did not blame the Smithsonian for
hiding the bones.

However, in the early 2000s, the creationist thread quickly wrapped
itself around the needle of growing conservative anger at the
Smithsonian’s perceived politics. Intermittent attacks on the
Smithsonian over everything from evolution
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and environmental conservation
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to sweatshops
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(the apparel industry was offended) may have been forgotten, but the
conspiracy about ancient giants elevated the same concerns to the
level of myth and made them an article of faith.

Influential conspiracy theorist David Icke picked up Childress’s
story for his 1993 book _The Biggest Secret__,_ but the reprint shared
on the (now defunct) KeeleyNet paranormal bulletin board in 1993
spread Childress’s claims across the internet. Then, in 2001, a
writer names Ross Hamilton produced an article in _Nexus_ called
“Holocaust of Giants: The Great Smithsonian Cover-Up
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expanding on Childress’s claim and linking it explicitly to
conservative evangelical Christianity. Hamilton argued that the
Smithsonian suppressed evidence of Bible giants not just to help
Native Americans but to keep Christians from realizing that
“Darwin’s troublesome theory” was false.

Hamilton’s article, often paired with Childress’s, crashed into a
burgeoning alternative history media revolution that revolved,
ultimately, around grievances against government, science, and
“elite” academics who questioned jingoist renditions of the past.
Whether it was popular books of fringe history that sought “white”
gods in ancient America or cable TV documentaries looking for
prehistoric Europeans who ruled ancient America, the overarching theme
was a longing to return to an imagined past when a rapidly
diversifying United States was still mostly white and Christian.

A lost white race of Bible giants—literally bigger, stronger, and
whiter than everyone else—fashioned as a symbol of everything
conservatives wanted to remake America into, is an all-too-convenient
bit of lore for the conspiracy-besotted right. (Never mind that the
Nephilim were technically the villains in Genesis!) And the
Smithsonian was, if anything, a useful foil for a fringe movement
looking for an enemy to accuse of suppressing the truth.

Soon enough, claims that the Smithsonian intentionally hid the bones
of Bible giants went mainstream, presaging the country’s own
rightward shift. By the 2010s, the Smithsonian’s secret giants
appeared in popular paranormal books, on late-night radio shows, in
multiple cable TV documentaries (including at least two separate
History Channel shows), and across a network of evangelical and
far-right media outlets.

Among the most popular of these were the Christian DVDs and later
podcasts produced by Steve Quayle and his Nephilim-hunting partner,
Timothy Alberino. Quayle, an archconservative, blamed Bible giants for
“teaching” men to be gay. He and Alberino were regulars on the
right-wing podcast circuit in the 2010s, often appearing with figures
like Alex Jones and Jim Bakker so Quayle could hawk their merch,
attack Democratic politicians as demonic, and advocate for a targeted
genocide [[link removed]] of Nephilim-controlled
liberals.

Burlinson told Blaze TV that he had been radicalized against the
Smithsonian through Alberino’s podcasts and videos. In his podcasts,
Alberino has described
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Bible giants as a “superior race society.”

In recent years, Alberino has made moves to go more mainstream. He has
appeared on _Ancient Aliens__,_ the History Channel show advocating
historical conspiracies, where David Childress is a featured star.
That same show also hosted Tucker Carlson, Tennessee Republican
Representative Tim Burchett, and others to peddle conspiracies about
government cover-ups of space aliens, interdimensional beings, demons,
and more.

For the far right, the E.T.s of _Ancient Aliens_—the same ones
Congress is currently hunting in various UFO hearings—are actually
angels and demons, and those demons are the souls of the giants who
died in the Flood, according to a nonbiblical text Alberino endorses
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Burlinson said in 2023
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that he thinks UFOs could be angels, and more recently he promised
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hearing to be held on September 9 would feature witnesses who
“handled the bodies” of these beings.

Conspiracies about Bible giants are basically the Christian version of
UFOs and aliens, and it’s no wonder there is significant
cross-pollination between believers in the two camps, even in
Congress, where several representatives like Burlinson and Burchett
have publicly discussed their belief in both. In fact, both
conspiracies give pride of place to the Nephilim narrative from
Genesis 6:4 as proof of either fallen angels or alien intervention.

It would be laughable if the Smithsonian conspiracy theory and tales
of Bible giants now being spread on Blaze TV, on Joe Rogan’s
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media, were not a kind of Trojan horse to soften up the public to
accept political propaganda in place of history and complete the
assault on America’s museums
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that failed in the 1990s. But the conspiracists continue to spread
their lore, and mainstream conservative politicians continue to
escalate their attacks on the Smithsonian—a far-right pincer
movement directed at an institution that is both the nation’s
premier repository of historical fact and a potent bolsterer of
America’s civic fabric. And that is no laughing matter.

Jason Colavito is an author in upstate New York writing about history,
science, and popular culture. He is the author of _The Legends of the
Pyramids_ and _Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean._.

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