Yesterday, the President issued another Executive Order: “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Right, who wants lies and insanity? Yet, as I read the order I wonder what “truth” and “sanity” mean, and finally, I wonder what the President means by “history.” On this latter point, let me, as someone who has been a historian, studied history, and written history, explain a bit.
I’m sure all of us have by now discovered without being told that we live in time, and that the present slips away pretty damned fast into the past. History is not the past, because the past is gone. History is the story we tell about the past; that is, it is constructed. This distinction between the past and the story we tell is embedded in the word “history.” Originally, the Latin word historia meant any kind of story as well as the story of the past. That dualism still exists in languages directly derived from Latin, like French or Italian or Spanish. It allows the understanding that history is always a story. In English, the separation confused some people into thinking that history was simply the past and not a story, which is why some people mistakenly think that history is unchanging, as the past is just the past and cannot change. That is the President’s error.
American history, as a story, is constantly changing as historians do research, discover not just new documents but pay attention to ignored documents. No historian since people in the West started writing history 2,500 years ago thought his aim was to repeat what other historians had said before. Why would anyone pursue a lifetime dedicated to regurgitating what everyone already knows? The writing of history is, and always has been, an attempt to retell the story in ways that have meaning in the present and according to facts and deductions and interpretations that are new. Writing history is always rewriting history, by definition, and that rewriting keeps the past alive.
Now comes an order from the error-ridden President that historians have been “rewriting” history and that has to stop. American history is forbidden to deal with the concept of race because race is apparently not a concept (invented by humans and socially constructed) but simply exists, and American history is simply the story of the triumph of racial equality over racism (though it is hard to know how that triumph takes place if there was no racism to begin with). With this order the President reverses by decree over 100 years of biological research which does not find racial distinctions to be anything else but culturally determined. Similarly, in this order, gender has no place in history for the same reason. He is espousing the ideology of late 19th century science when some biologists promoted the theory that females were not homo sapiens but belong to another species.
The President stupidly accuses federal museums, historical research institutions, exhibition galleries, all those involved in doing history of adhering to a false “ideology,” which he now formally bans. If that is not a stroke of ideological censorship, I don’t know what is. We all know historical examples of this kind of prohibition on concepts, on thinking: an enforced ban on the variety of religious and cultural and conceptual practices of people (diversity), an enforced repudiation of fairness as a principle of equal relations between individuals (equity), an outlawing of a level playing field in life (inclusion). We know that that happened in the 1930s in Germany at the same time it was happening in the Soviet Union. I have lived in Franco’s dictatorship in Spain in the 1960s when newspapers silently voiced their objection to mind control by blacking out whole columns of articles that were banned, and I watched the same censorship operating in Taiwan during Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship.
The President makes America great again by decreeing us to think it. The sad thing is that we do, many of us, already think that way, that the myth of America is the real America, that when Jefferson said we were created equal all Americans suddenly, by decree, became equal, never mind the slaves, the native Americans, the indentured servants, the property-less, the non-white, the women, the non-Christians.
We are so used to thinking this way that several years ago, when I wrote that in those early elections in the 18th and 19th centuries that consolidated the country as a nation, Jewish people were not allowed to vote, a Jewish friend could not believe it and asked for proof. He was college educated and certainly knew that the colonies were Christian and that the colonies turned into states by the Constitution kept their voting requirements and that, with I think only one exception, states only allowed white, male, Christian, property owners to vote. Yet, he was so enthralled by the myth, that historical knowledge had no impact on his everyday take that this is a “free” country and always has been.
When the President writes “truth” and “sanity” in his order, he whistles to those whose minds are stuck in the myth and he demonstrates his propensity, and that of his cohorts, to name-calling. When he accuses federal historians of a false ideology, he contrasts that with an ideology that promotes its opposite: non-diversity (the unilateral superiority of European culture and race), non-equity (the use of law as criminality to defeat fairness as a legal principle – contradicting a basic premise of European culture), and non-inclusion (honoring favoritism and corruption).
The order is “well written,” in the way it makes everything said sound so good, a cheering word encouraging optimism, but behind the well-chosen rhetoric is a robber-baron disdain for life, for thinking and living people, for you and for me. People exist only to be exploited for the Leadership’s purposes, like the lives of over 50 non-combatant Yemeni, whose lives were never considered but were taken in order to “send a message” to Europe. I’m referring to the recent “security” scandal, of course. The substance of that high-level discussion showed that the only reason the group supported the attack was to send the message that European commerce can continue through the Suez Canal only because of American protectionism, and for that protection, the Europeans must pay: “remunerate,” wrote SM (presumably, home land security and presidential advisor Stephen Miller), we want “an economic gain in extracted return.” For the full text of the chat on the decision to bomb Yemen see, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/signal-group-chat-attack-plans-hegseth-goldberg/682176/?gift=rgjs7R9D2Tmxl82PAnrrmAC6KxyNQwhjrGeT8YDxdu0&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share.
The Presidential Order is a kind of cheer our cheer leader is teaching us to shout when we support the “team” which has replaced the government with a protection racket, a mafia-type business. The military is not to protect us, says our security leaders, but to extract a return. Talk about truth and sanity.
Thank you for your well written article. I appreciate your insight and thoughtful way of explaining history.