Marty Levine
April 24, 2026
A few weeks ago, one of my neighbors was very upset by a flyer that was posted on a bulletin board in the building I live in.
My neighbor was personally offended by the lecture’s content and strongly believed, therefore, the building’s management should take it down.
This is a local manifestation of the national effort to return us to a state of ignorance about our country’s history that allows us to ignore the brutality that wiped out much of the Native American society that was flourishing across North America when the first Europeans “discovered” and colonized their” new land. It allows us to ignore the reality of 400 years of the enslavement of millions of Black men, women, and children for the economic benefit of those European immigrants who came to these shores. It allows us to glorify the positives of this country because we never have to come to grips with the negatives in the legacy of our past.
The Heritage Society’s Project 2025, the manifesto that has shaped the second Trump Presidency, spelled out this desire in very clear terms, “America is now divided between two opposing forces: woke revolutionaries and those who believe in the ideals of the American Revolution.”
President Trump, a little more than one month after taking the oath of office for the second time issued an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” that made the Federal Government the tool for this rewriting of our history.
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 otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame.
And what we have witnessed since has been a concerted effort to purge any knowledge about the complicated history of our nation.
As David Remnick, writing for the New Yorker, observed, this is a symptom, even a feature of fascism and oppression.
This urge to police the past is hardly unique to the Trump Administration. It is the reflexive obsession of autocrats everywhere. The history museums that were once a feature of many Soviet cities did not interrogate the life of Lenin. They were places of orthodox worship. His typescripts and teacups were sacralized, like the Shroud of Turin. More important, his ideological tenets were not left open to discussion. For decades, the second-most important figure in the Communist Party, after the General Secretary, was arguably the chief ideologist, who had the final word over what could and could not be said about history.
As I am writing this, I am reading Native Nations by Kathleen Duval. She writes in her introduction that:
…Native nations existed in North America long before Europeans, Africans, and Asians arrived and continue to the present day. Indigenous civilizations did not come to a halt when a few wandering explorers or hungry settlers arrived in their homelands, even when the strangers came well-armed. Native Americans made up the majority of the North American population through the mid-1700s and controlled most of the land and resources of the continent for another century after that. Before and during European colonization, Native North Americans lived in diverse civilizations with complex economies and commercial and diplomatic networks that spanned the continent. They live in history, adapting to changes in the Americas for at least twenty thousand years—and counting…
This is the part of our history that we are told must be suppressed.
In December 1830, President Andrew Jackson stood before Congress to give his annual message. “Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country,” he acknowledged. Yet it was inevitable: “One by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth.” The Indians’ disappearance was only natural, he claimed, like “the extinction of one generation to make room for another” and like the disappearance of the ancient Mississippians, who Jackson believed had been “exterminated.” The changes were for the best, he asserted, for “what good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to of the Indian Removal Act, which he had signed earlier that year, he encouraged the remaining Native Americans in the East to move to the wilds of the West to continue their “savage” life for as long as they could. But really, Jackson argued, their time had passed, and it was just as well.
As I read these passages, I felt as I did when I read Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land and Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project. Each of these books presented a view of history that ran counter to much I thought to be true. They left me unsettled because they challenged beliefs that I was on the right side of history. They left me with similar feelings that my neighbor felt about that poster.
The feeling of discomfort stems from my being among the privileged, among those who have benefited from the history we are told is false and must be expunged and forgotten. That is the motivation that attempts to curate our museums and to change the wording on plaques and monuments at historic sites. We are told that we are a white Christian nation by Manifest Destiny. And we are told that all those who do not fit into that class of people are second-class.
This week, Palantir, an AI defense contractor led by Billionaire Trump Supporter Alex Karp, published a frightening 22-point synopsis of Karp’s recent book that Fortune magazine described as a “mini-manifesto” of his political and social philosophy. It included these two final points that boldly assert some people should be more equal than others, just like our pioneer ancestors believed.
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- Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.
- We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?
Are these just the musings of a rich philosopher or a more sinister warning of how deep this challenge is? This is a man who leads an important government contract. This is a man whose position and wealth give him access to those in power. And this is a man who sees Elon Musk as a positive force, who sees the author of the Executive Order cited above as a good President and who is part the small mega-rich sliver of our population that controls so much wealth that he seems not to worry about economic inequality.
That Karp is comfortable issuing this manifesto speaks to how large the challenge is to create a real nation of equality.
And it speaks to the need for us to keep pushing back and saying we can be better than this, we can do better.
But only if we as individuals and as a nation are prepared to confront those things that make us uncomfortable. It is not easy to learn that what you thought was true is not the full story. It is not easy to learn that you may have benefited from harm done to others. But not being easy, not being comfortable, cannot be an excuse for allowing us to stay silent while harm to others is done.
Speak up, join with others, and work to make this a country we can truly be proud of.
