Photos: YouTube Screenshots
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Friday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy are scheduled to appear at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia to prepare next year’s 250th anniversary Independence Day celebrations. This visit, reported earlier in the week by the Philadelphia Inquirer, comes just days after it was revealed that President Trump plans to alter Philadelphia’s President’s House Site memorializing nine people enslaved by George Washington, a move condemned by the Philadelphia City Council yesterday and part of a wide-ranging effort to distort, whitewash and erase essential parts of American history that make Trump uncomfortable.
In response, Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman issued the following statement:
“Shame on Interior Secretary Doug Burgum for desecrating our national historic sites and our National Park Service, the keeper of our vast natural and cultural heritage.
“The Trump administration’s effort to whitewash American history dishonors those subjected to injustice and those who have worked to make the country stronger and more just.
“These are the moves of small-minded cowards. There is no shame in acknowledging America’s historic wrongs. The shame is in denying them and not trying to correct them.
“They are also the classic moves of authoritarians. Whether or not Trump, Doug Burgum and their lackeys have read or remember George Orwell’s 1984, they know in their bones the slogan of The Party: “He who controls the past controls the future.
“But whitewashing the past does not change it and it makes America weaker. America is stronger when our national parks – and our leaders — accurately represent our history, including by acknowledging historic injustice. America will be stronger when we have leaders in the White House and Interior Department who are honest enough to do so.”
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