[Published in the Sunday Guardian of India]
The battle for America’s collective memory is erupting once again.
Leftists spent the last decade destroying America’s traditional identity and well-established historic narrative. The Left filled classrooms, books, articles, parks, and museums with their mantra of a nation “built on stolen land and by slave labor”. At the same time, they wantonly assaulted the physical touch stones of America’s origins by removing statues and other monuments.
The Left intended to replace the connective fabric of American society with an alternative reality promoting a tyrannical communist government. They embraced the cautionary words from George Orwell’s “1984”: "Who controls the past controls the future”.
They are now howling from the roof tops as President Donald Trump is reversing their plans to reshape America.
America is unique. It is a country based upon ideas - not based on geography, language, or tribe. Our historic sites and markers ground us in who we are, and why we are.
History is about collective memory and frames of reference. Statues and historic sites are there to commemorate and remind, not to celebrate. Knowing and discussing our origin is fundamental to a civic culture where shared values hold us together. Civil dialogue with those we disagree is the structure that allows our institutions, our communities, and ourselves to exist.
Our Constitution is about forming “a more perfect union”. This means America is always a work in progress. The Constitution itself is the greatest “rules of engagement” for collective action that has ever been written. Looking beyond ourselves to our origins reaffirms our nation and our individual and collective roles in it.
Starting in 2009, the Left anointed itself as morally entitled to determine what memories should be saved or destroyed. The chorus of Leftist commentators from the media, academia, and politics wove a tapestry of excuses justifying official and unofficial acts of destruction and desecration. Tax dollars were used to dismantle memories and insert radical anti-white, anti-capitalist, and anti-American content into classrooms, museums, and parks. This is the very essence of tyranny and fanaticism.
Humans have attempted to alter collective memory since competing Pharaohs chiseled away Cartouches and defaced hieroglyphs. Carthage was destroyed, Rome was sacked. Mongol hordes obliterated cities along the Silk Road. Islamic hordes burned the Library of Alexandria. Vikings ravaged monasteries and burned centuries old manuscripts. Cromwell’s Puritan army smashed stained glass windows in countless churches.
World history has been saved by those who transcended their immediate impulse for destruction. Spain’s Ferdinand and Isabella calmed their Christian fervor when they saw the wonder of the Alhambra. Napoleon’s armies avoided destroying European cities and towns during nearly twenty years of war.
The Twentieth Century saw a disturbing shift in how history was viewed. The rise of Communism and Nazism led to intentionally obliterating history on a strategic scale. Worse, the followers of these dogmas made fabricating history a priority. Destroying reality and then faking an alternative became one of the greatest threats to civilization. Cultural treasures were lost to the ages as the Nazi’s raped Europe, the Soviets raped Eastern Europe, and Mao’s minions unleashed their Cultural Revolution.
The 21st Century brought a new wave of Islamic hordes whose primary mission was to destroy anything, and anyone, not sufficiently promoting their fanaticism. From the Taliban blowing up thousand-year-old Buddhist statues, to ISIS smashing the Tomb of Abraham and leveling Palmyra, the erasure of irreplaceable historic sites and artifacts has known no bounds.
Fanaticism is all about intolerance and silencing opponents. It is all about indoctrination and erasing individualism. Fanatics are not satisfied until they completely destroy independent thought. Their dream is a “hive mind” - thinking and acting as one. Leftists, Islamic radicals, and Communists want to anoint one leader who is all powerful, surrounded by blind devotion. Their goal is the end of civilization as we know it.
George Orwell, a Socialist who grew to understand the threat of tyranny, sent us a timeless warning: “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
On March 27, 2025, President Donald Trump set about stopping the Left’s obliteration of America’s identity. He issued Executive Order 14253, stating:
“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
Trump’s Executive Order requires the Secretary of Interior to “determine whether, since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history”.
As with most Executive Orders, the Interior Secretary then issued his own detailed guidance to implement the President’s policy. On May 20, 2025, Secretarial Order 3431 required the heads of the various federal land units to: “take action, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times).”
The Secretary’s Order outlined a process for compiling and reporting on such instances, including soliciting public input. These reports will be reviewed and appeals heard before actions occur. It will be months before this process is completed.
America’s Leftists are spreading false rumors of widespread removals of slavery documents and displays. These same Leftists previously demanded the removal of Confederate statues and tore down memorials to Lincoln and the Founding Fathers. These same Leftists are now waving signs, “Hands Off History!” to preserve their woke legacy.
The absurdity of the Left’s outrage is
that promoting slavery was at the core of the 19th Century Democrat
Party while stopping the spread of slavery was the founding principle of the
Republican Party. This divide continued
beyond the Civil War as Democrats formed the Ku Klux Klan as a paramilitary
force to kill freed Blacks and their Republican supporters. In the 20th Century, Democrats
promoted lynching of Blacks and opposed Republicans who tried to prevent this
terror.
The Left’s accusation about President Trump, and his Department of Interior, wantonly removing slavery displays is baseless. Republicans would not erase their Party’s original reason to exist.
The Honorable Scot Faulkner served as
the first Chief Administrative Officer of the U.S. House of Representatives,
Director of Personnel for Reagan’s 1980 Campaign, Administrator of Personnel
for the Presidential Transition, and on the White House Staff. His best-selling
memoir, “Naked Emperors” is available on Amazon.com.
