In what many are calling a brazen act of historical rewrite, Donald Trump and his administration are steering America's national museums and parks into troubling territory. The aim? To erase the parts of our history that don’t fit a rosy, flag-waving narrative.
Erasure isn’t just digital deletion; it’s the physical and ideological whitewashing of a nation’s past. And nowhere is this more disturbing than in our cherished national parks, where the land itself whispers stories of both triumph and terror.
This current push, sparked by an executive order first signed in March, demands Smithsonian institutions and national parks reevaluate and purge exhibits and plaques deemed “not positively patriotic enough.” The message? Anything that casts America in a negative light—think slavery, indigenous genocide, or racial strife—must be swept under the rug.
Fast forward to September 16, 2025, and the administration ratchets up the pressure. Now, sites like Fort Pulaski National Monument in Georgia are removing historic materials, including the haunting Civil War photograph “Scourged Back,” a stark testament to the brutality of slavery.
Said the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), led by Alan Spears, who condemned this censorship in no uncertain terms: “Great countries don’t hide from their history… We learn from our past, warts and all.” Spears rightly calls out the decision to remove “Scourged Back” as “shameful”—a dangerously misguided attempt to sanitize America’s racial wounds.
What’s truly alarming isn’t just the effort to obscure history—it's the smell of authoritarianism creeping in as the nation grapples with divisions over race, religion, truth, and fact. The Trump era’s obsession with rewriting narratives, coupled with the president’s own tangled history, suggests a troubling shift toward fascist tendencies.
America was never supposed to be a nation built on amnesia. Our museums and parks exist to remind us of our trials, all of them—the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s only regimes eager to control the narrative that silence inconvenient truths to make themselves look better.
Spears sums it up perfectly: “Our national parks can unite us, teach us, and help carve out a future based on confronting—and learning from—our history. The current administration’s meddling must stop.”
Is this the America we want? A nation that forgets its own story? Or one committed to understanding every chapter—light and dark alike? The choice, it appears, is being made for us.