Featured Image Credit: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images
Topics: Donald Trump, History, Environment
William Morgan
Topics: Donald Trump, History, Environment
Government employees have apparently leaked a massive database that reveals how President Trump and his administration plans to whitewash the great but fettered history of the United States of America.
The Department of the Interior confirmed the veracity of the database when it said its employees 'will be held accountable' after several publications got hold of it this week, discovering the White House's plans to reshape the established history of African-Americans, LGBTQ people, and climate change science at the National Parks.
When you have the leader of the world's largest economy actively rewriting its own history, attested and recorded by America's greatest scholars, it is hard to choose which quote from George Orwell's dystopian 1984 fits best.
'The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command,' seems particularly fitting for the ideological project that Trump has spearheaded since returning to the highest office in the land last year, with the president branding established history as 'anti-American.'
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That line from 1984 was even, essentially, the government's response to the leak, with a statement from the department asserting: "The narrative being advanced is false and these draft, deliberative internal documents are not a representation of final action taken by the department."
However, the database actually revealed the sheer amount of time being wasted by Rangers and other park workers on rebranding information shared with the public at each of the US' 64 national parks.
One of the database's anonymous leakers said: “This data belongs to the American people, who need to know what is being done in their name,” before pointing out what they saw as the clear goal of re-writing history.
“Profiting from coal and oil is a lot easier if the impacts of fossil fuels are censored at sites like Muir Woods, Glacier, Acadia, and Everglades,” they added.
Many of these alterations appear to re-write the history of the human occupation of North America, with information at Muir Woods altered to remove references to the Native Americans who lived at the site for roughly 15,000 years before white European settlers arrived.
Workers were also ordered to remove references to the established racist and eugenicist views of William Kent, who owned Muir Woods before donating it to the public good.
Presumably the Trump administration forgot Ben Shapiro's mantra that 'facts don't care about your feelings'.
Shockingly, the leaked database shows that the government is considering going even further than this. Though it is not clear what conclusion was made, apparently the Department of the Interior were looking at reviewing information relating to Emmett Till.
Till was just 14 when men in Mississippi tortured, beat, and lynched him, after the teen was wrongly accused of breaking the rules of the Jim Crow south in 1941 by speaking to a white woman - history so recent that roughly 6.4 million Americans were alive when it happened.
But then again, perhaps the team around Trump are just huge fans of 'The Party' in 1984 and its slogan, which Orwell described in his satire of authoritarianism as being: “Who controls the past... controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”