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When Leaders Forget They Are Stewards
Public institutions belong to the people they were created to serve, not to the ambitions of those temporarily entrusted with their care.
Jul 01, 2026
As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of America, it’s essential that we look to the past for lessons on how we should move forward during politically turbulent times marked by Americans holding little trust in historically respected institutions, including the federal government.
In 1796, our nation’s first president, George Washington, published his farewell address and in it, he declined to run for a third term despite many Americans wanting him to remain president indefinitely. Washington wanted to be clear that being president was not a lifetime appointment and that America was not a monarchy.
In this address, he also gave us a lesson that too many leaders seem to forget today: that the things we lead do not belong to us. Stewardship is the real assignment.
Recently, when a federal court ordered President Donald Trump’s name removed from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, it did more than settle a legal dispute. It served as a reminder that public institutions belong to the people they were created to serve, not to the ambitions of those temporarily entrusted with their care.
As we look ahead to the next 250 years of our nation, America’s leaders must understand that their job is not to leave their name on an institution, but to leave the institution stronger than they found it.
I learned this lesson when I served on the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts. As an appointee of President Barack Obama in 2011 and later as chair of the committee, I had the privilege of working alongside artists, educators, philanthropists, and public servants who understood that institutions endure only when leaders respect the purpose for which they were created.
The Kennedy Center was established by Congress as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy. Its mission was never to advance the ambitions of a particular board, administration, or political figure. It was created to serve the American people.
For more than 50 years, it has welcomed families, students, artists, and visitors from every corner of the nation. It has remained open through changing administrations, economic downturns, and periods of national division. Its purpose has endured because generations of leaders understood that they were caretakers of something larger than themselves.
Today, we see conservatives engaging in a hostile takeover of many of our nation’s key institutions by pushing an ideological agenda that refuses to tell the full, and complicated, story of our nation’s history.
At Smithsonian museums, references to President Trump’s two first-term impeachments have been removed, and the Trump administration issued an executive order that would review and remove exhibits from the Smithsonian Institution that contradict the administration’s distorted view of American history.
In our education system, higher education institutions are threatened with lawsuits and funding cuts for policies and programs that ensure all students have the opportunity to succeed. In states across the country, including Georgia, we have witnessed the passage of laws that restrict an honest and full teaching of our nation’s history—failing to give our children a true understanding of our nation and how we’ve overcome moments of grave injustice.
The understanding that President Washington had in 1796 that our nation’s institutions should not be reshaped in the image of our leadership seems increasingly absent from public life. Too often, leadership is confused with ownership and the focus shifts from mission to personality. Stewardship to control.
Strong leaders do not ask only what they have the power to do. They ask what responsibility requires of them. They understand that power is not permission, popularity is not wisdom, and institutions entrusted to their care are not personal possessions to be reshaped according to their preferences. Institutions thrive when leaders serve the mission. They struggle when the mission begins serving the leader.
When the distinction between serving an institution and owning it disappears, public trust begins to erode. That lesson has remained true since the inception of our nation, and it will remain true for the next 250 years. Once that trust is lost, it can take generations to rebuild.
As workers continue removing the lettering from the Kennedy Center façade, they are carrying out a court order.
But they are also delivering a reminder.
Public institutions belong to the people they were created to serve, not to the ambitions of those temporarily entrusted with their care.
As we look ahead to the next 250 years of our nation, America’s leaders must understand that their job is not to leave their name on an institution, but to leave the institution stronger than they found it.
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JD Vance's Drunk History
On June 25, Vice President JD Vance told his audience at the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum that Nixon got a bum rap. The uncontested historical record proves otherwise.
Jun 30, 2026
The Watergate scandal revealed President Richard Nixon’s contempt for the Constitution and his systematic abuse of power. At the time, it was one of the darkest chapters in US history, resulting in the first-ever resignation of an American president.
But on June 25, Vice President JD Vance told his audience at the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum that Nixon got a bum rap. The uncontested historical record proves otherwise. Vance’s contrary view demonstrates the depths to which he and President Donald Trump have taken the country.
“Facts Are Stubborn Things”
- In May 1972, a group of men connected with the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) burglarized and wiretapped the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex. One of the wiretaps didn’t work, so on June 17, 1972, they broke in again with a new microphone. A security guard saw door locks that had been taped open and called the DC police, which caught them red-handed. Among the burglars’ possessions was a White House phone number.
- After declaring falsely that no one on the White House staff was involved in the crime, Nixon acquiesced as his aides provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in “hush money” to the burglars. Then Nixon and his top advisers developed a plan to get the CIA to obstruct the FBI’s investigation into the matter.
- As Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein pursued the story, a DC grand jury summoned witnesses who cracked. Nixon aides—including White House counsel John Dean—testified in nationally televised hearings where Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) asked, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” The answer was “a lot.”
- With the revelation that Nixon had taped his conversations about the cover-up in the Oval Office, the president sought valiantly to block their production.
- When special prosecutor Archibald Cox sued to obtain the tapes, Nixon instructed Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. In what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon then told Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox, but he resigned too. Finally, Nixon turned to the third highest official in the Justice Department, Solicitor General Robert Bork, who carried out the order.
- Firing Cox was the futile act of a desperate man. Bork appointed Leon Jaworski as Cox’s successor, and Jaworski continued to press his case to the US Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision, the court ordered Nixon to release the tapes, and the public could hear Nixon’s own voice incriminate him.
- On July 27, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee recommended articles of impeachment. On August 7, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), Sen. Hugh Scott (R-Pa.), and Rep. John Rhodes (R-Ariz.) visited the White House to give Nixon the bad news: The full House was going to impeach him, and the Senate would convict him. The next day, Nixon resigned.
Vance’s “Deep State” Fantasies
Vance claimed that Nixon was the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy.
“If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon,” Vance continued, “it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”
But the supposed “deep state” actors to which Vance referred consisted of Nixon’s top advisers who turned on him, the most conservative Republicans in Congress, a unanimous US Supreme Court, and two intrepid reporters at The Washington Post.
Timothy Naftali, a historian at Columbia University’s School of International Public Affairs and the former director of the Nixon library, told The New York Times: “We have more than enough information from the Nixon era to know that there was no intelligence conspiracy against Richard Nixon. He brought his house of cards down upon himself.”
“You can hear him suborn perjury on the tapes,” Naftali told The Washington Post. “He’s telling an intermediary, what to tell someone who’s about to be interviewed by the FBI, what to say and what not to say. You can hear Nixon being told that money had been found to hire teamsters to go and break the bones of demonstrators. That’s all illegal.”
Lies Reveal Character
Prof. Naftali observed that, curiously, Vance had likened Trump to a president who had directed the CIA to subvert the Constitution.
“It’s not as if [Watergate] is a matter of partisan interpretation,” Naftali said. “The evidence is overwhelming. If [Vance] does know all of this, he’s telegraphing the kind of president he hopes to be.”
Vance also claimed that Watergate would have been a 12-hour news story today. He may be correct, but that does not diminish the seriousness of Nixon’s crimes.
As prof. Naftali observed, “It’s not that Nixon looks better in retrospect, it’s that we look worse.”
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Donald Trump Is the Biggest Failure in Recent US History
At every turn, Trump has tried to erode US democracy and the good of the people during his second term.
Jun 30, 2026
Donald Trump is the biggest failure in recent US presidential history. With the nation’s 250th birthday coming up, here’s a quick comparison to other US leaders.
He single-handedly tanked the economy with high prices resulting from tariffs and the Iran War. Trump’s defunding government agencies and scientific research, along with hyperinflation, has created an impossible job market (the uptick of unemployment nearly one percentage point over the past few years obfuscates the real job market). He has also gone after a national core value, democracy, attacking free speech whether in libraries, education, or protesting on behalf of Palestinian rights. The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is a clear symbol of his failed leadership: Trump tried to turn it blue for July 4th, but instead it became green with algae.
While LBJ oversaw an immoral, ruthless, and ultimately failed war in Vietnam, at least he passed civil rights legislation and poverty-reducing Great Society policies.
George W. Bush undertook a reckless war against Iraq; although unjust, one of the main objectives—to overthrow Saddam Hussein—was met, even if afterwards creating a liberal democracy failed miserably and, ultimately, led to ISIS ruling across swathes of the Middle East. Domestically, Bush governed during a recession in his first term that resulted from the dot-com bubble bursting, but he did not fundamentally attack the democratic core of United States, although the Patriot Act presaged the Trump era.
Because of Donald Trump’s monumental failure as a wannabe dictator, MAGA is fracturing and progressives are rising.
Joe Biden oversaw the post-Covid period during which inflation costs, which rose under Trump I during the pandemic, continued to rise because of international supply chain bottlenecks and the Ukraine War. He also gave the green light to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, a policy that Trump continued during his second term. However, Biden’s domestic policies and legislation included the forgiveness of student loan debt, a bipartisan infrastructure bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act, the latter of which included the largest investment in clean energy in US history.
Ronald Reagan conducted covert wars against Latin American governments and his neoliberal policies ultimately helped lead to Trump. However, his negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty were instrumental in leading to the end of the Cold War.
Barack Obama, like Reagan, got into his own covert wars, through supporting Islamist factions in the Syrian Civil War and expanding drone strikes. He also was responsible for creating chaos after his “leading from behind” regime change war against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Yet, domestically, he passed Obamacare, which led to an additional 17 million Americans having health insurance. He also helped pull the economy out of the Great Recession.
President Bill Clinton, a scandal-plagued presidency during the pre-9/11 era, oversaw a healthy economy, but represented the Democratic Party’s embrace of neoliberalism and “tough on crime,” “super predator” policies. While flawed and foreshadowing what was to come, he would not be considered a failed president.
Jimmy Carter, a leader during stagflation and the Iran Hostage Crisis, has been perceived as a failed president. While his handling of each problem could have been improved, he did not create stagflation, which came about from a mix of high oil prices and the Fed’s stimulative economic policies. His offering asylum and medical treatment for the last shah of Iran in the US was in line with US imperial policy. Despite his crimes against the Iranian people and the new Iranian government’s demand that he be returned to Iran to receive justice, Carter refused.
Lastly, Richard Nixon, the most corrupt recent American leader before Trump, authorized the burglary to increase his chances of winning reelection and, after a cove-rup, resigned in shame. He also expanded the failed Vietnam War to Cambodia and Laos, though he had campaigned on ending the conflict. Yet, he created the Environmental Protection Agency and reestablished ties with China, though to do so turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s genocide against a nascent Bangladesh. Nixon did attempt to curtail democracy but nowhere near as systematically as Donald Trump has during his second term.
At every turn, Trump has tried to erode US democracy and the good of the people during his second term. While campaigning to end both inflation and the Ukraine War, he has not ended the war and caused prices to skyrocket thanks to his tariffs and his immoral and illegal war against Iran. He has redirected taxpayer money from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the US Agency for International Development (predicted to cause the deaths of 4.5 million children under 5 years old), and scientific and medical research to fund tax cuts for billionaires, expand the brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency by a factor of nine, and now seeks $1.5 trillion in Department of Defense funding (that’s $10K a year per taxpayer if divided evenly).
His Iran War caused about 3,500 Iranian deaths and 4,300 Lebanese deaths. While the US and Iran have a ceasefire, Israel isn’t abiding by it. As of this writing, Trump is still threatening the complete destruction of Iran, which is not ideal if you are honestly negotiating for peace.
From a US imperial perspective, the war has failed on every front: The Iranian regime is more powerful than ever; the Iranian population has largely gotten behind its government during the war; Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz now; Iran acts as a check on Israeli use of force in Lebanon; and the US bases, from which American forces retreated from during the fighting, may be closed in the Gulf countries and move to Israel. For those who relish in military victories, it is a loss for America.
Donald Trump may be up there as the biggest loser in history, but for now, it’s safe to say that he is the biggest failure in recent American presidential history.
There is an upside to utter failure though. While establishment Democrats have offered tepid criticism against Trump’s authoritarianism and immoral wars, progressives have made headway whether it’s the Mamdani-backed progressives winning their primaries in New York, Graham Platner winning the primary in Maine, or Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.)'s use of “genocide” to describe Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza. Even Tucker Carlson has condemned his past Islamophobia and vociferously condemns the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the decimation of southern Lebanon and Beirut.
Because of Donald Trump’s monumental failure as a wannabe dictator, MAGA is fracturing and progressives are rising. Anti-Trump protests have broken record numbers and anti-ICE demonstrations at places like Delaney Hall are pushing back as strong as ever.
Surely, just before the 250th anniversary of the US, these are things worth celebrating.
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Juneteenth and the Distance Between Freedom and Meaning
Freedom does not become real simply because it is declared. It becomes real because someone carries it into the world. Someone teaches it. Someone protects it. Someone organizes around it. Someone refuses to let it disappear.
Jun 19, 2026
As Juneteenth approaches, I find myself thinking about anniversaries.
Not because I am particularly sentimental about dates, but because anniversaries reveal something about how societies remember. They tell us which stories we choose to elevate, which contradictions we learn to live with, and which truths we have become comfortable leaving unresolved.
This year, those questions feel particularly urgent.
Communities across the country will gather to celebrate Juneteenth, commemorating the moment enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas learned they were free more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed. At the same time, the nation is preparing to commemorate its 250th anniversary, renewing familiar conversations about liberty, democracy, independence, and freedom. There is something meaningful about those two anniversaries sitting so close together. One asks us to remember the promise of freedom. The other asks us to remember the distance between a promise and its fulfillment.
Every democratic gain we now celebrate exists because ordinary people organized, challenged existing systems, imagined alternatives, and demanded that the nation become more than it was.
For many people, Juneteenth is understood as a story about delayed freedom. That is certainly true. But the older I get, the more I think it is also a story about delayed meaning. The people in Galveston were legally free long before they knew they were free. The law had changed. Their status had changed. On paper, their relationship to the nation had changed.
Yet their lived reality had not. The declaration existed, but the meaning had not yet reached them. That distinction matters because we often talk about freedom as though it becomes real the moment it is declared. We assume that once a law is passed, a court issues a ruling, or a right is recognized, the work is complete. History tells a different story.
Again and again, America has demonstrated that there is often a gap between what institutions proclaim and what people experience. The abolition of slavery did not end racial hierarchy. The passage of the Voting Rights Act did not end voter suppression. Legal victories did not eliminate the need for organizing, education, resistance, or vigilance. Rights may be secured in law, but they must still be carried into communities, institutions, and everyday life. Juneteenth reminds us of that reality. It reminds us that freedom is not simply a legal condition. It is also a social condition, a cultural condition, and a lived condition. It becomes meaningful only when people can actually experience it.
That lesson feels particularly relevant today.
Across the country, we are witnessing renewed debates about democracy, citizenship, rights, belonging, and power. We are watching efforts to restrict voting access, weaken public institutions, narrow how history is taught, and redefine who gets to participate fully in public life. At the same time, many Americans are being encouraged to believe that these concerns are exaggerated, that racism and inequality belong primarily to the past, and that the nation's democratic project is largely complete. What concerns me is not simply the political debate itself. It is the historical amnesia that often accompanies it. Too often, we remember progress while forgetting the struggle that produced it. We celebrate outcomes while ignoring the generations of people who fought to make those outcomes possible. We remember milestones but forget movements. We remember victories but forget the conditions that made those victories necessary in the first place.
In doing so, we begin to mistake progress for permanence. Juneteenth offers a corrective.
It reminds us that democracy has never been self-executing. Freedom has never expanded automatically. Rights have never sustained themselves. Every democratic gain we now celebrate exists because ordinary people organized, challenged existing systems, imagined alternatives, and demanded that the nation become more than it was. That is why I find myself thinking differently about the conversations surrounding America's 250th anniversary. I am less interested in celebrating a polished national mythology than I am in wrestling honestly with the tension at the center of the American story. The United States was founded on extraordinary democratic ideals while simultaneously denying many people access to them. Those contradictions are not incidental to our history. They are central to understanding it.
Yet Juneteenth is not ultimately a story about contradiction. It is a story about persistence. It is a story about Black people who continued reaching for freedom even when freedom arrived late. It is a story about Black people who expanded democracy even when democracy excluded them. It is a story about generations of Black Americans who carried hope, memory, responsibility, and struggle across time so that future generations might inherit possibilities they themselves were denied. That is what I find myself celebrating this year.
Not a perfect nation, completed democracy, or a tidy story of inevitable progress.
I am celebrating the people who carried the work forward anyway. The people who understood that freedom does not become real simply because it is declared. It becomes real because someone carries it into the world. Someone teaches it. Someone protects it. Someone organizes around it. Someone refuses to let it disappear.
The lesson of Juneteenth is not that freedom finally arrived. The lesson is that even after freedom was declared, someone still had to carry the news.
And generations later, someone still has to carry the meaning.
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We Should Never Forget That Diversity Is What Makes America Great
Amid Trumpian attacks on immigrants and erasure of history, it is more important than ever that we stop and examine the record of who we are and how we got to where we are as a country and an American people.
Jun 16, 2026
June is National Immigration Heritage Month, a time to celebrate the diverse peoples and cultures that have made America great.
This year–when not only immigration and cultural diversity are being challenged, but also the complex history of our country is being erased–it is more important than ever that we stop and examine the record of who we are and how we got to where we are as a country and an American people.
First, we should never forget that this country was born with two “original sins”: slavery and genocide. The current administration in Washington wants to rewrite our history by eliminating mention of negative events and practices that defined our past, focusing instead on the “greatness and industriousness” of our founders and their “glorious victories.” In reality, there would be no America if not for the surplus wealth created by the labor of enslaved people across the South and the riches accrued by those who benefited from the theft of Indigenous peoples’ lands.
Nor should it be forgotten (although it is) that the Declaration of Independence names one reason for the War of Independence against the British Empire as the American settlers’ grievance that King George would not defend them against “merciless Indian Savages,” who were resisting having their lands taken from them. And, of course, we fought a civil war not so much to end the deplorable practice of human slavery, but to rein in the power and independence of the Southern states.
What would be American food, fashion, music, art, humor, literature, diplomacy, and so much more be without the contributions of African Americans, the Chinese, Italian, Greek, Polish, Irish, Jewish, Latino, and Arab immigrants (and so many more)?
As the country grew and with the industrial age upon us, the need to build infrastructure to transport people and goods, mine coal for power; and operate factories opened the doors to new immigrants from countries far afield. Chinese built railroads; Irish dug canals; Irish and Eastern and Central Europeans worked in the mines, and they were joined in the mines and factories by Italians, Greeks, and Arabs.
As needed as these new immigrants were for America to grow and prosper, their very presence, growing numbers, and unique cultures provoked a backlash among the earlier northwest European settlers who had come to see themselves as the original and “real Americans.” The “new immigrants” were demeaned, discriminated against, and subjected to state and vigilante violence.
Tragically, we see the same pattern of behaviors playing out today as Americans are confronting our newest immigrants. In a brilliant paper written a decade and a half ago for the Immigration Policy Center, Jeffrey Kaye examines the immigration history of one town in Pennsylvania. He notes that when the Irish, Italian, and Eastern and Central Europeans were first moving into the community, newspaper articles and speeches by City Council members described the Irish as “drunkards,” the Slavs as “peculiar,” the Hungarians as “ignorant, immoral, and filthy,” and the Italians as “the most disreputable.” All were subjected to derision for their “queer languages” and not fitting in. The tragic irony is that one century later, the descendants of these same groups are now saying the very same things about the newest immigrants who were mostly from Latin American countries.
Forgotten in this history of miserable repetition are the lessons we should have learned and the benefits we accrued along the way. We now know that the early English settlers in New York and the eastern colonies learned lessons in governance and agriculture from the Native Americans, and yet they referred to them as “savages.” And we know that it was the hard work, for no wages, that brought wealth to white Southern landowners who nevertheless demeaned Blacks as lazy and shiftless. Much the same can be said about the immigrants of the industrial age. Despite the bigotry and violence they endured, we can ask, “Where would America be today if not for the hard work and inventiveness of these immigrant communities?” Further, what would be American food, fashion, music, art, humor, literature, diplomacy, and so much more be without the contributions of African Americans, the Chinese, Italian, Greek, Polish, Irish, Jewish, Latino, and Arab immigrants (and so many more)?
The lesson here is a simple one: We should never forget that what makes America great is its diversity and its capacity to absorb so many peoples and cultures. What threatens our greatness is when we forget this and stupidly attempt to fabricate our history and “whitewash” our culture.
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Philadelphia Sues Over Trump's Removal of Slavery Exhibits From George Washington’s Home
"The message is clear. American history no longer includes all Americans."
Jan 23, 2026
The city of Philadelphia has sued the US Department of the Interior and the National Park Service after officials were filmed dismantling exhibits on slavery at the President's House historical site at Independence Park on Thursday.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court by the office of Mayor Cherelle Parker, says “the National Park Service has removed artwork and informational displays" from the site, where George Washington lived as president from 1790 until 1797, in order to follow an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in March, which requires national parks, museums, and monuments to portray an "uplifting" message about American history.
The President's House monument, unveiled in 2010, contained information about nine enslaved people whom Washington brought with him to the nation's "first White House," and Washington's history as a slaveowner. By the time of his death in 1799, there were more than 300 enslaved people at his estate in Mount Vernon, Virginia.
Information about the President's House site and its ties to slavery still remains online. It states:
Washington brought some of his enslaved Africans to this site and they lived and toiled with other members of his household during the years that our first president was guiding the experimental development of the young nation toward modern, republican government...
The president's house in the 1790s was a mirror of the young republic, reflecting both the ideals and contradictions of the new nation. The house stood in the shadow of Independence Hall, where the words "All men are created equal" and "We the People" were adopted, but they did not apply to all who lived in the new United States of America.
A monument acknowledging this history, however, appears to have run afoul of the portion of Trump's order requiring the Interior Secretary to see that sites "do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living."
As BillyPenn.com reported:
Starting after 3 pm, placards were ripped from the wall around the site with crowbars as people walked by, some heading to the Liberty Bell Center. Signs were unbolted from the poles overlooking the dig site where America’s first “White House” had stood until 1832. They were stacked together alongside a wall, and then taken away around 4:30 pm in a park service truck. No indication was provided where the signs and exhibition parts will go
One of the employees, who did not give his name, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that his supervisor had instructed him to take down the monuments earlier that day.
“I’m just following my orders,” the employee repeatedly said.
In a statement to the Washington Post, Interior Department spokesperson Elizabeth Peace later confirmed that the placards were indeed removed in accordance with the order.
"The president has directed federal agencies to review interpretive materials to ensure accuracy, honesty, and alignment with shared national values,” she said. “Following completion of the required review, the National Park Service is now taking action to remove or revise interpretive materials in accordance with the order."
The city of Philadelphia says it was not given notice about the placards being removed. The lawsuit says their removal was "arbitrary and capricious" and says the “defendants have provided no explanation at all for their removal of the historical, educational displays at the President’s House site, let alone a reasoned one."
In a Facebook post, criminal defense attorney Michael Coard, who pushed for the monument's creation for nearly a decade, called its destruction "historically outrageous and blatantly racist."
It is the latest example of Trump's order being used to justify the removal of monuments related to slavery and Black history in the United States.
The infamous 1863 "Scourged Back" image—a picture of an enslaved man's back with severe whip scars that was used to promote the end of slavery during the Civil War—was removed from the Fort Pulaski National Monument in Georgia in September, along with other information about slavery.
The administration has also removed more than 20 displays at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, some of which dealt with slavery, civil rights, and race relations, a move that came after Trump lamented that the museum put so much focus on "how bad Slavery was."
The National Park Service also deleted information about abolitionist activist Harriet Tubman and many references to slavery from its webpage about the Underground Railroad for months last year, before restoring it following public backlash.
Pages on the Arlington Cemetery website that recognize the contributions of Black and Hispanic soldiers have also been removed.
The order has also led to the removal or alteration of numerous monuments, museum exhibits, and web pages recognizing the achievements or struggles of other racial minority groups, women, LGBTQ+ people, and Native Americans.
In a statement to NBC News, Philadelphia City Council President Kenyatta Johnson said, "Removing the exhibits is an effort to whitewash American history."
"History cannot be erased simply because it is uncomfortable," he added. "Removing items from the President’s House merely changes the landscape, not the historical record."
Daniel Pearson, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, said: "The message is clear. American history no longer includes all Americans."
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‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Elon Musk Says Teachers Should Be ‘Imprisoned’ for Accurate Lessons on US History
The world’s richest man believes it is “treason” to teach students the plain fact that the United States was built on stolen Native American land.
Jan 15, 2026
Self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" Elon Musk believes schoolteachers should be "imprisoned" for educating students on topics that portray America negatively—including the nation's history of racism and the displacement of Native Americans.
The world's richest man, who was a prolific donor to President Donald Trump and a member of his administration, expressed this desire in a post on his social media app X on Thursday in response to a survey of high school students from 2022 conducted by the right-wing Manhattan Institute, about whether they had been taught concepts labeled as part of "critical social justice."
The post Musk replied to specifically emphasized that, according to the poll, 45% of students said they had been taught that "America was built on stolen land," while another 22% said they'd heard it from an adult at school.
Any even cursory retelling of US history makes such a statement beyond dispute. Since the arrival of European settlers in what would become the United States, Native Americans have been subject to over 300 years of well-documented forced migration policies, wars of extermination, and coercive treaties codifying their dispossession from lands they lived on for centuries.
In 2021, a year before the survey was conducted, researchers examined the first comprehensive dataset quantifying the forced removal of Native Americans and found that Indigenous people had lost approximately 99% of the lands they historically occupied.
The poll showed that students had also been taught other ideas about America that, while politically contentious, are also well-founded by US history and ongoing realities of legal and economic inequality—including that "America is a systemically racist country," that "white people have white privilege," and that "America is a patriarchal society."
With state-level bans on what it calls "critical race theory," "gender ideology," and other supposedly "divisive concepts" in public education, the right has in recent years been systematically chipping away at classroom discussions related to the uglier parts of US history and resulting ongoing inequality. Meanwhile, the second Trump administration has sought to use federal funds to coerce public schools into adopting his standards for "patriotic education."
But Musk, who donated an unprecedented $290 million to Trump to help him reclaim the presidency in 2024, thinks merely banning students from learning negative things about the country is not enough.
"Teaching people to hate America fundamentally destroys patriotism and the desire to defend our country," he wrote. "Such teachings should be viewed as treason and those who do it imprisoned."
The irony was immediately apparent to many. Musk's call comes just days after he claimed that by pushing to ban his platform X over its proliferation of nonconsensual artificially generated pornography, including of children, the United Kingdom “want[s] to suppress free speech.”
Musk has on numerous previous occasions emphasized the importance of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees the right to free expression.
"You can't claim to care about the First Amendment if you believe this," responded Billy Binion, a reporter for the libertarian news outlet Reason." Treason is a capital offense. Imprisoning or executing people for their words is impossible to reconcile with any understanding of free speech. Incoherent and un-American."
The billionaire has long claimed to be one of free speech's foremost defenders, but often only in cases involving his ideological allies.
Since he took over the social media platform formerly known as Twitter in 2022, those who have criticized him, reported negative news stories about him, or promoted causes he disagrees with—particularly Palestinian or LGBTQ+ rights—have often had their accounts suspended or their content’s reach limited.
In recent weeks, echoing rhetoric from the Trump administration about deporting tens of millions of nonwhite American citizens, Musk has spiraled further into explicit calls for the ethnic cleansing of the United States, endorsing posts stating that white people must “reclaim our nations” or “be conquered, enslaved, raped, and genocided” and that “if white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered,” necessitating “white solidarity.”
"Obviously, the whole Elon-is-a-free-speech-absolutist thing is long dead," wrote Alex Griswold, a spokesperson for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, commonly known as FIRE. "But it goes beyond that to the point that he is significantly more censorial than the median American."
Pam Fessler, a former news correspondent for NPR wrote that "People who call for the imprisonment of those who teach facts are the ones who 'hate' America."
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American History Is Black History: We Will Not Be Erased
We will become loud about who we are, what we have experienced, and how we have overcome the impossible.
Sep 21, 2025
The Trump-MAGA-white supremacist administration is ordering the removal from displays information and depictions of the era of slavery in the United States. One of the most emblematic images of enslavement is the graphic and soul-shocking image called "The Scourged Back" that depicts the back of Peter Gordon photographed circa 1863 in Louisiana. It shows graphically his healed but black keloid bareback. The photograph of his scarred back yells loudly the horrors and brutality of enslavement. The wounds on Peter Gordon's back were inflicted on him by his so-called owner.
To remove the histories and experiences of Black people in the US is part of the educational pogrom enacted to "whitewash" America's real history. To "whitewash" history is the political project to change the narrative of America and make that narrative into the blessings and triumphs of white people, while ignoring the blemishes, scars, and overcoming that is as great a part of America's history as any other.
The beginning and institution of slavery in North America's British colonies commences in 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia. It doesn't legally end until 1865. A Civil War had to be fought to settle the question and end the legal institution of slavery. And even when slavery had legally ended, new systems and schemes were developed, particularly in the Southern US, to reinstitute slavery de facto. This system called Jim Crow would continue through to its painstakingly dismantlement by courageous individuals and movements that exposed it and brought about its demise. This means that formal enslavement lasts for 246 years. Then the era of Jim Crow lasts for at least another 100 years, and its effects still persist for many today.
In 2026 the United States of America will celebrate its 250th birthday. In those 250 years of existence, in comparison, there are 89 years of enslavement. Then, there is de-facto enslavement, called Jim Crow or American Apartheid, that lasts for at least another 100 years. So, there is no way that America was born, existed, nor its story told without the story of Black people, and for most of us our saga from enslavement to liberation, and from hardships to overcoming. To remove the histories and narratives of Black people in North Americas is like removing the heart from a living body and along with its heart it also loses its soul. The body and its story without Black history is really a dead and empty narrative and will remain so until America has the courage to tell the whole story.
Not recognizing the presence and history of Black people is to render in perception, historical understanding, and official narrative the pronouncement and indoctrination that the United States is a white Christian nation without blemish or scar.
The American narrative is the Statue of Liberty greeting scores of people arriving at Ellis Island. The words on a bronze plaque invites: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." And in the statute's left hand in the form of a tablet is the date July 4, 1776.
There is a limitation in knowing the full history of most Black people. This is because we were treated as property and given names for inventory—bought, sold, raped, and worked to death. Doing genealogies there is usually a brick wall that Black families encounter. What we do know exists through oral traditions that attempt to teach and convey to us experiences and history in a world where we live and work but never existed.
The other story for me is before Ellis Island. My family arrived on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina. This was a major marketplace and auction block for the precious and enriching cargo of Black people. When talking to my family, it seems from the narrative, that they and their descendants were on the same plantation in South Carolina for at least 200 years—46 years, more or less, shy of the existence of this country.
There have been ludicrous reasons presented for removing images and memories of slavery. One is that it makes white people feel guilty. The Trump-MAGA-white supremacist administration says that it is "corrosive ideology," which means that a new ideology is being fomented. Evidently the current ideological narrative that includes slavery and overcoming that ordeal somehow eats away and corrodes the so-called American narrative.
But in reality, who is being bothered and feels corroded are the people who want to sanitize and de-color the real history of America. It is not that they are embarrassed by the brutal history of enslavement, but for them they embrace a politically racialized framework proffering that the history, experiences, and existence of Black people don't really exist. This administration has proven how racialized it is. Their efforts through the Department of Government Efficiency cost 350,000 Black women their jobs. Mobs called law enforcement, some in masks and with no identification, roam the streets removing brown and Black immigrants. They have succeeded in some circles in criminalizing immigrants so that they could carry out their agenda of removing non-whites from the population. And not recognizing the presence and history of Black people is to render in perception, historical understanding, and official narrative the pronouncement and indoctrination that the United States is a white Christian nation without blemish or scar.
A scripture says that "you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk to them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up." Our story will be told despite this racist agenda of erasure. We will talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly. We will tell the story unto generations, and we will become loud about who we are, what we have experienced, how we have overcome the impossible with possibilities, and declared, no matter how hard we have been pressed down and ignored, in the spirit of Maya Angelou, "Still I rise!" And so will the history of our experiences rise to the heavens and invade all of American history, and we will not be erased.
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Trump Ed Dept. Partners With Right-Groups to Spread White-Washed Civics Lessons in 'Schools Across the Nation'
One civics education advocate said the program, which will push schools to teach history content written by PragerU, Hillsdale College, and Turning Point USA, "smacks of authoritarianism."
Sep 18, 2025
President Donald Trump’s Department of Education has announced that it will partner with right-wing think tanks and organizations to develop and spread what it claims is “patriotic education”—but which critics worry is nothing less than ahistorical propaganda—in American "schools across the nation."
Earlier this week, the Trump administration redirected $137 million initially meant for programs aimed at minority students toward what it described as "American history and civics education."
Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced Wednesday that the money will be directed toward discretionary grants aimed at K-12 schools alongside the announcement of new civics curriculum and programs being drawn up by the 250 Civics Education Coalition—a consortium of more than 40 right-wing groups. The goal, McMahon said, was to advance education that "emphasizes a unifying and uplifting portrayal of the nation's founding ideals" in advance of the nation's 250th anniversary in 2026.
It is not Trump's first crack at instilling the nation's youth with a "patriotic education." In the waning days of his first term in office, Trump unveiled the 1776 Report, which, education columnist Jennifer Berkshire recently noted in The Baffler, "was widely panned by actual historians for its worshipful treatment of the Founding Fathers, its downplaying of slavery, and its portrayal of a century-old 'administrative state' controlled by leftist radicals."
While little has been publicized yet about what McMahon's new endeavor will look like in practice, it is known the kinds of people and organizations who will be crafting it. The civics initiative is being led by the America First Policy Institute, a MAGA-aligned think tank that has been responsible for staffing Trump's second administration and has received over $1 million from his political action committee, the Save America PAC. Until 2023, McMahon herself served on the board of AFPI.
In 2022, the group presented a piece of model legislation for a "Civics Course Act" to be introduced in states. It included requirements for students to spend ample time studying the nation's founding documents and figures while banning the teaching of what it called the "defamatory history of America’s founding," which suggests that slavery or inequality are in any way inherent to the nation's institutions.
It also banned the concepts of "systemic racism" and "gender fluidity" and forbade teachers from giving students course credit for engaging with "social or public policy advocacy."
Also included in the coalition is Hillsdale College, a private Christian liberal arts school in Michigan that has proposed its own K-12 curriculum, which Vanity Fair notes "has been criticized for revisionist history, including whitewashed accounts of US slavery and depictions of Jamestown as a failed communist colony."
Another participant is PragerU, the overtly partisan and often factually loose YouTube channel that has been tasked with creating children's educational content in nearly a dozen red states.
The group has produced content venerating figures notorious for practicing slavery, like colonist Christopher Columbus and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Its videos have argued, among other things, that climate change is a myth, that European fascism was a "far-left" ideology, and that Israel has "the world's most moral army."
The pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA will also be involved in crafting the curriculum. Its longtime leader, Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated in Utah last week, went on a crusade last year to, in his words, "tell the truth" about Martin Luther King Jr., whom he described as "an awful person," while claiming his signature achievement, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was a "huge mistake."
An offshoot of Kirk's group, Turning Point Education, said Kirk's assassination has increased its resolve to promote a "God-centered, virtuous education" in US public schools.
The 250 Civics Education Coalition has not yet published a curriculum. But according to the Department of Education, it will be rolling out "a robust programming agenda" over the next 12 months.
During Trump's second term, he has undertaken an effort to purge federal museums and national parks of what one executive order called "improper ideology," which has resulted in the erasure of exhibits and monuments to Black and Native American history. Last month, he lamented that the Smithsonian Museum focuses too much on "how bad slavery was" and ordered a review of the museum's content.
Federal websites, meanwhile, have systematically eliminated many pages that acknowledged the accomplishments of nonwhite historical figures or important events in women's and LGBTQ+ history.
Critics in the education world view Trump's effort to use grants to induce them to adopt his preferred curriculum as an illegal effort to propagandize children.
"The law is clear," said education historian Diane Ravitch in a blog post. "Federal officials are prohibited from seeking to influence or direct curriculum in any way."
Since 1970, the federal government has been barred by law from "any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum" of public schools.
"Civic education is and must be non-partisan," said Ted McConnell, the executive director of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools. "While the funding is long sought, this is the wrong approach and smacks of authoritarianism."
Update: This piece has been slightly updated to better clarify what is understood about the nature of the civics initiative.
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Sorry, Trump, Slavery Was Horrific and Central to the Rise of American Capitalism
Capitalist cotton slavery was how United States seized control of the lucrative world market for cotton, emerging thereby as a rich and influential nation.
Aug 28, 2025
The malevolent racist and fascist leader Donald Trump, aka “the president of the United States,” has recently ordered a review of the national Smithsonian museums’s presentation of US history, complaining that the museums focus too much on “how bad slavery was” and on other wrongdoings in the noble American record. Trump grumbles that public exhibits on past problems like Native American genocide and Black slavery are nasty, “woke,” and “radical left” distractions from the bigger and more inspiring story of white-ruled America’s glorious rise to capitalist wealth and power. He wants mindless patriotic celebration, not factually informed criticism.
This raises two interesting and curiously related questions:
- How bad was the Black chattel slave system that reigned across the US South from the Declaration of Independence until abolition during and after the Civil War?
- What did that system have to do with America’s supposedly glorious rise to wealth and power?
The answer to the first question depends in no small part on what strikes one as bad. If you are a racist Amerikaner pig like Trump and many of his backers, you are likely to think that US slavery wasn’t bad at all because it subjected people you hate, fear, and view as inferior and unworthy to deserved oppression, control, and exploitation. You might even think, like the demented racist Dinesh D’Souza, that slavery was good for the slaves because it provided paternalistic discipline and direction to lazy, childlike savages.
If you are a decent person with a heart for humanity regardless of skin color, however, you are right to suspect that slavery was not merely bad but horrific almost beyond words—a monumental crime at the heart and soul of an imperialist and capitalist nation that remains starkly racist partly because of its failure to deal honestly and seriously with the reality and legacy of that foundational transgression.
The answer to the second question depends on whether or not you are willing to look into some cold hard facts on slavery’s centrality to the rise of the United States as a power in the world capitalist system.
What “Made the United States Powerful and Rich”
Historian Edward Baptist’s 2014 study, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, eviscerated Americans’ tendency to see slavery as a quaint and archaic “premodern institution” that had nothing really to do with the United States’ rise to wealth and power. In this tendency, slavery becomes something “outside of US history,” even an antiquated “drag” on that history.
That tendency replicates a fundamental misunderstanding curiously shared by antislavery abolitionists and slavery advocates before the Civil War. While the two sides of the slavery debate differed on the system’s morality, they both saw slavery as an inherently unprofitable and static system that was out of touch with the pace of industrialization and the profit requirements of modern capitalist business enterprise.
Nothing, Baptist shows, could have been further from the truth. Unlike what many abolitionists thought, the savagery and torture perpetrated against slaves in the South was about much more than sadism and psychopathy on the part of slave traders, owners, and drivers. Slavery, Baptist demonstrates, was an incredibly cost-efficient method for extracting surplus value from human beings, far superior in that regard to “free” (wage) labor in the onerous work of planting and harvesting cotton. It was an especially brutal form of capitalism, driven by ruthless yet economically “rational” torture along with a dehumanizing ideology of racism.
It wasn’t just the South, home to the four wealthiest US states on the eve of the Civil War, where investors profited handsomely from the forced cotton labor of Black slaves. By the 1840s, Baptist shows, the “free labor North” had “built a complex industrialized economy on the backs of enslaved people and their highly profitable cotton labor.” Cotton picked by Southern slaves provided the critical cheap raw material for early Northern industrialization and the formation of a new Northern wage-earning populace with money to purchase new and basic commodities.
At the same time, the rapidly expanding slavery frontier itself provided a major market for early Northern manufactured goods: clothes, hats, cotton collection bags, axes, shoes, and much more. Numerous infant industries, technologies, and markets spun off from the textile-based industrial revolution in the North. Along the way, shipment of cotton to England (the world’s leading industrial power) produced fortunes for Northern merchants and innovative new financial instruments and methods were developed to provide capital for, and speculate on, the slavery-based cotton boom.
All told, Baptist calculates, by 1836 nearly half the nation’s economy activity derived directly and indirectly from the roughly 1 million Black slaves (just 6% of the national population) who toiled on the nation’s Southern cotton frontier. Sectional differences aside, The Half Has Never Been Told shows that “the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich” decades before the Civil War.
Capitalist cotton slavery was how United States seized control of the lucrative world market for cotton, the critical raw material for the Industrial Revolution, emerging thereby as a rich and influential nation in the world capitalist system by the second third of the 19th century.
“Crimes Which Would Disgrace a Nation of Savages”
The returns were wrung through soul-numbing exploitation overlaid with savage racist torture. Chronicling the horrifying violence and terror inflicted on millions of Black Americans who suffered in bondage over the eight decades between US national independence (1783) and the US Civil War (1861-1865), Baptist documents how the Southern slave engine of American capitalist accumulation murdered Blacks in huge numbers and “stole everything” from surviving slaves through “the massive and cruel engineering required to rip a million people from their homes, brutally drive them to new, disease-ridden places, and make them live in terror and hunger as they continually built and rebuilt a commodity-generating empire…”
Over a generation, The Half Has Never Been Told shows, the infant US South grew from a thin coastal belt of burned-out tobacco plantations into a giant continental Empire of Cotton. This remarkable expansion was rooted in regular and ferocious white violence. The brutality and bloodshed included mass-murderous Indian Removal (cotton slavery required constant Westward territorial extension), forced slave migrations, the endemic fracturing of slave families, and he ubiquitous and systematic torture of Black slaves. As Baptist observes:
In the sources that document the expansion of cotton production, you can find at one point or another almost every product sold in New Orleans stores converted into an instrument of torture [used on slaves]: carpenters’ tools, chains, cotton presses, hackles, handsaws, hoe handles, irons for branding livestock, nails, pokers, smoothing irons, singletrees, steelyards, tongs. Every modern method of torture was used at one time or another: sexual humiliation, mutilation, electric shocks, solitary confinement in “stress positions,” burning, even waterboarding… descriptions of runaways posted by enslavers were festooned with descriptions of scars, burns, mutilations, brands, and wounds.
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass asked in 1852. “A day,” Douglass answered, “that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” Further:
To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour… Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
Mein Trumpf’s Beloved Confederacy
The slave state Confederacy (1861-65) formed, seceded from the United States, and waged a Civil War against the nation’s non-slave states—an epic struggle that cost more than half a million lives—precisely to defend and preserve “the gross injustice and cruelty” of Black chattel slavery. The “cornerstone” of the Southern secessionist government, Confederacy Vice President Alexander Stephens explained on March 21, 1861, was “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
The Nazi regime of the 1930s and 1940s also believed (to say the least) in the natural inferiority of certain subordinated races (as did late 20th century right-wing US academics like Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein, and Stephen Pinker). Such was the harsh reality of the treasonous breakaway Southern government whose “beautiful monuments and statues” the deranged white supremacist and fascist thug Trump has called “ours” and considered “part of a Great American Heritage” of “Winning, Victory, and Freedom.”
This history is worth keeping in mind after Trump47 and his white nationalist Christian fascist Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have sickeningly and tellingly ordered the renaming of US military bases after Confederate Slave Power military leaders and “war heroes.” Hegseth is the member of an evangelical sect whose pastor claims that the best period in US race relations was the slave era.
Plenty of Trump’s neo-Confederate supporters would like nothing more than the restoration of Black enslavement, trust me.
A “Quintessential American Story”
Some words on Thomas Jefferson, the removal of whose statue from New York City Hall once sparked Trump’s anger… One of many wealthy white widowers who used young Black female slaves for sexual release before and after the American “revolution” (which was fought partly to ensure the survival and expansion of North American Black chattel slavery), the author of the Declaration of Independence enjoyed prominence as a “revolutionary leader” while keeping some of his own children as slaves.
Henry Wiencek’s rightly heralded volume, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (2012) dug into previously overlooked evidence in Jefferson’s papers and archaeological work at Jefferson’s Monticello site to paint a depressing picture of Jefferson’s stunted, penny-pinching world. As one reviewer noted:
Wiencek’s Jefferson is a man of business and public affairs who makes a success of his debt-ridden plantation thanks to what he calls the “silent profits” gained from his slaves and thanks to a skewed moral universe that he and thousands of others readily inhabited. We see Jefferson taking out a slave-equity line of credit with a Dutch bank to finance the building of Monticello and deftly creating smoke screens when visitors are dismayed by his apparent endorsement of a system they thought he’d vowed to overturn. It is not a pretty story. Slave boys are whipped to make them work in the nail factory at Monticello that pays Jefferson’s grocery bills. Parents are divided from children in his ledgers… Slaves are bought, sold, given as gifts, and used as collateral for the loan that pays for Monticello’s construction—while Jefferson composes theories that obscure the dynamics of what he himself called “the execrable commerce.” Many people saw a catastrophe coming and tried to stop it, but not Jefferson. The pursuit of happiness had become deeply corrupted, and an oligarchy was getting very rich. Is this the quintessential American story?
A quintessential American story indeed, one that is embodied very well in the history of Trump himself, son of a Klansman.
How bad was Black chattel slavery? For decent human beings it was horrific and criminal—religious humanists commonly join 19th-century abolitionists in calling it sinful—almost beyond words and moral comprehension! And this epic crime of “revolting barbarity” lay at the underlying material-historical and historical-material heart and foundation of the rise of the white supremacist American capitalism that the depraved real estate parasite and fascist leader Trump wants to see more properly celebrated in the national culture.
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