President Trump has ordered the National Park Service to remove any material that he believes to be offensive, unpatriotic, or reminiscent of improper partisan ideology from signs and presentations that visitors see at national parks and historic sites as part of his ongoing war on woke.
Rather, his administration has directed the Department of the Interior-managed national parks and hundreds of other monuments and museums to make sure that all of their signage serves as a reminder to Americans of our remarkable history, our steady progress toward a more ideal Union, and our unparalleled record of promoting liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.
Trump opponents and proponents of free speech are shocked by the marching instructions, which went into force late last week. They are questioning how park staff are expected to present monuments that acknowledge slavery and Jim Crow laws in a positive light. And how, with an unparalleled record of expanding liberty, they will balance the tale of Japanese Americans who were sent to detention camps during World War II.
Last Monday, staff at Manzanar National Historic Site, one of ten camps where over 120,000 Japanese American residents were detained in the early 1940s, posted a mandatory notice outlining the changes. Manzanar is a dusty camp in the eastern California high desert.
Like all such warnings across the nation, it features a QR code that visitors may use to report any signs they see that fail to highlight the beauty, grandeur, and wealth of landscapes, or that are disparaging of current or former Americans.
An identical sign honoring the fight to guarantee higher salaries and safer working conditions for immigrant farm laborers is displayed at Kern County’s Cesar E. Chavez National Monument. These signs are being erected throughout the extensive system, which includes the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Park, the Ford’s Theater National Historic Site in Washington, D.C., the site of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and Fort Sumter National Monument, where Confederates fired the opening shots of the Civil War.
So, neither James Earl Ray nor John Wilkes Booth are bad?
A National Park Service official stated that adjustments would be made as necessary in response to an email seeking comment, but she did not address inquiries concerning particular parks or monuments.
Dennis Arguelles, director of the National Parks Conservation Association’s Southern California chapter, described the entire situation as shocking. These tales are an essential part of our past, even though they may not be complimentary to American heritage.
We run the risk of making some of these mistakes again if we lose these stories, Arguelles stated.
Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History is the title of Trump’s executive order dated March 27 that requires federal sign writers to see the bright side. He gave the Interior Department special instructions to examine all signs installed since January 2020, when the Biden administration started, for wording that supports an inaccurate reconstruction of American history.
Trump pointed to indicators that put the United States’ fundamental ideals and significant historical moments in an unfavorable light, undermining the country’s outstanding accomplishments.
He named the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., and the National Historical Park in Philadelphia as specifically caving in to what he called the previous administration’s fervor to portray our country’s unmatched legacy of promoting liberty, individual rights, and human happiness as fundamentally racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.
His remedy? Direct historians and federal personnel to rewrite the revisionist history using patriotic terms.
According to rock climber and author of a guidebook for Yosemite National Park, Kimbrough Moore, it all seems somewhat Orwellian. He shared a sign he observed in the restroom of the Porcupine Flat campground in the center of the park on Instagram after word of the upcoming changes started to spread across the park.
A placard that reads, “Please DO NOT put trash in the White House,” was added across from the common notice in all park restrooms that states, “Please DO NOT put trash in toilets, as it is very difficult to remove.” It is quite hard to get rid of.
The post went viral as expected, confirming what would-be censors have known for centuries: language regulation is a complex issue that can be challenging to manage in a free society.
According to Moore, even the poor can serve as a site for resistance.
