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“Ignorance Is Strength,” Said the Court - KOLUMN Magazine
Invoking Orwell, a federal judge halted an effort to strip slavery from a national historic park—part of a wider attempt to reorder American memory from the White House outward.
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Rufe’s opinion opened with George Orwell’s 1984, a novel that has become shorthand for state-managed reality. She wrote that the court was being asked whether the federal government had the power “to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts.” Her answer was blunt: it does not.
In ordinary times, a dispute over signage at a historic site might be relegated to the metro section. But these are not ordinary times for American memory. The removal at the President’s House site was tethered to a broader administrative project, formalized in a Trump executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which framed mainstream historical scholarship and museum interpretation as “ideological indoctrination” and demanded more “uplifting” narratives at federal museums, parks, and monuments."