Once a celebrated magazine dedicated to the “increase and diffusion of knowledge,” it appears the 49-year-old Smithsonian magazine is now nothing more than a rag hellbent on extolling the non-existent virtue of murderous Marxist monsters.

Namely, monsters like Che Guevara, a deceased “revolutionary” Marxist known for his authoritarianism, dissent for liberty and horrifying murder streak — but also known for the inexplicable adoration he often receives from members of the far-left.

As in THIS Che Guevara:

Now enter Smithsonian magazine, which has published a puff piece ostensibly about his son, Ernesto Guevara, that includes nothing but praise for his effusively evil father. In fact, the author of the piece, Tony Perrottet, went so far as to describe the mass murderer as “a soulful, poetic introvert” who boasted “good looks” and was a “family man.”

“We filed into an attached museum, which told the story of Che’s extraordinary life, starting with his childhood in the Argentine city of Rosario in the 1940s and his move as a medical student with matinee idol good looks to Buenos Aires,” he wrote, describing what he saw when he and Guevara’s son went to visit a museum dedicated to his father.

“On display were his favorite books, including Don Quixote; his bombilla, the bulb-shaped pot from which he drank his Argentine tea, maté; and an asthma inhaler. There were also images from Mexico City in 1955, where the peripatetic Che met Fidel [Castro], an idealistic young lawyer-turned-revolutionary, at a dinner party. The two had opposite personalities—Che a soulful, poetic introvert, Fidel a manically garrulous extrovert—but possessed the same revolutionary zeal.”

A couple of paragraphs down, Perrottet dovetailed to Guevara’s “family” life.

“Alongside the images of Che the conquering warrior were startling snapshots from his lesser-known existence in the 1960s — as a family man in Havana,” he wrote with praise and adoration dripping from his pen.

“Che would write tender poetry for his wife, and when he departed for the Congo in 1965, left tape recordings of his favorite romantic verse, including Pablo Neruda’s Goodbye: Twenty Love Poems. He also left a letter for his four children to be opened and read only in the case of his death.”

Ernesto Guevara, Che’s son, led a group of eight on a motorcycle tour around Cuba. The escapade was filled with the island’s usual mild chaos and misadventures, which Ernesto had tackled with dry humor. https://t.co/7TNIHJrVbc — Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) October 24, 2019

Perrottet was smitten by all his discoveries regarding his apparent hero.

“I was a little star-struck myself and lapped up shreds of Guevara family gossip … the austere and disciplined Che worked long hours, six days a week, first as the head of the National Bank and then as minister for industry,” he wrote. “On his day off, he volunteered as a laborer in the cane fields, a nod to Mao’s China.”

Though Mao’s China was responsible for the deaths of up to 45 million people, nowhere in Perrottet’s piece in Smithsonian magazine was this mentioned.

The piece likewise barely touched on Guevara’s murderous tendencies, except for in this sentence: “[W]ithin 25 months, [Castro and Guevara] were in control of Cuba, with Che given the job of overseeing the execution of Batista’s most vicious thugs.”

On Jan. 1, 1959, Castro and Guevara overthrew the regime of then-Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and then proceeded to kill the former dictator’s officials.

But they didn’t stop there …

“Guevara undoubtedly played a key role in the overthrow of the dictatorial Batista regime in January of 1959,” Thor Halvorssen, the founder of the Human Rights Foundation, wrote in an open letter two years ago addressed to retailers who were selling Guevara-themed t-shirts.

“However, despite promises of a new democratic government, within a few months, he and Fidel Castro had designed and installed a full-blown police state that deprived the overwhelming majority of Cuban citizens of democracy and human rights.”

Guevara also oversaw “the rise of forced labor camps which gave way a few years later to full-scale concentration camps.”

These camps were reportedly filled with “dissidents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests, and anyone else who had committed ‘crimes’ against the new moral revolution.”

Many of these suspected “criminals” were eventually killed on behalf of Castro.

That a puff piece regarding such a vicious man appeared in such an allegedly esteemed magazine — one funded by taxpayers, to boot — is troubling, though not surprising.

The 173-year-old Smithsonian Institution as a whole has in recent years repeatedly embraced left wing-styled radicalism.

Two years ago the institute installed a tribute to America-hating race-baiter Colin Kaepernick at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The year before that the institute snubbed conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who happens to be one of only two black people who’ve ever served on the high court.

In 2015 the institute was called out for celebrating the life of Margaret Sanger, the racist founder of Planned Parenthood who’d reportedly sought to use contraceptives to control the population of minorities.

And in 2013 the institute sought to honor Trayvon Marton, the Florida youth who has falsely been portrayed by the radical left as a martyr for his otherwise justified shooting and death in 2012 by a local community patrol volunteer.