Notes:
Marshall Romero is a senior in high school, and an active member of the Texas student advocacy group SEAT. (Students Engaged in Advancing Texas) They have led opposition to anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation in Texas, from the local level to the state legislature, and are a current Youth Honorary Chair of Banned Books Week 2026.

Notes:

Dr. Maria McCauley is a transformational leader committed to expanding what communities can achieve through equitable access to information, learning opportunities, and human connection.  She is Director of Libraries for the City of Cambridge, and is elected ALA (American Library Association) 2026-2027 President.

A recently published five-year report compiled by the American Library Association (ALA), Book Riot, Florida Freedom to Read Project, and the Freedom to Read Project chronicled an explosion of book bans beginning in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The surge was the result of what they called “a full-blown, organized political movement” led by groups such as Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. Censors have had the most success in Florida and Texas, where state legislatures have passed laws requiring schools to purge their libraries of books that attract complaints from parents. But they have increasingly targeted local school board positions across the country to embed members who advance their censorious policies.

While book challenges were once focused primarily on individual books or authors and were brought by concerned parents or family members acting on their own behalf, the past half-decade shows a shift to sweeping challenges from organized interest groups. These efforts have been successful in red states and beyond, which should alarm anyone who supports the right to read and learn.

According to Betsy Gomez, coordinator of the Banned Books Week Coalition, ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom “tracked 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025, the second highest ever documented by ALA,” and “713 attempts to censor library materials and services, 487 of which targeted books.” In 2025, the ALA found that “92 percent of all book challenges were initiated by pressure groups, government officials and decision makers, up from 72 percent in 2024” and “less than 3 percent of challenges originated from individual parents.”

Tactics and Targets

Books being yanked off the shelves at schools around the country include a number of acknowledged literary classics such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, usually singled out for their violent or sexual content. But the most challenged books in recent years invariably tell stories about people of color or LGBTQ+ characters.

According to PEN America, public school libraries banned 3,743 unique titles during the 2024–2025 school year. Roughly 44 percent of those titles featured characters identified as people of color. Another 36 percent featured characters identified as LGBTQ+, and some 19 percent of the banned titles dealt with characters depicted as trans or genderqueer. A typical book targeted for featuring LGBTQ+ characters and themes is Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club, a National Book Award-winning young adult novel about two women who fall in love in San Francisco’s Chinatown against the backdrop of the Cold War. According to PEN America, it was banned nineteen times in 2024–25.

Some books have been banned merely for acknowledging that the United States has a past marred by slavery, oppression, and exploitation, or for depicting struggles for social justice. For instance, Veronica Arreola’s J is for Justice: An Activism Alphabet, an illustrated picture book introducing youngsters to social justice activism, was one of nearly 596 titles removed from Department of Defense school libraries earlier this year. It was also removed from a Virginia school library.

Book banning at the K-12 level is bad enough, but increasingly brazen censors are also trying to restrict the sort of books that can be read in college as well. Early this year, Texas A&M University barred a philosophy professor from assigning an excerpt from Plato’s Symposium, his famous dialogue about the nature of love, because it allegedly contained “gender ideology.” The University of Nebraska at Kearney announced in June that it would discontinue the textbook Discovering Human Sexuality in courses after fielding multiple complaints from conservative critics, including Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen. The critics particularly bemoaned a training module in the book about empowering transgender students.

Although most of the book challenges around the country in the past few years have been perpetrated by right-wing groups and politicians, not all the titles being targeted are “progressive” or “woke.” For instance, two books by former Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly, about Jesus and Ronald Reagan, were removed from shelves in one Florida school district.

These extraordinary efforts to control student access to works about specific academic subjects or marginalized identities are problematic on their own, but a separate challenge exacerbates all of this: declining literacy and interest in reading.

A Decline in Literacy

Ray Bradbury once said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” Over the past two decades, the United States has seen a decline in multiple literacies. As Rose Horowitch noted in The Atlantic, “According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022.” The decline was measured across all demographics, including among those most likely to read.

These days, Americans are reading shorter works and more pop culture pap than serious content. When it comes to news consumption, fewer than 10 percent of young people now read a daily newspaper. More than half of adults get news from social media in what media scholars have called news snacking, the misguided belief that important news will just find them while they scroll through their corporate, Big-Tech, algorithmically controlled social media feeds. As Horowitch put it, the United States is in the midst of a “literacy crisis.”

UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf went further, telling The Atlantic that America isn’t illiterate; it’s “postliterate.” The latest research corroborates this assessment. Scholars at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth recently conducted a broad study of more than 5,000 schools in 38 states and concluded that “only five states plus the District of Columbia had meaningful growth in reading test scores from 2022 to 2025. Nationally, students remain nearly half a grade level behind pre-pandemic reading scores and only slightly better in math.”

We have our work cut out for us.

Make America Read Again

One way to fight back against censors and declining literacy is to center the importance of the right to read for civic engagement and the health of our republic. Each year, the organizers of Banned Books Week select several Honorary Chairs to help raise awareness—authors, activists, and students who champion inclusivity and intellectual curiosity, leading by example through their work and teaching. These ambassadors for literacy and intellectual freedom remind us that democracy is stronger when we hear more voices from diverse perspectives and when everyone has access to the insights and ideas that books especially make available. One of this year’s Youth Honorary Chairs is high school senior Marshall Romero, who is also involved in Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT). In an interview on the Project Censored Show, Romero observed that

when it comes to a lot of conversations surrounding banned books or media … things happening directly [in] the classroom, there’s not a lot of youth voice or youth perspective on it. Rather, it’s a lot of partisans or parents concerned about what their kids want to learn or what the classroom should look like. … But students are not being considered as stakeholders. … It’s people that haven’t been in the classroom for 30 years. … It’s just been a big hurdle being taken seriously by legislators, but also being able to say, Hey, we’re the primary stakeholder, and you should listen to us.

As a member of SEAT, Romero believes students deserve a seat at legislative and school board tables when decisions that directly impact young people are being made.

Maria McCauley, president of the American Library Association, connected attacks on libraries to broader assaults on democratic institutions. In an appearance on the Project Censored Show, McCauley said that libraries are “foundational to the health of our democracy” and “offer agency and freedom for all of our community members to be able to thrive and flourish.” This is why it is imperative not only to protect libraries and the librarians who staff them, but also to celebrate them, a primary mission of Banned Books Week.

There are many ways for people to get involved during Banned Books Week, including hosting a BBW trivia night (see here for a program kit) or organizing a Right to Read Night, in cooperation with the National Coalition Against Censorship, where people can learn about the most challenged book titles and authors. Project Censored has been a proud member of the BBW Coalition since 2013, and we do our part each year to promote the shared mission of protecting the right to read while fighting censorship in its many guises.

In addition to these efforts, we need people like you, dear reader, to join in the cause. Support your local library and librarian. Visit your local independent bookstore or subscribe to your local news outlet (if you’re lucky enough to have either). Attend school or library board meetings and make it known that censorship has no place in our classrooms or communities. Download the Unite Against Book Bans action toolkit, which features tips about lobbying decision makers, participating in meetings, and organizing protests in support of the right to read. Project Censored also has an action guide for BBW where you can get involved in as little as five to ten minutes. We can stem the tide of book bans and other assaults on our democracy, but we need to work together, and we must do it now.

Notes:

Dr. Austin Kocher is a political and legal geographer studying the theories, laws, and institutional practices behind immigration enforcement. His research focuses on the political and legal geography of immigration enforcement, examining topics such as mass immigrant surveillance, the digitization of asylum processes, and the impacts of immigration policies on vulnerable populations. Austin is also a Research Fellow at American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and the Immigration Lab and runs an organization called Relevant Research.

Notes:

Cathy Kennedy has been a registered nurse for four decades and is president of National Nurses United.

Editor’s note: This article is part of a two-part series exploring the pressing community issues shaping the neighborhoods surrounding Project Censored interns’ college campuses.

Twenty-four traditional Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ (Cayuga) families have been evicted from nation houses, as of April 2026.  The US government and the Cayuga Nation Council—led by illegitimate leader Clint Halftown—are enabling the displacement of people from their land, 247 years after committing a genocidal campaign against the Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ people.

In the early 2000s, some Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ started a series of meetings in Buffalo to plan out how to return to their ancestral lands. By 2003, they had begun acquiring land within the 64,0000-acre reservation area. That same year, Halftown pursued a casino proposal that would have required the Nation to drop its land-claim case. Although Halftown signed a series of agreements with Alpha Hospitality and New York State, including a 10,000-acre cap on land acquisitions in the reservation area, he ultimately walked away from the deal. Traditional Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ people were opposed to this proposal because casino culture deeply contradicts ancestral law. The Haudenosaunee claim that “ Casino culture destroys the social, cultural and spiritual fabric of our people.” This proposal was the first clear sign that Halftown was acting unilaterally, defying the consensus process at the heart of Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ governance, ultimately leading to his removal from any responsibilities. Yet, the US government refused to acknowledge his removal and still upholds this decision.

A History of Erasure and Dispossession

The Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ Nation is one of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. As Kurt A. Jordan, former director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP) at Cornell University, details in The Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ People in the Cayuga Lake Region, the Sullivan-Clinton expedition, from June through October 1779, consisted of the mass destruction of Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ settlements and elimination of food sources, leaving people to starve or flee to British-held Fort Niagara, 140 miles away. Washington instructed Major General Sullivan that “the immediate objects of this expedition (were) the total destruction and devastation of their settlements” (emphasis added) and “it will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground to prevent their planting more. Parties should be detached to lay waste to all the settlements around with instruction to do it most effectively so that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed.”

Around 1789, Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ people began returning to their homeland. In November 1794, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the US federal government signed the Treaty of Canandaigua, which established a 64,000-acre reservation, first proposed in 1789, at the northern end of Cayuga Lake. New York State ignored the federal treaty and violated a federal act that forbade state governments from engaging in land negotiations with Indigenous nations. By 1807, the state had acquired the land, leaving the Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ people with no contiguous reservation, despite their land claim.

Traditional Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’  governance follows The Great Law of Peace, the oral constitution of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. This form of governance functions as a direct democracy built around clans, clan mothers, and sachems (or condoled chiefs). The clan mother designates the sachem after a preceding chief’s death in a ceremony that brings together all six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Decision-making occurs through consensus, and everyone is revocable.

Halftown’s Illegitimate Power Grab

Halftown was never designated a sachem, but rather a liaison to Sachem Vernon Isaac. His mother, Sharon Leroy, had been appointed secretary for life. In this role, she corresponded with the US government and obtained the signatures of 3 other council members. These signatures would be considered sufficient for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to recognize Halftown as the federal representative of the Cayuga Nation.

In 2010, Sachem Sam George, among other Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’, received a mailed invitation from Halftown and his mother Sharon Leroy promising employment and housing at the northern end of Cayuga Lake.

The traditional Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ resorted to collective action in April 2014, occupying Cayuga Nation buildings. Sachem Sam George had been called up because the community “got sick and tired of being harassed and mistreated.” Sachem Sam recalled a direct interaction he had with Halftown, in which he told him that Halftown had “forgotten the people.” Halftown told Sachem Sam that he was obliged to go forward with the evictions, by any means necessary.

Halftown has directed the demolition of community spaces and homes since 2020 with the help of his “police force,” or rather, a non-Cayuga group of mercenaries who constitute the Cayuga Nation Police (CNP). In February 2020, multiple homes and community spaces were destroyed, including a school house and a daycare center. The CNP now occupies the former center. During these demolitions,  Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’  citizens were held at gunpoint and zip-tied, forced to watch the destruction of their community spaces, places where they held ceremonies and passed on their culture. In August 2022, bulldozers demolished a house in Varick, New York. Wanda John, a Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ member, was violently forced out of the house, left with bruises, and forced to watch the destruction of the home. On February 25, 2026, on a cold, snowy day, the CNP violently evicted a mother and her six children. When community members arrived in support, CNP used chemical spray and tasers against them. The Seneca Police Department was present during the eviction and stood by in support of Halftown’s actions.

On April 18, 2026, Halftown displaced the last family residing on these promised homes, ultimately displacing all traditionalists. In a press release, the CNP prides itself in its ability “to regain possession” of the “final illegally occupied home,” based on missed rent payments. Yet, as Sachem Sam said, residents received leases only the first year. In court, Halftown could not produce lease agreements. There was a common understanding that tenants at these properties would not be charged rent. Moreover, local municipalities lack the authority to foreclose or bring tax action against the Nation.

Demolitions have been the most visible tactic, at least in the corporate press, when they do report on Halftown’s reckless treatment of the Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’people. Yet, Halftown continues to harass, intimidate, and abuse communities through less overt means. He sends out quarterly distributions to citizens who remain aligned with him. Sachem Sam sees this strategy as leverage: “He’s buying people,” he said. He also mails newsletters promoting his perspective to a curated list of Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ people, including some who live across the nation, which gives them a narrow view of the situation. He continues to acquire land and place it in federal trust, despite Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ opposition. In 2023, Halftown placed approximately 115 acres of land into trust. Indeed, traditionalists see putting land into federal trust as a violation of sovereignty and self-determination because it represents a transfer of land from Indigenous peoples to the Department of the Interior. Additionally, Halftown’s acquisition of lands represents his ability to gain more power, as he acts in the name of the Nation.

Sachem Sam offered two episodes that illustrate the surveillance and harassment Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ citizens live under. One day, Sachem Sam noticed a hot dog stand at one of the Nation’s gas stations.

“I got myself a hot dog, and I had a plastic knife in my hand. I was spreading butter on my hot dog. The story came out that [Halftown] claimed that we are very dangerous to the people in the neighborhood, because somebody saw me buttering or putting mustard on my hot dog. That’s the kind of story that he tells people all the time.”

Sachem Sam described another instance where kids were playing basketball outside their home, and Sharon Leroy walked by and asked them to move the hoops. The kids then left for a lacrosse game. By the time they returned, the locks on their house had been changed.

A Story That Reflects Corporate Media’s Failures In Indigenous Reporting

When asked what honest coverage of the situation would look like, Sachem Sam said that “the reporter would disappear, likely with a great amount of money, and the article would never be published.”, referring to past alleged harassment of reporters by Halftown. Sachem Sam praised independent news reporter Aaron Fernando’s reporting in The Real News Network, notably because it was contextualized. Sachem Sam also recalls Fernando’s continual on-the-ground presence.

This story has been largely underreported and often misrepresented. The New York Times covered it nationally after the demolitions, but it did not follow up or report on it beforehand. The story’s headline Bulldozing, Kidnapping Claims, Inside a Battle Over a Tribe’s Future, explicitly drew on a shock factor. The article itself continually refers to the Great Law of Peace as an “older system”, ultimately delegitimizing its continued application within the Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ Nation. News outlets often use the term “faction” to describe the traditional Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ people, delegitimizing traditional governance. When Halftown acquired land into federal trust in 2023, the Finger Lakes Times published an article built around a Cayuga Nation press release that celebrated the acquisition. The article failed to contextualize the underlying leadership dispute or to mention that traditionalists actively oppose land trusts. It also fails to highlight the intimate relationship Indigenous peoples have with land, which is more often discussed in Indigenous media. Corporate media coverage tends to make it seem as if the events are simply the result of “internal fighting” rather than continued obstruction of Cayuga self-determination by the US government. The one-sided reporting has also extended to the press coverage of evictions. In April, when the last Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ citizens were evicted from their homes, The Finger Lakes Daily News published an article which largely mirrored a Cayuga Nation press release, failing to contextualize the violence Halftown has inflicted upon Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ people or interview community members. The pattern of corporate press limiting its sources to those with power speaks to the distinction between “elite” and “non-elite” sources. The over-reliance on the former in the corporate media in Indigenous reporting has been documented in a study by Robert Harding, a faculty member of the University of the Fraser Valley.

The CNP and local press enable Halftown to enforce his authority, and it draws directly on US institutions to do so. The department recently attended a recruitment event at Fort Drum, a US military base in Upstate New York. Additionally, CNP personnel have received direct help from the federal government, including training from the Department of Justice in April.

Without the backing of the government that first tried to eliminate them, the traditional Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ people have continued to resist Halftown. “He will not kill our spirit,” said Wanda John at a community meeting in July.

Isïa Patie is an incoming junior at Binghamton University studying political science. Before that, she attended the University of Lille in France. Her interests include housing policy, gender studies, and the sociology of spaces of confinement.

Editor’s note: This article is part of a two-part series exploring the pressing community issues shaping the neighborhoods surrounding Project Censored interns’ college campuses.

​On March 2, 2026, The George Washington University (GWU) sold its Ashburn campus to Amazon Data Services (ADS) for $427 million, without the Loudoun County government’s knowledge. The 122-acre campus, which contained GWU’s School of Nursing, will transition into property for AI infrastructure expansion and data centers under Amazon’s management. “This deal,” said Loudoun County Supervisor Juli Briskman, in conversation with More Perfect University, “came as a surprise not only to my office, but to the entire county government.”

Briskman claims that the county government learned about GWU’s lucrative deal through the media. Before Amazon purchased the campus, the university repeatedly disregarded the county government’s proposals for a joint development plan for years.

​Although data centers have been an economic boon to Loudoun, they have also become invasive. Buddy Rizer, Loudoun’s executive director of economic development, emphasized the county’s dedication to restricting data infrastructure development on Route 7 because of concerns about the residential population. Rizer added that Amazon will need approval from the Board of Supervisors, and he doesn’t believe the company will secure enough votes to get any land-use approval, since the plan conflicts with existing zoning policies.

“Currently, there is no electrical infrastructure that is needed for data centers on that land,” Rizer told WTOP News. “We think that this is just not the right area, because of proximity to houses, and the ability to really use that land for other economic development priorities.”

​Besides blindsiding the county government, GWU had not consulted its faculty or student representatives. The deal states that faculty and students can remain on the Virginia campus for the next five years as they relocate several research programs and archives. However, the five-year relocation strategy remains unclear.

​Data Centers Are Overbuilt in Northern Virginia

​Ashburn is the original hotspot for data centers, with about 250 data centers in Loudoun County alone. According to the Northern Virginia Regional Commission, most of the world’s internet traffic is processed through Ashburn’s data facilities, with anticipation of an 85 percent growth in power demand in the region throughout the next fifteen years. A study found that Amazon owned more than five hundred acres of land in Loudoun before acquiring GWU’s satellite campus.

​Loudoun County residents have experienced a lower quality of life due to diesel generators. The county’s electric grid has been overwhelmed by rising power demand, forcing data center operators to use backup diesel generators. Diesel generator use is set to become more frequent as one hundred additional data centers have been approved for development. Even limited use of diesel generators has been linked to fourteen thousand asthma cases throughout the United States. Additionally, many Loudoun residents have complained of noise pollution that has disrupted their daily activities. Data centers emit a perpetual humming sound (exceeding eighty-five decibels) from water overconsumption and HVAC cooling systems used to prevent hardware damage.

Media Reporting Discrepancies: How We Understand The Growth of AI Infrastructures

While local and independent media highlighted community opposition to the sale, corporate media focused on the financial elements. The Hatchet broke the news first, with establishment outlets like Forbes and the Washington Post following suit. Both outlets reported the sale from a business perspective, emphasizing GWU’s budgetary rationale. None of the corporate outlets mentioned how the community would be affected, as Amazon and the university discussed the deal behind closed doors.

Yet corporate media has not ignored these concerns elsewhere. As data-center construction accelerates nationwide, major outlets, such as AP and The Washington Post, have increasingly documented communities fighting projects over electricity costs, water consumption, noise, land use, and the secrecy surrounding development. In Virginia, the Washington Post reported that public opinion has shifted dramatically against data centers, while communities in Prince William County successfully challenged massive proposed developments. Reuters has similarly documented resistance in Michigan, where residents opposed a multibillion-dollar data-center project over its potential effects on farmland, water supplies, and the electrical grid. National reporting now recognizes that community resistance is emerging as a bipartisan movement threatening the AI industry’s infrastructure expansion. This raises an important question on why corporate outlets did not initially approach GWU’s deal through this lens.

Major newspapers recognized the significance of centers and the active dissent against their construction, yet that did not translate into meaningful coverage of Amazon’s GWU campus acquisition. This reporting discrepancy becomes more dubious with The Washington Post‘s ownership by Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and executive chairman. This conflict of interest can affect reporting on this case, where Amazon was directly involved, causing reporters to omit information beyond real estate news.

Public opposition to data centers persists despite misrepresentation in reporting. A recent Gallup survey found that 71 percent of Americans oppose data center construction in their area. Loudoun County residents’ concerns are echoed across the United States, where communities demand moratoriums on data center construction projects. Nevertheless, data centers continue to proliferate as the federal government prioritizes AI infrastructure expansion for economic and geopolitical agendas. President Trump has consistently dismissed public scrutiny of AI encroachment, criticizing the growing resistance for lagging behind economic prosperity. Republican senators recognize the risks of bolstering data development, as it may undermine their position in upcoming elections.

GWU’s deal exposes the wider struggle against tech expansion as the media and the people grapple with its costs. Similar reporting discrepancies can be observed for the looming Stratos Project that will occupy ten thousand acres of land in Utah. Backlash against the Stratos Project has ousted three local politicians and drawn attention from Loudoun County’s community, but these events have received little coverage. As data campuses continue to drain water supplies and to harm quality of life, reporters must resist contributing to the erasure of the communities engulfing these establishments.

Sarah Abd Alqader is a senior at The George Washington University, studying Political Science and English, with a passion for print publishing and independent journalism. Drawing on her Iraqi-American background, her work invites readers to examine Middle Eastern news stories alongside the critical nuances and histories typically omitted from them.

On September 8, historian Lonnie G. Bunch III announced that he was resigning as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, a federal government-created educational nonprofit and trust, which manages eighteen museums including the National Museum of American History (NMAH), the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). Since taking over as head of the Smithsonian in 2019, Bunch, the founding director of the NMAAHC, has supported efforts to include the stories of people of color, women, and other disempowered groups in the Institution’s presentation of US history, championing and fundraising for a new National Museum of the American Latino and a proposed Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. These efforts made Bunch and the museums he helms the target of intense criticism from Donald Trump and other Republican politicians, who have repeatedly blasted the Smithsonian for being “woke” and too focused on “oppressors and the oppressed.” The Smithsonian fracas is only the most visible front in the Trump administration’s broader campaign to control how we remember the American past, a campaign that echoes how authoritarian regimes elsewhere have censored and rewritten their own national histories. The parallels between the administration’s drive to control history and its effort to muzzle the press and cut off public access to information are too glaring to ignore.

On March 27, 2025, Trump signed an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” bemoaning a supposedly widespread movement to “rewrite” American history by casting the nation’s “founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” The order claimed that “the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and “has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” The order instructed Vice President JD Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian board, to work to remove “improper ideology” from Smithsonian displays and to prohibit spending on exhibits or programming “that degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race.”

In May 2025, Trump tried to fire Kim Sajet, then-director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, whom he denounced as “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI.” She later resigned. Museum studies scholar Suse Anderson told the New York Times the attack on Sajet and the Portrait Gallery was designed “to disempower and discredit those who are working within these institutions to tell a more complete and complex American story.”

In August 2025, Trump sent Bunch a letter asking for his cooperation in a “comprehensive internal review” of the public-facing content and exhibition planning at NMAH, NMAAHC, NMAI, and five other museums. The review’s stated aim was “to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,” particularly in preparation for the country’s 250th anniversary celebrations. The letter asked Bunch to send the administration reams of material on “the chain of command” for approving exhibits and programs, details about current and upcoming exhibits, curatorial and staff manuals, and any educational materials linked to current exhibits and visitor surveys within 30 days.

Then, on July 4, 2026, the White House Domestic Policy Council released a lengthy report, “Saving America’s Story,” that rehearsed a litany of grievances about the NMAH, insisting that it “has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.” The report claimed the NMAH had downplayed and denigrated the role of Christianity in shaping the nation and its founding ideals, engaged in “anti-white” activism (by creating programming for every major demographic except “whites, Christians, males and Americans”), cast immigrant rights activism—which it labels “illegal alien political activism”—in “heroic terms,” created youth-facing exhibits with “sexually explicit or sexually suggestive content,” and generally framed the national heritage as an object of “disdain.” The authors argued that NMAH should instead “teach the history of an American nation that is worthy of our affections and worth passing along to future generations.”

Historians pushed back almost immediately. As the Organization of American Historians argued, the report is best seen as one salvo in a multi-pronged campaign to coerce the Smithsonian into bending its presentation of history to suit the MAGA political agenda. It transparently aims to “impose a narrow, singular, and celebratory narrative of American greatness populated by a mythologized set of heroes” and would “erase the conflict, struggle, and diversity—the complexity—that have always defined the American experience.”

A few weeks after “Saving America’s Story” was released, Trump signed an executive order instructing the Park Service to place signs outside the NMAH warning visitors about the allegedly inaccurate and unpatriotic nature of its exhibits. Then, just days before Bunch’s resignation, on August 28, the Department of the Interior sent a letter to the Smithsonian threatening to withdraw support for the institution because of its “culture of ideological activism” and demanded an in-person meeting to discuss concerns.

Beyond the Smithsonian

Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian is part of a larger pattern of his administration tampering with and attempting to sanitize the way the national past is remembered and commemorated.

In January 2026, for example, Trump ordered the National Park Service (NPS) to remove a slave memorial outside The President’s House in Philadelphia, which honored nine people enslaved there by President George Washington. In June 2026, reporting revealed that the administration removed dozens of plaques, exhibits, and films from thirty-seven sites managed by the NPS that it claims “disparage Americans.” Among the items removed was an “African American Civil War Memorial wayside” on the National Mall in Washington, DC. On June 12, a federal judge ordered that all the signs be reinstalled, noting that the White House actions “set a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization.”

In February 2026, the NPS removed a large rainbow pride flag from the Stonewall national monument in New York City. The monument commemorates the 1969 uprising that broke out following a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a foundational event in the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. LGBTQ+ activists and historical preservationists challenged the flag’s removal in court. In April, the Trump administration agreed to settle the lawsuit and once again hang a pride flag at the Stonewall site alongside a US flag.

The Biden administration had changed the names of several military bases named for Confederate officers, including renaming Fort Bragg in North Carolina as Fort Liberty. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has systematically restored the names of these bases to their pre-Biden names (by finding service members with the same last names as the Confederate leaders to ostensibly honor). In addition to Fort Bragg, the names of “Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Pickett and Fort Robert E. Lee in Virginia, Fort Gordon in Georgia, Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Polk in Louisiana and Fort Rucker in Alabama” were restored to their earlier names.

Hegseth has also removed the names of Harvey Milk, Harriet Tubman, and other civil rights leaders from US Navy ships. Claiming he was merely “taking politics out of ship naming,” Hegseth’s decision to strip the name of murdered gay rights activist Harvey Milk, a Navy veteran, from a Navy oil service vessel took effect at the start of Pride Month. Critics charged that the change was an effort “to erase the contributions of LGBTQ+ people and an insult to fundamental American values of honoring veterans.”

In 2019, the New York Times published a Pulitzer Prize-winning multi-part series, The 1619 Project, about the impact of slavery, racism, and Black freedom struggles on every aspect of life in the United States, from politics and culture to the economy, agriculture, urban design, and the criminal justice system. In response, the Trump administration established the 1776 Commission in 2020 to counter what it called a “radicalized view of American history,” embodied by efforts like the 1619 Project, and to promote “patriotic education.” The Trump commission’s members were a hodgepodge of conservative politicians, academics, and activists, including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, then-Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, and a single professional historian, Victor Davis Hanson. The Commission released a partisan, error-filled report just days before the end of Trump’s first term. Biden terminated the task force on his first day in office. In 2025, Trump issued an executive order reinstating the Commission.

Finally, in the lead-up to the July celebrations of the nation’s 250th anniversary, the Trump administration deployed six “Freedom Trucks,” mobile museums with displays about the country’s founding and history housed in eighteen-wheel tractor-trailers, to traverse the country. As Guardian reporter Ed Pilkington described the Freedom Truck exhibits, they depicted the United States “as a white Christian nation,” lauded the contributions of white male leaders to the country’s development, and stressed “God as the source of the country’s greatness” while mentioning women, immigrants, and people of color only occasionally.

The Authoritarian Playbook

None of this is unique to the United States. Authoritarian, ultra-nationalist regimes around the world have long relied on the same playbook of censorship and historical mythologization now being employed by Trump.

Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice Party in 2018 passed a law making it a civil offense to assert that the Polish state or the Polish people were complicit in the Holocaust. In 2022, two Polish researchers, Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, who co-edited a book about the involvement of Catholic Poles in the Nazi genocide of the Jews, were convicted of violating that law (although an appeals court ultimately overturned the conviction).

In Putin’s Russia, it is a crime to disseminate “false information about the activities of the USSR during the Second World War,” to circulate “manifestly disrespectful information about the dates of military glory and memorable dates of Russia relating to the defense of the Homeland,” or to desecrate “symbols of Russia’s military glory.” According to a 2018 study by the Agora rights organization, seventeen Russian historians, researchers, and professors have been prosecuted for undesirable comments or findings concerning World War II.

Ever since India’s authoritarian, Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, “history has been under siege,” Suchintan Das wrote in a 2024 Jacobin article. The government has installed loyalists who hold a Hindu-centric view of Indian history in the leadership of historical research institutions across the country. It has censored and rewritten textbooks and syllabi used in schools to minimize the contribution of Muslims and secular political movements to the country’s development, while at the same time deleting references to Hindu supremacist violence like the 2002 Gujarat riots. It has also promoted a mythic and factually dubious representation of ancient Indian culture through its social media and public pronouncements.

The Far Right’s Fixation with Rewriting the Past

Why do Trump, Modi, Putin, and other right-wing nationalists expend so much energy censoring, managing, and rewriting their nations’ histories?

Right-wing nationalist ideology celebrates a particularly narrow, often racist vision of a hierarchical, usually ethnically homogeneous nation. Narrating national history is a primary means of defining who belongs—usually the dominant racial, ethnic, or religious group—and who can be excluded as alien or other—usually oppressed racial, religious, sexual, and even political minorities.

The mythic vision of the past favored by Trump and fellow autocrats is rooted in a narrative of national greatness that has supposedly been interrupted or subverted by assorted national enemies (liberals, socialists, communists, immigrants, Muslims, feminists, the LGBTQ community) and which only “strong” leaders will be able to restore. Hence, rewriting history serves to legitimate the authoritarian rule of leaders such as Trump, Putin, and Modi and to cast what are, in fact, abuses of power as necessary and justified.

Trump and other far-right politicians believe that the entire purpose of teaching history is to inspire patriotism and unthinking devotion to the nation. Hence, their preference for focusing the national narrative on a succession of heroes, whom schoolchildren are supposed to admire and seek to emulate. In his various denunciations of the Smithsonian and the 1619 Project, for example, Trump repeatedly complained that their version of US history was teaching students to “hate America.” Rarely has Trump or anyone in his administration expressed concern that students learn accurate, scholarly history about the economic and social realities, struggles, injustices, and conflicts that shaped ordinary Americans’ lives.

Trump and other right-wing authoritarians want to erase evidence of past resistance to oppression and past movements for social change—because those stories are a source of inspiration for people fighting similar battles today.

Controlling the historical record is about much more than deciding what appears in a museum exhibit or a school textbook. A society that cannot honestly confront the conflicts, injustices, and struggles of its past loses an essential resource for understanding its present and imagining a different future. Political decree cannot make the past simpler, cleaner, or more patriotic; historians and historical institutions must preserve its complexity and make the evidence available for citizens to examine, debate, and learn from. Democracy needs truthful, fact-based history just as it needs truthful, fact-based journalism. That is why we must push back against the Trump administration’s attempt to control American history.