As the Trump administration continues to prove itself to be a bigoted white supremacist organization by directing the National Park Service to remove Black history exhibits depicting slavery and the Jim Crow era, so that the eyes of the white and eternally fragile won’t feel bombarded by them, one judge has ordered the administration to reinstall an exhibit honoring the enslaved people who were owned by President George Washington at the President’s House Site in Philadelphia. NPS began removing the exhibits late last month, just before the start of Black History Month, in compliance with President Donald Trump’s executive order, titled the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” as if truth, sanity or American history are things Trump would know anything about.
From CBS News:
In a ruling issued Monday, Senior Judge Cynthia M. Rufe ordered the defendants in the case — Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, the Department of the Interior, National Park Service Acting Director Jessica Bowron and the National Park Service — to restore the site to the way it was on Jan. 21, the day before the signage was removed. They also must keep all of the items safe, secure and undamaged, and cannot install any “replacement materials” without mutual agreement with the city of Philadelphia while the litigation is ongoing or before another order from the judge.
The order also says officials must continue to properly maintain the site, including the grounds, video monitors, recordings and exhibits. The order does not give NPS a deadline for restoring the site.
The decision comes after the city of Philadelphia filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to have the displays restored, arguing that the city has prior agreements with NPS that require any disputes to be resolved through communication and compromise between the two parties, as opposed to exhibits being outright removed because a president who doesn’t even live there has made a habit out of appointing white people who aren’t even historians to decide how much Black history is too much Black history.
It’s worth noting that despite being demonstrably racist, the Trump administration has proved itself to be such a propaganda-peddling, authoritarian nightmare that judges are out here quoting dystopian novels when ruling against it.
“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims—to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not,” Rufe wrote in her ruling.
“The government here likewise asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overwritten,” Rufe wrote, addressing the administration’s argument, which appears to be that it had the exhibits removed because it can. “And why? Solely because, as Defendants state, it has the power.”
According to the Hill, the Justice Department argued the city had no right to sue and that it was the government’s right to decide for itself the message it wants to express, or not express.
“As with any national park or museum, reasonable minds might differ about what to display in the limited space available. But this is fundamentally a question of Government speech,” the DOJ wrote in court filings.
So, they’re not just racists — they’re cowardly racists.
As we previously reported, besides the administration’s removal of exhibits that remind us that America’s first president was a slave owner until the day he died, it kicked off Black History Month by ordering NPS to remove visitor brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Jackson, Mississippi, and to no longer refer to the Klan member who killed civil rights icon Medgar Evers as a “racist.” Before that, the administration directed several other national parks to begin removing exhibits such as the iconic portrait of a runaway slave’s severely whipped back, titled “The Scourged Back.”
Before all of that, the administration forced the Smithsonian to remove exhibits from its African American history museums. And it’s worth noting that while the Trump administration has been doing its best to eradicate any and all Black history that threatens the white nationalist view of this “shining city on a hill,” it has also worked tirelessly to restore all honors, fort names, and monuments to the Confederacy.
The least Trump and his minions could do is just admit that their decision about what they have removed from national parks has nothing to do with “limited space,” and everything to do with prioritizing white conservative ideology over the truth about what America is, and what it is exactly that they wish to make great again.
They’re not fooling anyone.
SEE ALSO:
Donald Trump Purges National Parks Of Slavery Exhibits
Trump Administration Doesn’t Want Us To Remember That George Washington Enslaved Black People
