You could call the Trump regime’s campaign against so-called woke ideology an ongoing effort to muzzle our nation’s history. From the start of his second term, the National Park Service has engaged in a rampage of censorship, targeting historical sites in Philadelphia, Georgia, New York and elsewhere.
Now Trump has come for Boston. On Wednesday, Jake Spring reported in The Washington Post that the park service “has ordered the removal of three quotes” at the Bunker Hill Monument. Thus has the National Park Service earned a New England Muzzle Award. Spring writes:
The site includes panels with quotes from historic figures or writings that reflect on the 200-year-old monument. A visitor at the site complained to park staff about a quote related to women’s suffrage as being “woke” feminist ideology, the people familiar said, and the visitor later sent an email complaint.
The Boston Globe’s Tonya Alanez and Chloe Pisani on Thursday added to (sub. req.) the Post’s reporting, writing that they had confirmed the story with U.S. Sen. Ed Markey’s office. The Globe reported that one of the three quotes to be removed was from an 1846 letter by G.B. Stebbins to The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery newspaper:
As we drew near to Boston, there stood Bunker Monument, towering up towards the heavens, as if in silent, bitter mockery of the millions of slaves guarded by the professed lovers of Liberty, who reared its lofty column.
Another, addressed to “Our Irish Societies,” appeared in The Pilot, the newspaper of Boston’s Roman Catholic Archdiocese, in 1875:
Now that a public orator has declared that foreign-born men have no association with the men of the Revolution, it is our duty to show that in love of freedom and loyalty to the republic, the citizens of foreign birth take no second place.
The third quote that was removed was from a letter to the Globe written in 1971 by two members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
It seems significant that the three quotes pertain to the rights of Black people and immigrants as well as an antiwar message — all at odds with Trump’s racist, anti-immigrant, war-mongering administration.
The government’s officially sanctioned vandalism coincides with another act of vandalism at Boston’s Museum of African American History. Malcolm Gay reports (sub. req.) in the Globe that decorations to be used in Juneteenth celebrations had been set on fire.
Ironically, the investigation is being led by the Boston Police Department — and the National Park Service.