June 18, 2026 • 43 mins
Last week, a federal judge ordered the Department of the Interior to stop implementation of a Trump executive order that would whitewash history at National Park sites. A leaked database shows the materials that parks employees had flagged for removal. They want to 'make America great' by erasing its past.
Sources & Further Reading:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/restoring-truth-and-sanity-to-american-history/
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72178941/city-of-philadelphia-v-burgum/
https://sites.google.com/umn.edu/save-our-signs/
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ulzIcpjpyTKLa52DClUkUlcazJPdAryK0B0oKmA9TF8/
https://mississippitoday.org/2026/02/05/medgar-evers-killer-trump-says-stop-calling-him-racist/
https://mississippitoday.org/2026/02/05/visitor-brochures-returned-medgar-evers-home/
https://mississippitoday.org/2026/02/12/medgar-evers-home-omissions-to-story/
https://mississippitoday.org/2025/03/17/wwii-vet-medgar-evers-erased-from-arlington-cemetery-website/
https://www.mississippifreepress.org/brochures-calling-medgar-evers-killer-racist-still-available-at-evers-home/
https://www.nhpr.org/2013-08-12/van-evers-honors-his-father-in-his-own-way
https://abcnews.com/Politics/hegseth-announces-usns-harvey-milk-renamed-usns-oscar/story?id=123266490
https://www.mpbonline.org/blogs/news/medgar-evers-family-fights-efforts-to-strip-his-name-from-navy-vessel/
https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2026/02/national-park-service-plans-censor-brochures-murder-civil-rights-leader
https://npshistory.com/publications/memy/brochures/2021.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/16/philadelphia-trump-judge-slavery-history/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/us/politics/judge-national-parks-trump.html
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone media. It's hot in Jackson, Mississippi, in the
month of June. That's why all the windows were open.
That night, most of the family was gathered around the television.
The youngest child lost his battle against sleep hours ago,
(00:23):
but the older two had settled in to watch a
movie after the President's addressed to the Nation ended. Their
mother said they could stay up until their father got home.
They heard it happen. They knew what they'd heard through
the open windows, the unmistakable sound of their father's car
pulling into the driveway, and then two loud, sharp sounds,
(00:47):
the car door slamming shut and a gunshot. Rena and Darryl,
both just nine years old, grabbed their baby brother and
stayed low below the windows, just like their father taught them.
He'd trained them well. They knew what to do in
an emergency. He'd taught them to drop low to the
floor army, crawl into the bathroom and hide in the
(01:11):
big cast iron bathtub. If they ever heard gunshots or explosions,
they'd be safe in there. And they'd drilled that until
they got it right, practicing how to crawl through the
house with their baby brother in tow, making sure they
could get the toddler safely into the tub in case
(01:31):
the worst happened. He'd made a game of it, tried
to make it fun, tried to make it a little
less terrifying. But the house had been firebombed before that
night in June. They executed the drill flawlessly. They put
their baby brother in the bathtub, but when they heard
(01:51):
their mother's screams, the two older children ran to her side.
She was standing in the driveway in a growing pool
of her husband's blood. Medgar Evers was murdered by a
white supremacist on June twelfth, nineteen sixty three. In twenty twenty,
(02:11):
the Medgar and Merley Evers Home in Jackson, Mississippi was
acquired by the National Park Service and designated as a
National monument. Visitors could stand on the spot where a
klansman killed the civil rights activist in his own driveway,
and in twenty twenty five, the President signed an executive
order aimed to force park rangers to stop calling the
(02:34):
murderer a racist. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird,
little guys Byron Dela beck With was a racist. I mean,
(03:05):
let's just get that out of the way right here
at the top, Byron Dila beck With shot and killed
Medgar Evers, and Byron de la beck With wouldn't even
argue with you about whether he was a racist. He
was proud of it. That fact is just not something
any reasonable person thinks is of for debate. When he
(03:28):
was arrested in nineteen sixty three, the local newspaper in Greenwood,
Mississippi ran a front page story with the headline he
is friendly but outspoken. Underneath the picture of Dila bequ With,
it wasn't his mugshot. And even that newspaper described him
(03:49):
as a die hard segregationist end quote, a man who
hated negroes. So if you want to quibble about whether
the man was a raisedst you're falling behind the editor
of the Greenwood Commonwealth in nineteen sixty three. But we'll
get to Byron. We've got plenty of time. He's been
(04:11):
dead for twenty five years. He's not going anywhere. But
I was thinking about him this week. It's just an
incredibly strange coincidence that I happened to be thinking about
Byron de Leabeque on June twelfth, because he did murder
Medgar Evers on that date in nineteen sixty three. But
I happened to be thinking about him that day, not
(04:32):
because I knew the anniversary, but because that's the day.
A federal judge in Massachusetts granted an injunction ordering the
Department of the Interior and the National Park Service to
stop implementing one of the president's deranged executive orders. Judge
Angel Kelly's order also requires the federal government to restore
(04:53):
and reinstall all interpretive materials so signs, brochures, posters, et
cetera that were removed, altered, or damaged over the last
year as part of the department's compliance with Executive Order
one four to two five three. Executive Order one four
two five three, with the very normal title Restoring Truth
(05:17):
and Sanity to American History, was signed in March of
twenty twenty five. It's okay if you don't remember that one.
He was churning those bad boys out at a pretty
spectacular pace in the first few months of his second term.
I mean, he spent half the afternoon the day he
took office signing executive orders. There were twenty six of
(05:37):
them on day one. He issued one hundred and forty
three executive orders in just the first one hundred days
last year, and a total of two hundred and twenty
five in the year twenty twenty five, and another fifty
or so so far this year. I mean, the man
loves to sign things. They really run the gamut. I
(06:02):
mean we're talking about everything from trying to end birthright citizenship,
restricting all refugee programs to the point that they only
admit white South Africans, pulling out of the World Health
Organization and the Paris Climate Accord, spinning up the short
lived but disastrous Department of Government Efficiency, and designating Mexican
drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. And sometimes it's just
(06:27):
like stuff he was thinking about and I guess he
wanted someone to take his picture while he thought about it.
I mean, just really petty stuff. There were several separate
executive orders just targeting specific law firms he was upset
with for personal reasons. There have been five different executive
(06:50):
orders related to the availability of the TikTok app on
your smartphone. In January of this year, he signed something
called Celebrate Eating American Greatness with American motor Racing, and
it directed the Department of the Interior to find a
suitable route through DC for a street race for his
big Fourth of July party. You just never know what
(07:14):
you're going to get. The day before he signed the
executive order that started up the whole Doge mess, he
signed one to make federal agencies stop buying paper straws.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
We're going back to plastics, so as these things don't work.
I've had them many times, and on occasion they break,
they explode if something's hot. They don't last very long,
like a matter of minutes, sometimes a matter of seconds.
It's a ridiculous situation. So we're going back to plastic straws.
I think it's okay, And I don't think that plastics
(07:50):
are going to affect a shark very much as they're eating,
as they're munching their way through the ocean. Okay, thank you, sir.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Next, we have a full and unconditional pardon for former
Governor Rob Lakoyevitch of the state of Illinois. You get
the idea. But at the end of March of twenty
twenty five, he signed his one hundred and seventh executive
order that year, ordering the Department of the Interior to
(08:19):
root out the corrosive ideology of history. I guess the
Order 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
(08:42):
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
(09:05):
otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity in a deeper
understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite
history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national
shame disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals
that continue to inspire millions around the globe. The Order
(09:28):
aims to root out divisive language, stuff that quote portrays
American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive. You know,
stuff like the historical fact of chattel slavery or the
genocide of indigenous peoples, or the concept of racism in general.
(09:53):
It was in large part aimed specifically at undoing any
changes made to public monuments, memorial statues, and markers during
the Biden administration, a time that did see some pretty
targeted changes when it came to public memory, but it
also tasked the Secretary of Interior with ensuring that all
(10:14):
public monuments, memorial statues, markers, or similar properties within the
Department of Interior's jurisdiction do not contain the descriptions, depictions,
or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living,
including persons living in colonial times, and instead focus on
(10:34):
the greatness of the achievements in progress of the American people, or,
with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance and grandeur
of the American landscape. At the end of May twenty
twenty five, two months after the executive order was signed,
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgham, signed an order directing
(10:57):
Department employees to begin implementing the ex executive order. According
to Bergham's order, all bureaus within the Department of the Interior,
so that includes the National Park Service, had ninety days
to review all public facing properties in their jurisdiction for
inappropriate material, and within another thirty days after that, they
(11:20):
were to remove any content that didn't adequately focus on
America's greatness. And again, this language that I've read to
you is really all the direction they were given. It's
very vague. There wasn't some sort of complex rubric for
determining what is disparaging to past Americans. So, given these
(11:44):
vague directions, between June and September of twenty twenty five,
National Park Service employees conducted this required review. Every National
Park Service site in the country submitted something to the
best of their ability, and in March of this year,
(12:05):
an anonymous group of concerned civil servants leaked that entire database,
thousands of files submitted by National Park Service employees across
hundreds of locations all over the country. All of it
was posted online, and it's an interesting picture. A lot
(12:26):
of people who work for the National Park Service are
incredibly passionate about what they do. They do it because
they love it. They're committed to the sites where they work,
they're committed to telling these stories, but not all of them.
And at the end of the day, a job is
a job, and even the most passionate civil servant has
(12:48):
to pay the rent, and they just didn't want to
get fired. The submissions are anonymous, at least in the
leaked database, so you don't really know anything about the
people who filled out some form at work one day,
but you can kind of get a sense of the
various states of mind that these people might have been
(13:10):
in when they wrote these submissions. They had to obey
the order they had to submit a report of any
part content that could be interpreted as disparaging American greatness
or whatever. But some of the submissions are really bare
minimum somebody checking a box that they did it. They
did enough to not get fired, but they're clearly not
(13:32):
excited about participating in this ideological project. You know, they'll
take a picture of the sign and say this should
be reviewed, but there's no commentary. Other submissions are clearly
pleased for permission to keep educating the public, and some
(13:53):
of them, more than I would have liked, show someone
who is a little too eager to comply, really going
above and beyond to suggest ways that they can erase
any uncomfortable history and comply with this order to effectively
produce propaganda Park. Employees at the Selma to Montgomery National
(14:15):
Historic Trail wrote of their exhibits, quote, while these statements
are historically accurate and supported by first hand accounts, this
information may be perceived as disparaging by individuals who are
less familiar with the history of the civil rights movement.
Now that top level statement does come across as some
(14:37):
form of resistance in the way that these bureaucratic sort
of things can be. But the submitted documentation meticulously highlights
material that should be removed under the order. On the
wall panel about the murder of Viola Luzo, the submission
highlights the phrase a car full of white clansmen from
(14:59):
Birmingham targeted the pair and pursued them at high speed.
They eventually overtook the oldsmobile and fired two shots at
missus Leuzo's head. She died instantly. That is the sentence
about her murder that is flagged for removal, the sentence
where she's actually murdered. I guess it's disparaging to the
(15:24):
clansmen to say they shot this woman in the head.
In the pamphlet about the March to Montgomery, they flagged
for removal every mention of the murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson,
a young black man killed by a state trooper. But
Jackson's murder was the catalyst that inspired the march from
(15:46):
Selma to Montgomery in the first place. You can't have
an exhibit about the March from Selma to Montgomery without
talking about the young black man who was peacefully marching
for the right to vote when he was beaten by
a mob and then shot and killed by a police
officer who later was convicted for that killing. He was
(16:06):
trying to stop a state trooper from beating his eighty
two year old grandfather to death with a club when
they shot him. The same pamphlet flags for removal every
mention of James Reebe, the Unitarian minister who was in
town for the march when he was beaten to death
by a white mob. It also flags for removal every
(16:27):
mention of Jonathan Daniels, the seminarian who was shot and
killed in Alabama later that same summer when he took
a shotgun blast to save the life of Ruby Sales,
an organizer with the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee. If
you can't talk about who was bleeding on bloody Sunday,
if you can't talk about why the march happened in
(16:48):
the first place, If you can't mention the clan, if
you can't talk about police violence or the people who
were martyred fighting for civil rights in Alabama in nineteen
sixty five, just scrap the whole brochure at that point,
because what does it even say if you cut that out?
What is the story you're trying to tell? If you
have to scrub it so clean, all the words are gone.
(17:13):
At the Emmett Till and Many Mobley Till National Monument
in Mississippi, staff flagged the entire display as a possible
violation of the order, but in their submission they warned
that without content that could be deemed a violation of
the order, the site quote would be almost completely devoid
(17:35):
of interpretation. How can you tell the story of Emmett
Till if you aren't allowed to disparage any American? If
you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything
at all. It's a fine adage if you're giving advice
to an incorrigible gossip, but it's terrible direction for writing
(17:56):
an educational display about lynching. To comply with this executive order,
the exhibit would have to be completely blank. You wouldn't
be able to talk about him at till at all.
(18:23):
Alan Spears, Senior director for Cultural Resources at the National
Parks Conservation Association, said of the effort to sanitize the
history of the civil rights movement, quote, you can talk
about Martin Luther King Junior overcoming, you just can't talk
about what he overcame, So you end up telling a
story that makes no sense. At the Harper's Ferry National
(18:48):
Historic Park employees flagged facts that might be offensive on
a pamphlet for a Civil War battlefield tour. The submitted
copy highlights areas of concern a text box containing quotes
from historical figures and documents about the cause of the
Civil War. The text in the highlighted portion says, our
(19:12):
position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, and
that is a direct quote from the Mississippi Declaration of Secession.
Another highlighted quote from Alexander Stevens, the vice president of
the Confederate States of America, reads slavery was the immediate
cause of the late Rupture and present Revolution. The Parks
(19:36):
employee who flagged the brochure wrote that the quotes are
historically accurate, but quote is this considered cherry picking and
denigrating Southerners. If it needs to be changed, we can
just remove this textbox. In another brochure at Harper's Ferry,
the unnamed employees concerned that language about the murder of
(19:58):
one of John Brown's men might and denigrate the townspeople.
The language in question is about how the mob of
people who killed William Thompson threw his body in a
river and then used his corpse or target practice. Again,
that's just a thing that happened. I don't know that
(20:18):
you're denigrating the murderous mob by saying what they did.
I do wish I knew who authored this particular submission,
because I need to know what goes on in the
mind of the parks employee who again works at the
Harper's Ferry National Historic Park. What is going on in
(20:42):
this person's mind when they wrote this about a handout
with a timeline of the life of John Brown. Quote
this document states a mob murdered an abolitionist. Does this
denigrate the murderers? We can reword to. Abolitionist editor Elijah
(21:02):
Lovejoy was murdered for his views does this denigrate the murderers?
What a phenomenal question. The same employee flagged language on
a handout with a timeline of general facts about the
Civil War. From the submission April fifteenth, eighteen sixty one,
(21:28):
President Lincoln calls for seventy five thousand volunteers to put
down the rebellion, and then as commentary, the employee has added,
is rebellion considered acceptable? Could be changed to calls for
volunteers to respond? Is rebellion considered acceptable? We are talking
(21:50):
about the Civil War. President Lincoln wasn't just asking for volunteers.
This is an explicit reference to Proclamation eighty, which was
President Lincoln's invocation of the Militia Act after the Battle
of Fort Sumter, when the militia of a state in
rebellion attacked the United States military at the time. The
(22:13):
Militia Act allowed the president to call up volunteers to
put down insurrection. Even if this is your first day
on earth and you don't already know what happened after that,
you can keep reading that very same handout to find
out there was a Civil war. You can call it
a rebellion. It was the Civil War at Grand Teton
(22:38):
National Park staff offered to put a sticker over the
portion of the exhibit about the Mariahs Massacre, the murder
of nearly two hundred Pagan Blackfeet people in eighteen seventy.
It was a sneak attack on a camp of mostly
women and children, many of whom were sick with smallpox.
There were almost no able bodied men at the camp,
(23:01):
and the United States Army shot sick sleeping children and
then burned their bodies. The exhibit itself was already pretty
generous to the guys who committed the massacre. The heading
on the panel reads how do we acknowledge the good
and bad of a historic figure? And it starts by
(23:25):
listing the positive accomplishments of Gustavus Cheney Doane. Of the
hundreds of signs that park staff suggested for removal, this
is one of a relatively small number that is confirmed
to have been entirely removed. The offending text appears to
have been a rather recent edition. In twenty twenty two,
(23:49):
Mount Don, a mountain peak inside Yellowstone National Park, was
officially renamed First People's Mountain, and that appears to have
been the catalyst for the recontextualizing of Doane's legacy in
these exhibits at Grand Teton. The removed text read in part.
In January eighteen seventy, Doane participated in what is now
(24:11):
known as the Marias Massacre, at which the US Army
killed over one hundred and seventy Pagon Blackfeet, including many women, elders,
and children. Doane wrote fondly about this attack and bragged
about it for the rest of his life. I don't
understand how you could say that that is a text
(24:32):
that denigrates an American when all it says is a
historical fact that this man was proud of until the
day he died. It's not just racism, genocide, and slavery
that are off limits. At the Cape Hatteras National Seashore,
(24:52):
employees flagged language about light pollution, shoreline erosion, sea level rise,
and climate change as possible violations of the directive, as
they might quote reduce the focus on the grandeur, beauty,
and abundance. At Biscayne National Park in Florida, the submission
flags in educational display, but the dangers of littering and
(25:15):
how trash ends up in the ocean and then washes
up on the shore, because that too quote emphasizes matters
unrelated to the beauty, abundance, or grandeur. At Glacier National Park,
an employee reported that the contracted party that provides concessions
at one of their sites had decors that includes the
(25:36):
phrase climate change affects National Parks and the treasures they protect.
This was flagged as a possible violation. At the Theodore
Roosevelt National Park, an employee suggested removing a page about
light and noise pollution from an activity book for children
and flagged language about habitat loss due to agriculture and
(25:59):
development at the Cane River Creole National Historical Park in Louisiana.
The submission offers to remove the sentence The National Park
Service is committed to preserving and sharing an inclusive story
of America from all materials made available to the public,
and that kind of sums it up, doesn't it. The
(26:22):
order prohibits preserving and sharing an inclusive story of America.
The goal is not to share history, but to make
up a new, better, cleaner, brighter, wider story of America.
To enshrine as fact things like the version of the
(26:43):
first Thanksgiving you learned from a coloring book page in
the third grade. Everyone was happy to be colonized. No
one was sad about slavery. There's never been a genocide,
and America will still be the most beautiful country on earth,
even after we've strip mined and fracked every square inch
of the natural landscape. But what actually got removed? This
(27:07):
leaked database contains the responses submitted by every National Park
Service site. Remember Trump signed the executive order in March
of twenty twenty five, and in that order he directed
Interior Secretary Doug Burgham to make a plan to do this.
So Bergham in turn wrote an order in May directing
everyone in the Department of the Interior to make a
(27:28):
plan within their own bureaus to compile possible violations and
start making a plan to remove them. And this database
seems to be about as far as they got. This
is just the list of possible violations. Implementation and follow
through is thankfully not really anyone's strong suit. It is
(27:52):
surprisingly difficult to say with any certainty what got changed
or removed as a result of this order. A project
called Save Our Signs sprang up in an attempt to
build an archive of all existing National Park signs plaques,
exhibits and materials, both as an actual archive of that
material that could potentially be lost and as a means
(28:15):
to track any changes that came as a result of
this order. The site is a collaborative effort run by librarians,
public historians, and data scientists, and they collect submissions of
photos of National Park materials. According to data compiled by
Save our Signs, there is some degree of confirmation for
(28:36):
at least fifty nine instances of censorship or removal of
park materials, and some of those removals have already been restored,
and that's a far cry from the thousands of submissions
in the leaked database flagging items for review and possible removal.
The majority of the confirmed alterations were from Independence National
(28:58):
Historical Park in Phillipeadelphia, and all of those materials have
already been ordered to be restored to their original condition
after the City of Philadelphia sued Doug Burgham earlier this year.
But again, this is just one source of largely crowdsourced data.
There could be countless other instances of material that has
(29:20):
been altered. We just don't know. And as slow as
the rollout of these changes has been, a federal judge
(29:42):
has said it has to stop. After Philadelphia filed their
lawsuit to stop the removal of exhibits from the National
Historical Park. The National Parks Conservation Association filed a separate
lawsuit in February of twenty twenty six, and they're asking
the courts to stop all limitation of changes made pursuant
to Trump's executive order. Last week, Judge Angel Kelly granted
(30:07):
their request for a preliminary injunction. So that doesn't mean
the case is over. They haven't won, but for now,
the government is prohibited by court order from continuing to
implement the Restoring Truth Insanity to American History Order pending
the outcome of this litigation. Not only that, the order
(30:30):
requires that the government put back anything they've already altered, removed,
or damaged in the course of implementing the order up
to this point, it truly isn't clear from the filings
in this case if anyone has a comprehensive list of
every actual change that's been made. So I'm curious to
(30:52):
see what comes of that and the aftermath of their
inevitable failure to comply with this court order. The Department
of the Interior has already filed. Noticed that they're appealing
this order to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, although
at the time I'm writing this, that appeal hasn't actually
been filed yet. Why, though, did any of this make
(31:15):
me think of Byron de la Beque? You might be
asking that if you even remember. That's where we started
in the midst of all of this, right around the
time these lawsuits were being filed to prevent the implementation
of those changes. So back in February of twenty twenty six,
Jerry Mitchell, a reporter with Mississippi Today, visited the Medgar
(31:38):
and Merley Evers Home National Monument, and he says when
he went to visit, he asked for a brochure, and
he was told by an employee that none were available.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, one of those employees told
Mitchell that new brochures were being printed and the new
(31:58):
brochures did not contained the word racist. Specifically, they did
not use the word racist to describe Medgar Ever's killer.
Those new brochures apparently also removed language about Evers lying
in a pool of his own blood after being shot.
(32:20):
This initial reporting on the possibility of new censored brochures
sparked immediate outrage in Mississippi, and this was quickly followed
by denials from the National Park Service. The old brochures
were brought back out, no new brochures ever showed up,
and a vague statement from the National Park Service seemed
(32:43):
to deny that the executive order had anything to do
with planned edits to those materials. In follow up reporting
from Mississippi Today, an employee with the Medgar and Merley
Evers Institute claimed to have heard that an order came
down from NPS that park rangers were no longer allowed
to say the word racist while giving tours. I can't
(33:06):
find any comment from the National Park Service on the
veracity of that claim, although I imagine they would deny it.
The Evers Institute is a nonprofit that's still run by
the couple's daughter, Rena, and the institute has an active
and ongoing relationship with the National Monument and the current
interpret of materials at the site were developed in cooperation
(33:27):
with and approved by Rena Evers Everett herself. So if
someone who works for her is saying they heard this
from NPS, that does have some weight. National Park Service
officials can deny having ordered any changes in as many
weirdly worded statements as they want to, but their claims
(33:48):
don't match what visitors are reporting experiencing at the Evers
Home National Monument this year. Mississippi Today spoke to a
number of tourists who have visited the site in January
and February of this year, including Michelle Storms, the executive
director of the ACLU in Washington State. Michell and her
husband visited the monument in January. They took a guided
(34:11):
tour with a park ranger, and she says the bulk
of the information presented on the tour was just a
sort of surface level discussion of Merly Evers accomplishments later
in her life. Mississippi to Day's Jerry Mitchell quotes her saying,
it was pretty surreal to listen to that because there
(34:32):
was nothing about Medgar Evers being murdered. I thought it
was the weirdest thing. So she's saying, she took a
tour of this site, a guided tour with a National
Park Service park ranger, and again, this site is the
actual home where Medgar Evers was murdered in front of
his wife and children, murdered by a white supremacist because
(34:55):
he was a black man and a civil rights activist
in Mississippi. And she's saying on this tour there was
no mention of equality, justice, the principles he fought and
died for. There's no mention that he died at all.
I've seen pictures of the site. It's a pretty small area.
(35:19):
There's only so many places a tour group could stand.
They would have had to stand on the spot where
Medgar Evers lay bleeding to death in front of his
screaming children, and no one mentioned that he died. They
erased the story of his death from the tour of
(35:40):
this monument to his martyrdom. But the brochures haven't been changed.
The latest reporting I can find is that as of
a few months ago, the old brochures are still available
and if the National Park Service comply with this new
court order now they can't change them, but they wanted to.
(36:07):
And this battle over brochures at national parks isn't the
only place the administration has tried to erase people like
civil rights activist Medgar Evers or sanitize the image of
people like his killer klansman Byron de le BECKUI last year,
Defense Secretary Pete Hegsath announced his intention to rename several
Navy ships that had been named after prominent civil rights
(36:29):
leaders and activists. The US naval ship Medgar Evers, a
dry cargo ship that delivers provisions to ships at sea,
did not end up getting renamed, but the US Naval
ship Harvey Milk did again implementation not their strong suit,
(36:50):
and Medgar Evers was one of many black veterans whose
names disappeared from the Arlington National Cemetery website when the
administration purged government web pages deemed to be part of diversity,
equity and inclusion initiatives. When they say they want to
eliminate DEI, what they mean is they want to eliminate
(37:11):
the public existence of black people. Just because the administration
is a little shoddy on the follow through of their
ten thousand simultaneous efforts to remove from public life anyone
who isn't a straight, white, evangelical American born man doesn't
mean they aren't making progress. They're trying to take us
(37:32):
back to nineteen fifty. They're actively undoing the civil rights
legislation of the nineteen sixties. They aren't just erasing from
pamphlets the violent deaths of people like Medgar Evers, Jimmy Lee, Jackson,
Viola Luzo, James Reeve, and Jonathan Daniels. They're trying to
take back the victories they're blood paid for. They're eroding
(37:56):
the Voting Rights Act, They're trying to bring back segregation.
They have to rewrite that history to weaken the fight
against their effort to control the future. Because maybe you'll
care less about a new story about a court decision
that weakens the Voting Rights Act, if your heart isn't
already on fire with the knowledge of how we got
(38:16):
the Voting Rights Act, why we needed it, what it did,
and who died for it. That executive Order claims to
want to tell a history of this country that we
can be proud of, and that's what I want to
And maybe if there is any beautiful story to be
(38:37):
told about America for its two hundred and fiftieth birthday,
it is a story of those scars. But this, this
is the Landlord's special version of history. You can't just
slap a coat of bright white paint over the holes
in the walls and call it brand new. I'm not
(38:57):
really one for sentimental patriotism, but to be honest, I
haven't suffered enough to earn that sort of cynicism in
neither of most of you. I want you to remember
these words that Fanny lou Hamer spoke in the summer
of nineteen sixty four. She'd been threatened, carass shot at, arrested, imprisoned, beaten, tortured.
(39:22):
She just wanted to vote. She knew the America she
lived in as a black woman in the nineteen sixties
wasn't the America we'd all been promised, but she believed
it could be.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
I question, America, It's just America, the line of the free,
in the home of the brain. Wow.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
We have to sleep with our telephones out for the
hook because our lives be threatened daily because we want
to live. It did some human beings, and I'm thank
you for all she suffered at the hands of the
(40:11):
violent racism that truly is built into the foundations of
this country. She still stood in front of this nation
and she asked, is this America? Because she wanted the
answer to be no, because she knew the answer was
it doesn't have to be that. Another America is possible.
(40:34):
So don't you forget it either. These are not stories
that denigrate the history of America. These are stories that
prove America could be good. I feel like I've been
telling a lot of stories lately about the nineteen sixties.
I didn't set out to do that. That wasn't some
(40:54):
existing special interest or primary area of expertise for me.
But I feels so drawn to those stories because they
feel so uncomfortably familiar Right now, when I'm reading and
writing about my weird little guys, when I'm thinking about
the government's role in fanning the flames of right wing extremism,
(41:16):
when I'm reading the news today, I feel like we're
stuck in nineteen sixty five. And maybe that's only because
we didn't get it right in eighteen sixty five. But
these stories of the nineteen sixties feel like home right now.
There are lessons to be learned from the struggle in
the nineteen sixties. If there weren't, no one would be
(41:40):
going to so damn much trouble to make sure you'd
never learned any And as this administration rapidly dismantles every
civil rights victory, one with blood sixty years ago, I
can't stop hearing the way the history rhymes. I did
start off this week thinking about Byron Della Beckwe But
(42:01):
my air conditioner broke this week, so I've been sitting
in my eighty five degree apartment with an ice pack
tucked into the waistband of my shorts, trying to type
this on a laptop that already had a missing e key,
And now the space par doesn't really work. And honestly,
that old racist will still be dead next week, and
hopefully I'll have a new computer and a functioning air
(42:21):
conditioner by then. So you didn't really get your weird
little guy this week, but you got something a little scarier,
maybe a reminder that a whole mess of aspiring weird
little guys found a way to channel that energy into
their government job, and now they're making it their life's
work to erase the history that would help you understand them,
(42:43):
to strip you of the rights their predecessors never wanted
you to have in the first place, and to crush
any opposition to either project. I can only help you
with the history. The rest is up to you. Weird
(43:13):
Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly conger Our
Executive producers are Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme
music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me
at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I
will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it
(43:33):
as nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my Weird Little Guys
Cool Zone media. It's hot in Jackson, Mississippi, in the
month of June. That's why all the windows were open.
That night, most of the family was gathered around the television.
The youngest child lost his battle against sleep hours ago,
(00:23):
but the older two had settled in to watch a
movie after the President's addressed to the Nation ended. Their
mother said they could stay up until their father got home.
They heard it happen. They knew what they'd heard through
the open windows, the unmistakable sound of their father's car
pulling into the driveway, and then two loud, sharp sounds,
(00:47):
the car door slamming shut and a gunshot. Rena and Darryl,
both just nine years old, grabbed their baby brother and
stayed low below the windows, just like their father taught them.
He'd trained them well. They knew what to do in
an emergency. He'd taught them to drop low to the
floor army, crawl into the bathroom and hide in the
(01:11):
big cast iron bathtub. If they ever heard gunshots or explosions,
they'd be safe in there. And they'd drilled that until
they got it right, practicing how to crawl through the
house with their baby brother in tow, making sure they
could get the toddler safely into the tub in case
(01:31):
the worst happened. He'd made a game of it, tried
to make it fun, tried to make it a little
less terrifying. But the house had been firebombed before that
night in June. They executed the drill flawlessly. They put
their baby brother in the bathtub, but when they heard
(01:51):
their mother's screams, the two older children ran to her side.
She was standing in the driveway in a growing pool
of her husband's blood. Medgar Evers was murdered by a
white supremacist on June twelfth, nineteen sixty three. In twenty twenty,
(02:11):
the Medgar and Merley Evers Home in Jackson, Mississippi was
acquired by the National Park Service and designated as a
National monument. Visitors could stand on the spot where a
klansman killed the civil rights activist in his own driveway,
and in twenty twenty five, the President signed an executive
order aimed to force park rangers to stop calling the
(02:34):
murderer a racist. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird,
little guys Byron Dela beck With was a racist. I mean,
(03:05):
let's just get that out of the way right here
at the top, Byron Dila beck With shot and killed
Medgar Evers, and Byron de la beck With wouldn't even
argue with you about whether he was a racist. He
was proud of it. That fact is just not something
any reasonable person thinks is of for debate. When he
(03:28):
was arrested in nineteen sixty three, the local newspaper in Greenwood,
Mississippi ran a front page story with the headline he
is friendly but outspoken. Underneath the picture of Dila bequ With,
it wasn't his mugshot. And even that newspaper described him
(03:49):
as a die hard segregationist end quote, a man who
hated negroes. So if you want to quibble about whether
the man was a raisedst you're falling behind the editor
of the Greenwood Commonwealth in nineteen sixty three. But we'll
get to Byron. We've got plenty of time. He's been
(04:11):
dead for twenty five years. He's not going anywhere. But
I was thinking about him this week. It's just an
incredibly strange coincidence that I happened to be thinking about
Byron de Leabeque on June twelfth, because he did murder
Medgar Evers on that date in nineteen sixty three. But
I happened to be thinking about him that day, not
(04:32):
because I knew the anniversary, but because that's the day.
A federal judge in Massachusetts granted an injunction ordering the
Department of the Interior and the National Park Service to
stop implementing one of the president's deranged executive orders. Judge
Angel Kelly's order also requires the federal government to restore
(04:53):
and reinstall all interpretive materials so signs, brochures, posters, et
cetera that were removed, altered, or damaged over the last
year as part of the department's compliance with Executive Order
one four to two five three. Executive Order one four
two five three, with the very normal title Restoring Truth
(05:17):
and Sanity to American History, was signed in March of
twenty twenty five. It's okay if you don't remember that one.
He was churning those bad boys out at a pretty
spectacular pace in the first few months of his second term.
I mean, he spent half the afternoon the day he
took office signing executive orders. There were twenty six of
(05:37):
them on day one. He issued one hundred and forty
three executive orders in just the first one hundred days
last year, and a total of two hundred and twenty
five in the year twenty twenty five, and another fifty
or so so far this year. I mean, the man
loves to sign things. They really run the gamut. I
(06:02):
mean we're talking about everything from trying to end birthright citizenship,
restricting all refugee programs to the point that they only
admit white South Africans, pulling out of the World Health
Organization and the Paris Climate Accord, spinning up the short
lived but disastrous Department of Government Efficiency, and designating Mexican
drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. And sometimes it's just
(06:27):
like stuff he was thinking about and I guess he
wanted someone to take his picture while he thought about it.
I mean, just really petty stuff. There were several separate
executive orders just targeting specific law firms he was upset
with for personal reasons. There have been five different executive
(06:50):
orders related to the availability of the TikTok app on
your smartphone. In January of this year, he signed something
called Celebrate Eating American Greatness with American motor Racing, and
it directed the Department of the Interior to find a
suitable route through DC for a street race for his
big Fourth of July party. You just never know what
(07:14):
you're going to get. The day before he signed the
executive order that started up the whole Doge mess, he
signed one to make federal agencies stop buying paper straws.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
We're going back to plastics, so as these things don't work.
I've had them many times, and on occasion they break,
they explode if something's hot. They don't last very long,
like a matter of minutes, sometimes a matter of seconds.
It's a ridiculous situation. So we're going back to plastic straws.
I think it's okay, And I don't think that plastics
(07:50):
are going to affect a shark very much as they're eating,
as they're munching their way through the ocean. Okay, thank you, sir.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Next, we have a full and unconditional pardon for former
Governor Rob Lakoyevitch of the state of Illinois. You get
the idea. But at the end of March of twenty
twenty five, he signed his one hundred and seventh executive
order that year, ordering the Department of the Interior to
(08:19):
root out the corrosive ideology of history. I guess the
Order 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
(08:42):
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
(09:05):
otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity in a deeper
understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite
history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national
shame disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals
that continue to inspire millions around the globe. The Order
(09:28):
aims to root out divisive language, stuff that quote portrays
American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive. You know,
stuff like the historical fact of chattel slavery or the
genocide of indigenous peoples, or the concept of racism in general.
(09:53):
It was in large part aimed specifically at undoing any
changes made to public monuments, memorial statues, and markers during
the Biden administration, a time that did see some pretty
targeted changes when it came to public memory, but it
also tasked the Secretary of Interior with ensuring that all
(10:14):
public monuments, memorial statues, markers, or similar properties within the
Department of Interior's jurisdiction do not contain the descriptions, depictions,
or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living,
including persons living in colonial times, and instead focus on
(10:34):
the greatness of the achievements in progress of the American people, or,
with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance and grandeur
of the American landscape. At the end of May twenty
twenty five, two months after the executive order was signed,
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgham, signed an order directing
(10:57):
Department employees to begin implementing the ex executive order. According
to Bergham's order, all bureaus within the Department of the Interior,
so that includes the National Park Service, had ninety days
to review all public facing properties in their jurisdiction for
inappropriate material, and within another thirty days after that, they
(11:20):
were to remove any content that didn't adequately focus on
America's greatness. And again, this language that I've read to
you is really all the direction they were given. It's
very vague. There wasn't some sort of complex rubric for
determining what is disparaging to past Americans. So, given these
(11:44):
vague directions, between June and September of twenty twenty five,
National Park Service employees conducted this required review. Every National
Park Service site in the country submitted something to the
best of their ability, and in March of this year,
(12:05):
an anonymous group of concerned civil servants leaked that entire database,
thousands of files submitted by National Park Service employees across
hundreds of locations all over the country. All of it
was posted online, and it's an interesting picture. A lot
(12:26):
of people who work for the National Park Service are
incredibly passionate about what they do. They do it because
they love it. They're committed to the sites where they work,
they're committed to telling these stories, but not all of them.
And at the end of the day, a job is
a job, and even the most passionate civil servant has
(12:48):
to pay the rent, and they just didn't want to
get fired. The submissions are anonymous, at least in the
leaked database, so you don't really know anything about the
people who filled out some form at work one day,
but you can kind of get a sense of the
various states of mind that these people might have been
(13:10):
in when they wrote these submissions. They had to obey
the order they had to submit a report of any
part content that could be interpreted as disparaging American greatness
or whatever. But some of the submissions are really bare
minimum somebody checking a box that they did it. They
did enough to not get fired, but they're clearly not
(13:32):
excited about participating in this ideological project. You know, they'll
take a picture of the sign and say this should
be reviewed, but there's no commentary. Other submissions are clearly
pleased for permission to keep educating the public, and some
(13:53):
of them, more than I would have liked, show someone
who is a little too eager to comply, really going
above and beyond to suggest ways that they can erase
any uncomfortable history and comply with this order to effectively
produce propaganda Park. Employees at the Selma to Montgomery National
(14:15):
Historic Trail wrote of their exhibits, quote, while these statements
are historically accurate and supported by first hand accounts, this
information may be perceived as disparaging by individuals who are
less familiar with the history of the civil rights movement.
Now that top level statement does come across as some
(14:37):
form of resistance in the way that these bureaucratic sort
of things can be. But the submitted documentation meticulously highlights
material that should be removed under the order. On the
wall panel about the murder of Viola Luzo, the submission
highlights the phrase a car full of white clansmen from
(14:59):
Birmingham targeted the pair and pursued them at high speed.
They eventually overtook the oldsmobile and fired two shots at
missus Leuzo's head. She died instantly. That is the sentence
about her murder that is flagged for removal, the sentence
where she's actually murdered. I guess it's disparaging to the
(15:24):
clansmen to say they shot this woman in the head.
In the pamphlet about the March to Montgomery, they flagged
for removal every mention of the murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson,
a young black man killed by a state trooper. But
Jackson's murder was the catalyst that inspired the march from
(15:46):
Selma to Montgomery in the first place. You can't have
an exhibit about the March from Selma to Montgomery without
talking about the young black man who was peacefully marching
for the right to vote when he was beaten by
a mob and then shot and killed by a police
officer who later was convicted for that killing. He was
(16:06):
trying to stop a state trooper from beating his eighty
two year old grandfather to death with a club when
they shot him. The same pamphlet flags for removal every
mention of James Reebe, the Unitarian minister who was in
town for the march when he was beaten to death
by a white mob. It also flags for removal every
(16:27):
mention of Jonathan Daniels, the seminarian who was shot and
killed in Alabama later that same summer when he took
a shotgun blast to save the life of Ruby Sales,
an organizer with the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee. If
you can't talk about who was bleeding on bloody Sunday,
if you can't talk about why the march happened in
(16:48):
the first place, If you can't mention the clan, if
you can't talk about police violence or the people who
were martyred fighting for civil rights in Alabama in nineteen
sixty five, just scrap the whole brochure at that point,
because what does it even say if you cut that out?
What is the story you're trying to tell? If you
have to scrub it so clean, all the words are gone.
(17:13):
At the Emmett Till and Many Mobley Till National Monument
in Mississippi, staff flagged the entire display as a possible
violation of the order, but in their submission they warned
that without content that could be deemed a violation of
the order, the site quote would be almost completely devoid
(17:35):
of interpretation. How can you tell the story of Emmett
Till if you aren't allowed to disparage any American? If
you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything
at all. It's a fine adage if you're giving advice
to an incorrigible gossip, but it's terrible direction for writing
(17:56):
an educational display about lynching. To comply with this executive order,
the exhibit would have to be completely blank. You wouldn't
be able to talk about him at till at all.
(18:23):
Alan Spears, Senior director for Cultural Resources at the National
Parks Conservation Association, said of the effort to sanitize the
history of the civil rights movement, quote, you can talk
about Martin Luther King Junior overcoming, you just can't talk
about what he overcame, So you end up telling a
story that makes no sense. At the Harper's Ferry National
(18:48):
Historic Park employees flagged facts that might be offensive on
a pamphlet for a Civil War battlefield tour. The submitted
copy highlights areas of concern a text box containing quotes
from historical figures and documents about the cause of the
Civil War. The text in the highlighted portion says, our
(19:12):
position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, and
that is a direct quote from the Mississippi Declaration of Secession.
Another highlighted quote from Alexander Stevens, the vice president of
the Confederate States of America, reads slavery was the immediate
cause of the late Rupture and present Revolution. The Parks
(19:36):
employee who flagged the brochure wrote that the quotes are
historically accurate, but quote is this considered cherry picking and
denigrating Southerners. If it needs to be changed, we can
just remove this textbox. In another brochure at Harper's Ferry,
the unnamed employees concerned that language about the murder of
(19:58):
one of John Brown's men might and denigrate the townspeople.
The language in question is about how the mob of
people who killed William Thompson threw his body in a
river and then used his corpse or target practice. Again,
that's just a thing that happened. I don't know that
(20:18):
you're denigrating the murderous mob by saying what they did.
I do wish I knew who authored this particular submission,
because I need to know what goes on in the
mind of the parks employee who again works at the
Harper's Ferry National Historic Park. What is going on in
(20:42):
this person's mind when they wrote this about a handout
with a timeline of the life of John Brown. Quote
this document states a mob murdered an abolitionist. Does this
denigrate the murderers? We can reword to. Abolitionist editor Elijah
(21:02):
Lovejoy was murdered for his views does this denigrate the murderers?
What a phenomenal question. The same employee flagged language on
a handout with a timeline of general facts about the
Civil War. From the submission April fifteenth, eighteen sixty one,
(21:28):
President Lincoln calls for seventy five thousand volunteers to put
down the rebellion, and then as commentary, the employee has added,
is rebellion considered acceptable? Could be changed to calls for
volunteers to respond? Is rebellion considered acceptable? We are talking
(21:50):
about the Civil War. President Lincoln wasn't just asking for volunteers.
This is an explicit reference to Proclamation eighty, which was
President Lincoln's invocation of the Militia Act after the Battle
of Fort Sumter, when the militia of a state in
rebellion attacked the United States military at the time. The
(22:13):
Militia Act allowed the president to call up volunteers to
put down insurrection. Even if this is your first day
on earth and you don't already know what happened after that,
you can keep reading that very same handout to find
out there was a Civil war. You can call it
a rebellion. It was the Civil War at Grand Teton
(22:38):
National Park staff offered to put a sticker over the
portion of the exhibit about the Mariahs Massacre, the murder
of nearly two hundred Pagan Blackfeet people in eighteen seventy.
It was a sneak attack on a camp of mostly
women and children, many of whom were sick with smallpox.
There were almost no able bodied men at the camp,
(23:01):
and the United States Army shot sick sleeping children and
then burned their bodies. The exhibit itself was already pretty
generous to the guys who committed the massacre. The heading
on the panel reads how do we acknowledge the good
and bad of a historic figure? And it starts by
(23:25):
listing the positive accomplishments of Gustavus Cheney Doane. Of the
hundreds of signs that park staff suggested for removal, this
is one of a relatively small number that is confirmed
to have been entirely removed. The offending text appears to
have been a rather recent edition. In twenty twenty two,
(23:49):
Mount Don, a mountain peak inside Yellowstone National Park, was
officially renamed First People's Mountain, and that appears to have
been the catalyst for the recontextualizing of Doane's legacy in
these exhibits at Grand Teton. The removed text read in part.
In January eighteen seventy, Doane participated in what is now
(24:11):
known as the Marias Massacre, at which the US Army
killed over one hundred and seventy Pagon Blackfeet, including many women, elders,
and children. Doane wrote fondly about this attack and bragged
about it for the rest of his life. I don't
understand how you could say that that is a text
(24:32):
that denigrates an American when all it says is a
historical fact that this man was proud of until the
day he died. It's not just racism, genocide, and slavery
that are off limits. At the Cape Hatteras National Seashore,
(24:52):
employees flagged language about light pollution, shoreline erosion, sea level rise,
and climate change as possible violations of the directive, as
they might quote reduce the focus on the grandeur, beauty,
and abundance. At Biscayne National Park in Florida, the submission
flags in educational display, but the dangers of littering and
(25:15):
how trash ends up in the ocean and then washes
up on the shore, because that too quote emphasizes matters
unrelated to the beauty, abundance, or grandeur. At Glacier National Park,
an employee reported that the contracted party that provides concessions
at one of their sites had decors that includes the
(25:36):
phrase climate change affects National Parks and the treasures they protect.
This was flagged as a possible violation. At the Theodore
Roosevelt National Park, an employee suggested removing a page about
light and noise pollution from an activity book for children
and flagged language about habitat loss due to agriculture and
(25:59):
development at the Cane River Creole National Historical Park in Louisiana.
The submission offers to remove the sentence The National Park
Service is committed to preserving and sharing an inclusive story
of America from all materials made available to the public,
and that kind of sums it up, doesn't it. The
(26:22):
order prohibits preserving and sharing an inclusive story of America.
The goal is not to share history, but to make
up a new, better, cleaner, brighter, wider story of America.
To enshrine as fact things like the version of the
(26:43):
first Thanksgiving you learned from a coloring book page in
the third grade. Everyone was happy to be colonized. No
one was sad about slavery. There's never been a genocide,
and America will still be the most beautiful country on earth,
even after we've strip mined and fracked every square inch
of the natural landscape. But what actually got removed? This
(27:07):
leaked database contains the responses submitted by every National Park
Service site. Remember Trump signed the executive order in March
of twenty twenty five, and in that order he directed
Interior Secretary Doug Burgham to make a plan to do this.
So Bergham in turn wrote an order in May directing
everyone in the Department of the Interior to make a
(27:28):
plan within their own bureaus to compile possible violations and
start making a plan to remove them. And this database
seems to be about as far as they got. This
is just the list of possible violations. Implementation and follow
through is thankfully not really anyone's strong suit. It is
(27:52):
surprisingly difficult to say with any certainty what got changed
or removed as a result of this order. A project
called Save Our Signs sprang up in an attempt to
build an archive of all existing National Park signs plaques,
exhibits and materials, both as an actual archive of that
material that could potentially be lost and as a means
(28:15):
to track any changes that came as a result of
this order. The site is a collaborative effort run by librarians,
public historians, and data scientists, and they collect submissions of
photos of National Park materials. According to data compiled by
Save our Signs, there is some degree of confirmation for
(28:36):
at least fifty nine instances of censorship or removal of
park materials, and some of those removals have already been restored,
and that's a far cry from the thousands of submissions
in the leaked database flagging items for review and possible removal.
The majority of the confirmed alterations were from Independence National
(28:58):
Historical Park in Phillipeadelphia, and all of those materials have
already been ordered to be restored to their original condition
after the City of Philadelphia sued Doug Burgham earlier this year.
But again, this is just one source of largely crowdsourced data.
There could be countless other instances of material that has
(29:20):
been altered. We just don't know. And as slow as
the rollout of these changes has been, a federal judge
(29:42):
has said it has to stop. After Philadelphia filed their
lawsuit to stop the removal of exhibits from the National
Historical Park. The National Parks Conservation Association filed a separate
lawsuit in February of twenty twenty six, and they're asking
the courts to stop all limitation of changes made pursuant
to Trump's executive order. Last week, Judge Angel Kelly granted
(30:07):
their request for a preliminary injunction. So that doesn't mean
the case is over. They haven't won, but for now,
the government is prohibited by court order from continuing to
implement the Restoring Truth Insanity to American History Order pending
the outcome of this litigation. Not only that, the order
(30:30):
requires that the government put back anything they've already altered, removed,
or damaged in the course of implementing the order up
to this point, it truly isn't clear from the filings
in this case if anyone has a comprehensive list of
every actual change that's been made. So I'm curious to
(30:52):
see what comes of that and the aftermath of their
inevitable failure to comply with this court order. The Department
of the Interior has already filed. Noticed that they're appealing
this order to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, although
at the time I'm writing this, that appeal hasn't actually
been filed yet. Why, though, did any of this make
(31:15):
me think of Byron de la Beque? You might be
asking that if you even remember. That's where we started
in the midst of all of this, right around the
time these lawsuits were being filed to prevent the implementation
of those changes. So back in February of twenty twenty six,
Jerry Mitchell, a reporter with Mississippi Today, visited the Medgar
(31:38):
and Merley Evers Home National Monument, and he says when
he went to visit, he asked for a brochure, and
he was told by an employee that none were available.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, one of those employees told
Mitchell that new brochures were being printed and the new
(31:58):
brochures did not contained the word racist. Specifically, they did
not use the word racist to describe Medgar Ever's killer.
Those new brochures apparently also removed language about Evers lying
in a pool of his own blood after being shot.
(32:20):
This initial reporting on the possibility of new censored brochures
sparked immediate outrage in Mississippi, and this was quickly followed
by denials from the National Park Service. The old brochures
were brought back out, no new brochures ever showed up,
and a vague statement from the National Park Service seemed
(32:43):
to deny that the executive order had anything to do
with planned edits to those materials. In follow up reporting
from Mississippi Today, an employee with the Medgar and Merley
Evers Institute claimed to have heard that an order came
down from NPS that park rangers were no longer allowed
to say the word racist while giving tours. I can't
(33:06):
find any comment from the National Park Service on the
veracity of that claim, although I imagine they would deny it.
The Evers Institute is a nonprofit that's still run by
the couple's daughter, Rena, and the institute has an active
and ongoing relationship with the National Monument and the current
interpret of materials at the site were developed in cooperation
(33:27):
with and approved by Rena Evers Everett herself. So if
someone who works for her is saying they heard this
from NPS, that does have some weight. National Park Service
officials can deny having ordered any changes in as many
weirdly worded statements as they want to, but their claims
(33:48):
don't match what visitors are reporting experiencing at the Evers
Home National Monument this year. Mississippi Today spoke to a
number of tourists who have visited the site in January
and February of this year, including Michelle Storms, the executive
director of the ACLU in Washington State. Michell and her
husband visited the monument in January. They took a guided
(34:11):
tour with a park ranger, and she says the bulk
of the information presented on the tour was just a
sort of surface level discussion of Merly Evers accomplishments later
in her life. Mississippi to Day's Jerry Mitchell quotes her saying,
it was pretty surreal to listen to that because there
(34:32):
was nothing about Medgar Evers being murdered. I thought it
was the weirdest thing. So she's saying, she took a
tour of this site, a guided tour with a National
Park Service park ranger, and again, this site is the
actual home where Medgar Evers was murdered in front of
his wife and children, murdered by a white supremacist because
(34:55):
he was a black man and a civil rights activist
in Mississippi. And she's saying on this tour there was
no mention of equality, justice, the principles he fought and
died for. There's no mention that he died at all.
I've seen pictures of the site. It's a pretty small area.
(35:19):
There's only so many places a tour group could stand.
They would have had to stand on the spot where
Medgar Evers lay bleeding to death in front of his
screaming children, and no one mentioned that he died. They
erased the story of his death from the tour of
(35:40):
this monument to his martyrdom. But the brochures haven't been changed.
The latest reporting I can find is that as of
a few months ago, the old brochures are still available
and if the National Park Service comply with this new
court order now they can't change them, but they wanted to.
(36:07):
And this battle over brochures at national parks isn't the
only place the administration has tried to erase people like
civil rights activist Medgar Evers or sanitize the image of
people like his killer klansman Byron de le BECKUI last year,
Defense Secretary Pete Hegsath announced his intention to rename several
Navy ships that had been named after prominent civil rights
(36:29):
leaders and activists. The US naval ship Medgar Evers, a
dry cargo ship that delivers provisions to ships at sea,
did not end up getting renamed, but the US Naval
ship Harvey Milk did again implementation not their strong suit,
(36:50):
and Medgar Evers was one of many black veterans whose
names disappeared from the Arlington National Cemetery website when the
administration purged government web pages deemed to be part of diversity,
equity and inclusion initiatives. When they say they want to
eliminate DEI, what they mean is they want to eliminate
(37:11):
the public existence of black people. Just because the administration
is a little shoddy on the follow through of their
ten thousand simultaneous efforts to remove from public life anyone
who isn't a straight, white, evangelical American born man doesn't
mean they aren't making progress. They're trying to take us
(37:32):
back to nineteen fifty. They're actively undoing the civil rights
legislation of the nineteen sixties. They aren't just erasing from
pamphlets the violent deaths of people like Medgar Evers, Jimmy Lee, Jackson,
Viola Luzo, James Reeve, and Jonathan Daniels. They're trying to
take back the victories they're blood paid for. They're eroding
(37:56):
the Voting Rights Act, They're trying to bring back segregation.
They have to rewrite that history to weaken the fight
against their effort to control the future. Because maybe you'll
care less about a new story about a court decision
that weakens the Voting Rights Act, if your heart isn't
already on fire with the knowledge of how we got
(38:16):
the Voting Rights Act, why we needed it, what it did,
and who died for it. That executive Order claims to
want to tell a history of this country that we
can be proud of, and that's what I want to
And maybe if there is any beautiful story to be
(38:37):
told about America for its two hundred and fiftieth birthday,
it is a story of those scars. But this, this
is the Landlord's special version of history. You can't just
slap a coat of bright white paint over the holes
in the walls and call it brand new. I'm not
(38:57):
really one for sentimental patriotism, but to be honest, I
haven't suffered enough to earn that sort of cynicism in
neither of most of you. I want you to remember
these words that Fanny lou Hamer spoke in the summer
of nineteen sixty four. She'd been threatened, carass shot at, arrested, imprisoned, beaten, tortured.
(39:22):
She just wanted to vote. She knew the America she
lived in as a black woman in the nineteen sixties
wasn't the America we'd all been promised, but she believed
it could be.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
I question, America, It's just America, the line of the free,
in the home of the brain. Wow.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
We have to sleep with our telephones out for the
hook because our lives be threatened daily because we want
to live. It did some human beings, and I'm thank
you for all she suffered at the hands of the
(40:11):
violent racism that truly is built into the foundations of
this country. She still stood in front of this nation
and she asked, is this America? Because she wanted the
answer to be no, because she knew the answer was
it doesn't have to be that. Another America is possible.
(40:34):
So don't you forget it either. These are not stories
that denigrate the history of America. These are stories that
prove America could be good. I feel like I've been
telling a lot of stories lately about the nineteen sixties.
I didn't set out to do that. That wasn't some
(40:54):
existing special interest or primary area of expertise for me.
But I feels so drawn to those stories because they
feel so uncomfortably familiar Right now, when I'm reading and
writing about my weird little guys, when I'm thinking about
the government's role in fanning the flames of right wing extremism,
(41:16):
when I'm reading the news today, I feel like we're
stuck in nineteen sixty five. And maybe that's only because
we didn't get it right in eighteen sixty five. But
these stories of the nineteen sixties feel like home right now.
There are lessons to be learned from the struggle in
the nineteen sixties. If there weren't, no one would be
(41:40):
going to so damn much trouble to make sure you'd
never learned any And as this administration rapidly dismantles every
civil rights victory, one with blood sixty years ago, I
can't stop hearing the way the history rhymes. I did
start off this week thinking about Byron Della Beckwe But
(42:01):
my air conditioner broke this week, so I've been sitting
in my eighty five degree apartment with an ice pack
tucked into the waistband of my shorts, trying to type
this on a laptop that already had a missing e key,
And now the space par doesn't really work. And honestly,
that old racist will still be dead next week, and
hopefully I'll have a new computer and a functioning air
(42:21):
conditioner by then. So you didn't really get your weird
little guy this week, but you got something a little scarier,
maybe a reminder that a whole mess of aspiring weird
little guys found a way to channel that energy into
their government job, and now they're making it their life's
work to erase the history that would help you understand them,
(42:43):
to strip you of the rights their predecessors never wanted
you to have in the first place, and to crush
any opposition to either project. I can only help you
with the history. The rest is up to you. Weird
(43:13):
Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly conger Our
Executive producers are Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme
music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me
at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I
will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it
(43:33):
as nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my Weird Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
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