A sitting member of Congress brought poster-sized photographs of three real, living people into a federal hearing room last week and told a museum director that those photos make children more likely to be raped.
That is not an exaggeration of what happened. It is a description of it.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) was questioning Dr. Anthea Hartig, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, about the museum’s Entertainment Nation exhibit — a survey of how American pop culture has shaped the country.
The exhibit includes RuPaul, the Emmy-winning performer whose show RuPaul’s Drag Race has run for more than fifteen years on basic cable. Mace’s posterboard also featured season 13 contestants Kandy Muse and Joey Jay.
“Do you know how many kids get raped by adults every year in this country?” Mace asked Hartig, according to LGBTQ Nation, which first flagged the exchange.
Then she answered her own question with an accusation: putting drag performers in front of kids “sexualizes them, and makes them more vulnerable to people that want to rape them or abuse them.”
She had already told Hartig that the museum “strive[s] to represent queer pedophiles, indoctrination, grooming of kids at an American History Museum.”
The People in the Photos Found Out on Social Media
Kandy Muse learned her face had been used as a prop in a congressional hearing the way most of us learn things now — from a post online.
“Can I sue?” she asked on X, replying to a supporter who had shared the clip.
Joey Jay was further along. “I’m talking with my lawyer I’ll let you know what he says,” she wrote.
Neither performer was invited to the hearing. Neither was given a chance to respond. Neither had done anything except appear in a Smithsonian exhibit about American entertainment history.
They were named, pictured, and publicly linked to child rape by a member of Congress operating under the legal immunity that comes with speaking on the House floor and in committee.
The Hearing Didn’t Come Out of Nowhere
Mace’s outburst was one moment in a much larger pressure campaign.
On July 4, the White House Domestic Policy Council released a 162-page report titled “Saving America’s Story,” which claims the museum has been “captured” by a framework the administration describes as rooted in Marxism.
ABC News reported that the report accuses the museum of “anti-White activism,” “illegal alien activism,” and “transgender activism.”
It follows Trump’s March 2025 executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which directed Vice President JD Vance to strip “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian’s 21 museums, galleries, and the National Zoo.
Hartig, who has led the museum since 2019, was summoned to Capitol Hill twice in the same week.
NPR reported that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) accused her of using a taxpayer-funded museum to “push a racial narrative that divides Americans.”
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) opened by asking whether she was “America first” and whether she loves America.
Hartig’s answer, repeated over and over: the Smithsonian is nonpartisan and does not take sides in America’s political fights.
Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) took her own swing, complaining that the museum displayed “the fetish attire of a very small subset of Americans with weird sexual proclivities.”
She demanded to know what a crotch harness was. Hartig described it as a two-piece garment and noted that no visitor had complained about the display.
What the Evidence Actually Says
Here is the part that matters most, and it isn’t complicated.
Children are not endangered by museum exhibits.
According to RAINN, citing Bureau of Justice Statistics data, 93% of child sexual abuse victims knew the person who hurt them — 59% were acquaintances and 34% were family members. Only 7% were strangers.
Abuse happens in homes. In churches. In locker rooms and classrooms and cars driven by people the child’s parents trusted. It happens through grooming by adults who already have access.
Mace invoked the real suffering of real children — and then pointed the alarm at a photograph on a museum wall, away from every place the data says the danger actually lives.
That isn’t child protection. It is the opposite of it.
Every hour Congress spends interrogating a historian about a crotch harness is an hour not spent on background checks, mandatory reporter training, or funding for child advocacy centers.
The Exit Interview
Mace is on her way out. She finished last in South Carolina’s June 9 Republican gubernatorial primary, and her term ends January 3, 2027. On Instagram, she called the Smithsonian “a taxpayer-funded grooming operation.”
There’s a temptation to file this under noise — a lame-duck lawmaker doing one last bit for the cameras. Resist that.
Words like these travel. The “groomer” smear has followed drag performers from congressional hearings to library story hours to bomb threats and armed protests outside community centers.
Kandy Muse and Joey Jay are calling lawyers because a stranger with a congressional seat decided their faces made a useful prop.
And Anthea Hartig, a historian doing her job, sat in that room and answered every question in a level voice while being asked whether she loves her country.
