National Park Service Ordered to Sanitize History

NPS sites must erase anything that "disparages Americans"

The Trump administration late last week ordered the National Park Service to begin erasing the parts of history that make America look bad. Apparently, the only thing being conserved now is fragile egos.

By September 17, Constitution Day, every national park, monument, and historic site must remove or cover up any content deemed to “inappropriately disparage Americans.” That includes signage, ranger programs, films, exhibits, websites, anything that might cast a shadow on our national mythology.

The order comes with QR codes and signs now going up across all 433 NPS sites encouraging the public to flag any content they think should be changed. I know that sounds hard to believe, but it’s true. The Interior Department has turned park visitors into informants and frontline censors. And if a ranger mentions internment, slavery, colonial violence, anti-LGBTQ discrimination, anything that paints a fuller picture of our imperfect past, it may soon be grounds to fire them.

New signage at every NPS site | Photo: NPCA

There’s a term for this, it’s called historical negationism or historical denialism. It’s a tactic employed by authoritarian regimes to sanitize history to align with their ideology.

The Trump administration calls it a “review.” They say it’s about reminding Americans of our “extraordinary heritage.” But that heritage includes genocide. It includes racism. It includes state-sponsored injustice. And a great many of our national park sites exist in no small part to remember those truths. To face them. To learn from them.

So how could this directive play out?

Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, where U.S. soldiers butchered sleeping Cheyenne and Arapaho families in cold blood, could soon be sanitized to avoid “disparaging” the killers. One of the most shameful atrocities in American history, carried out by uniformed men under the U.S. flag, reduced to polite ambiguity. Because the truth makes the wrong people uncomfortable.

Minidoka National Historic Site, where thousands of Japanese Americans were rounded up at gunpoint, stripped of their rights, and locked in desert prison camps, may no longer be allowed to name that injustice, because it “reflects poorly” on the nation that built the barbed wire.

Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument, where children faced fire hoses and police dogs, may be forced to tiptoe around the brutality they endured, lest the perpetrators or their descendants be made to feel shame.

Stonewall National Monument, the site of a police raid that helped launch the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, may be stripped of its context entirely. Not because it isn’t historically significant, but because the people who made history there are no longer deemed worthy of being remembered.

Pullman National Historical Park, the site of one of the most important labor uprisings in American history, could be watered down to a feel-good story about industrial innovation, no mention of workers being shot in the street by U.S. troops for demanding fair wages.

It means every ranger who’s spent their career teaching real, hard, necessary American history is now at risk of being muzzled or fired for telling the truth.

And what happens when our uncomfortable historical sites are reduced to footnotes? When their interpretive signs are reworded until they say nothing at all?

We get silence where there should be truth. We get a National Park Service that no longer serves the public, but shields the powerful. We get rangers afraid to do their jobs, staff too scared to speak, and landscapes stripped not only of protection, but of meaning.

And that’s exactly what they want.

Once the stories are gone, the land gets easier to plunder. If Sand Creek is just another field, it can be drilled. If Manzanar is just desert, it can be sold. If Stonewall is just a building, it can be demolished. If the past no longer matters, then nothing stands in the way of controlling the future.

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Where is This Coming From?

We’re seeing now that this administration’s public lands agenda isn’t just about clearing space for oil wells or copper mines. It’s about manufacturing a version of America that never did anything wrong. It’s about replacing hard truth with soft lies. About turning what’s left of the Park Service into a stage for performative patriotism, where the flag is honored, but the truth is not.

If you look a little deeper than the QR codes, tweets, and jingoistic slogans, you can see that this is the same mistaken idea of freedom I wrote about earlier this year. Not the freedom to learn, to grow, to understand, but the freedom to never be told no. To bulldoze through history the same way some people want to bulldoze through wilderness: without limits, without reflection, without responsibility.

That’s what this directive is about. It’s not just censorship, it’s revenge. Revenge against the idea that the government can ever tell you what’s off-limits. Revenge against any version of America that complicates the myth. Revenge against truth itself, for daring to demand humility.

And it’s all rooted in the same poisonous logic: that being free means being unaccountable. That the highest form of liberty is the right to be left alone, even by the truth.

But that’s not freedom.

American freedom has never been the freedom to forget. It’s the freedom to confront. The freedom to reckon. The freedom to rise.

It’s a freedom that’s been fought for, not just in war, but in movements. In marches. In sit-ins. In strikes. In every place where Americans demanded more from this country than it was ready to give. It was never the freedom to do whatever you want. It was the freedom to stand up, speak out, and claim your place in a nation that promised more.

I borrowed that phrase, a mistaken idea of freedom, from President Jimmy Carter, who warned that the greatest threat to our democracy wasn’t foreign armies or economic collapse, it was the slow erosion of our national spirit. A turning inward and away from community. A closing of the door on our past. A loss of confidence in each other, and in the idea that democracy demands something from us.

Carter knew that real freedom demands responsibility, not just to truth, but to one another.

That’s what this is about. This fight over signs and plaques and ranger talks may sound small in the grand scheme of things. But it’s not. It’s the front line in a much bigger war, one over memory, meaning, and whether we’re still a country that tells the truth about itself.

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Wish I had better news for you, but the firehose is still at full blast.

Until next time.

-Jim