The Trump administration spent a year stripping slavery, climate, and stolen-Native-land exhibits out of our national parks, and on Friday a federal judge called it censorship and ordered every last one put back.
Judge Angel Kelley wrote that the administration was trying to rewrite the nation's history with a white-out pen, and that Interior's conduct set a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization. Her order does three things. Restore everything they changed. Freeze any further removals. File a status report every single week until the exhibits are back on the walls.
Look at what they pulled. The exhibit on the nine people George Washington enslaved at the President's House, gone from the ground where the country was founded. Roughly 80 items flagged along the Selma march route. A Brown v. Board exhibit flagged for using the word "equity." Glacier signage explaining the glaciers are melting. A geology sign at Sunset Crater yanked because the photo showed a visitor holding a Pride flag.
A national park sign carries a fact set down in the exact place the fact happened. Scrub the slavery exhibit off that ground and you've vandalized the public record, on public land, in our name, with our money.
They reached for the white-out. A judge slapped it out of their hand.
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