Early on in Trump’s second term, he rolled out executive orders demanding censorship of exhibits and signage at museums and national parks, as well as other institutions that received federal funds. He complained that federal funds should not support anything that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion, anything that he deemed “woke,” and anything that reflected badly in our history. On Friday two federal judges ruled against his administration’s censorship of historically accurate accounts.
A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the National Park Service from removing or revising signs, films and other materials at national parks across the country to comply with a directive from President Trump.
The ruling pauses enforcement of an executive order that called for removing or covering up materials at national parks that “inappropriately disparage Americans” or cast the United States “in a negative light.”
The judge, Angel Kelley of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, also ordered the Park Service to restore within three weeks any exhibits that it had dismantled or altered.
The ruling provides a temporary reprieve for the plaintiffs, a coalition of advocacy groups that sued over the executive order in February, while the litigation continues to unfold.
To comply with the president’s directive, the Park Service has taken down plaques about slavery at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, a sign about climate change at Fort Sumter in South Carolina and a sign about Indigenous people at Acadia National Park in Maine.
Another federal judge has already ordered the Park Service not to make further changes to the slavery exhibit at the President’s House Site at Independence National Historical Park, as she considers a separate lawsuit filed by Philadelphia.
Judge Kelley, who was nominated by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., sharply rebuked the Trump administration for taking down materials. “Not only does this undermine the integrity of the national parks; it sets a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization,” she wrote.
Judge Kelley began her 63-page ruling by listing examples of national parks that help educate visitors about difficult periods of American history, as well as contributions made by people of color, gay and transgender figures, women and other marginalized groups.
“From the echoes of abolition in John Brown’s Fort in Harpers Ferry, to the genesis of the modern L.G.B.T.Q.+ civil rights movement at the Stonewall National Monument, to the retreating ice of Glacier National Park in Alaska, the national parks preserve the multifaceted and multilayered history of our nation, including the good, the bad and the ugly,” she wrote.
In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs argued that removing the materials was “arbitrary and capricious,” in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. They also accused the Park Service of exceeding its legal authority.
Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, the parent agency of the Park Service, suggested that the administration would appeal the ruling.
“This ruling is from a liberal activist judge,” Ms. Martin said in an email. “The department will look at our appeal options while we celebrate U.F.C. Freedom 250 on the South Lawn of the White House this weekend in honor of our nation’s 250th with the greatest president in the history of our country — President Donald J. Trump.”
Emily Thompson, the executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, one of the advocacy groups that brought the lawsuit, applauded the ruling.
“National parks are not propaganda tools, nor should they be used for partisan purposes,” Ms. Thompson said in a statement. “They exist to preserve and interpret the full American story, not just the parts that make some politicians comfortable. This ruling is an important step to help ensure that remains the case.”

Is it just me, or is the overworked “woke” now a thing of the past as the conservative propaganda moves on to something else?
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I’m not sure, Roy. Rufo’s claim to fame was the invention of “woke panic.”
Now they say that anything they don’t like is communist, socialist, radical lunatic or something similar. Back in the early days of the Depression, rich guys hurled those epithets at FDR for promoting any program to help the poor.
Trump’s genius is that he’s convinced the lower middle class and the poor that any program intended to help them is communist.
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this has been the method since the trainman riots of 1877. I traced this political trope in a college paper when I was 20. They were demonizing labor unions as socialist back when a lot of them actually were socialist. Back then they really advocated for government ownership of the means of production. While the unions advocated, their bosses hired private police forces to bludgeon them into submission. Advocates for the poor like Jane Addams were painted with the same brush as anarchists who sent bombs in the mail.
It has never really stopped.
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