The Life in My Years

April 27, 2025
I was at a protest yesterday and one of the speakers asked the assembled crowd, “How many of you are afraid to look at the news in the morning?” The show of hundreds of hands was almost unanimous, and I imagine that those who didn’t raise their hands had them full.

Almost as if it was predetermined, I woke up at four in the morning, shook off the cobwebs and picked up my phone to read; ‘Smithsonian begins removing exhibits, artifacts from African American History Museum.’ Well, with the idea of another hour of sleep dashed by exalted leader, I got up, set the coffee to brew, and read the bad news.

Bad news?

Well of course it is. It’s what happens in Trump’s America.

When dear exalted leader issues a decree, the order must be followed. The order to whitewash (and I use this word purposefully) American history was issued and signed in his illegible scrawl in late March in the form of an Executive Order titled, RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY (Caps not mine. We know that exalted leader prefers caps).

The EO begins, “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.”

The EO continues, “The Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology. This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”
Translated, I imagine that means that slavery will be portrayed as an opportunity for Black folks to learn farming and other useful trades.

Section 4 titled. Restoring Truth in American History, instructs the Secretary of the Interior (that would be Doug Burgum whose entire knowledge of American history can dance on the head of a pin) 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, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology;” and “take action to reinstate the pre-existing monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties, as appropriate and consistent with 43 U.S.C. 1451 et seq., 54 U.S.C. 100101 et seq.,and other applicable law;”
This probably means that statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, as well as other traitors, will be returning to a park near you.
The entire EO, which has Stephen Miller, America’s version of Joseph Goebbels, written all over it as author (though it could be any one of exalted leader’s other white nationalists) is linked here.

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The Rev. Dr. Amos Brown, a civil rights icon in San Francisco, was recently notified by email that the artifacts that he had lent to the Smithsonian would be returned to him. The reason given to Dr. Brown was that the loaned books “are delicate.” Because the venerable Smithsonian doesn’t know how to preserve and care for old books?

One of the items being returned to Dr. Brown is a Bible that he had carried with him during demonstrations with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson.

Also being returned is Brown’s copy of History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880, written by George Washington Williams, a Black Civil War veteran who would go on to become a minister and later a member of the Ohio House of Representatives. The book was published in 1883 and is considered to be the first history of African Americans from slavery through reconstruction. It can be accessed for free at the Project Gutenberg website: link here.

These items have all been deemed by dear leader and his minions to be “improper ideology.”

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Erasing history and replacing it with fabrications. It’s one of the top ten items on the autocrat’s ‘to do list.’

Katie Stallard, Senior Editor, China and Global Affairs, at the New Statesman and the author of Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia, and North Korea, explains on the podcast, Shield of the Republic, how the citizens of those three autocratic nations have been fed a load of manure about the histories of their countries.

Ms. Stallard explains, “when you go to North Korea it is impossible not to miss all the commemoration, the statues, the narrative of the end of the Second World War, in the sense that the people are told that it was the current leader’s grandfather Kim Il-sung who liberated the Korean Peninsula at the end of the war . . .” She continues, “. . . as we know in real life, Japanese colonial rule ended because of the Japanese defeat in 1945.”

During the same podcast, Ms Stallard explains the revisionist history that exists in Russia and China and compares it to what is currently happening in the Trump regime. Link to podcast here.

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Our exalted leader’s paranoid executive orders and proclamations against DEI and “wokeness” have, in conjunction with exalted leader’s EO titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” (link here), been creating a falsified, so called patriotic version of American history.

While this is not what the Trump-light people (the cheaper eggs folks) voted for, this is the “patriotic” lily white version of America that the true believers, the ones hopelessly hooked on the MAGA drug, are seeking. These are the people who believe they’ve been seeing their version of America slip into oblivion. Their America is one that never existed except in their own minds, and Trump, with the help of his fascist staff (because Trump likely has no need for history, whether authentic or made up), are giving it life; a Frankenstein monster of a false past.

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Even before exalted leader signed his EOs, we’ve borne witness to the falsification of contemporary history by the Trump regime. On his first day in office, Trump pardoned the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2020. And even before that, throughout his campaign, Trump glorified those criminals, calling them “political prisoners” and “patriots” while playing a version of the National Anthem being sung by the so-called (criminal and insurrectionist) J6 Prison Choir, at his rallies.

Trump’s sycophants in the media and in Congress have distorted the history of that infamous day, going so far as to call it a harmless tour. Ashli Babbitt, a criminal who was shot while trying to break into the Capitol building that day has been blasphemously resurrected by Trump and the right wing into martyrdom.

Even as Ukraine struggles for its survival, Trump, the exalted one, has been lying about the start of the war, blaming Volodymyr Zelenskyy for starting the War in Ukraine. In the process of spreading that black lie, Trump, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio have been further tarring the reputation of the United States by its appearance as a Russian ally and a toady to exalted leader’s hero Vladimir Putin.

In the end though, history stubbornly exists. The exalted leader and his sycophants can remove exhibits from museums, tear down monuments, close museums and try to spin tales as historical fact but in the end history always wins.