In an earlier essay, "Silencing the Storytellers" in April 2025, I wrote about the coordinated effort to narrow, sanitize, and control the stories Americans encounter about their own culture and history, an initiative that spans five critical fronts: the arts, public broadcasting, public schools and universities, museums and libraries, and historical institutions.
This campaign derives its formal authority from the president’s Executive Order 14253 — “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” — which mandates that federal agencies remove or revise interpretive materials that are deemed “partisan ideology” or that “disparage Americans past or living.” In practice, the order has triggered the systematic removal, revision, or flagging of signs, exhibits, and displays across national parks, historic sites, museums and other federally supported cultural institutions.
In turn, these actions affect the very storytellers — the curators, historians, and educators — who preserve and interpret public memory, targeting materials that address Native American displacement, slavery, racism, environmental degradation and other uncomfortable but well-documented aspects of American history.
Read the entire commentary on Substack In The Center Lane With Herb Paine →
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