By Lori Lee
NDG Contributing Writer
Following the 2025 inauguration, the U.S. has seen a push to implement new ways to lie to the American people, controlling free speech through executive orders, through funding cuts, and through the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). These efforts combine to shape false narratives in schools, museums and other institutions across the country.
Early on in 2025, the FCC began efforts to control programming of all the major networks, including CBS, ABC, and NBC, Time reported, threatening to strip away licenses over their news coverage and Saturday Night Live programming. It even convinced networks to take political critics Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel off the air, though as Kimmel was brought back, the ordeal showcased the power of public influence.
The government also began targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs early in 2025, spreading disinformation and distorting federal laws through executive orders, reported the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
It also used executive orders to control American history by changing place names and removing names and facts from official historic records, the Center for American Progress noted.
“Who gets to decide what this country remembers? Who gets to decide what it forgets, or what it erases,” asked CEO of the Japanese American National Museum, Ann Burrows, speaking at an American Community Media briefing. As George Orwell said: “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.”
As Burroughs explained, museums have faced incredible pressures to alter and avoid histories and to conform politically, as its funding is threatened or disrupted.
Noting the parallels between the work of ethnic museums and that of journalism, Burrows said, “museums operate within the realm of First Amendment rights,”and when civic space has shrunk, so too have these rights, she said.
“So, the attacks on us are really just attacks on you, and the attacks on truth are really just part of that narrowing.”
Authoritarian regimes consistently attack culture and history, Burrows noted, though it is diversity that makes us so powerful.
The history of incarceration of Japanese Americans is never forgotten, in 1942, over 125,000 people being removed from their homes and imprisoned without due process. What we’re seeing today are just the incredible echoes of that history, and it played out so tragically and powerfully in the events in Minnesota most recently, she said.
“We feel an incredible obligation now to be able to stand up for our system museums that don’t have the same kind of luxury that we do to be able to speak out.”
We’re seeing national museums pressured to sanitize exhibits, added Founding Executive Director of Alabama Values, Anneshia Hardy, and we’re seeing school curriculums restricted in the name of neutrality or patriotism rather than calling it erasure.
Yet, it is at moments in history when progress is made, that counter narrative grows stronger, advised Margaret Huang, president and chief executive officer of The Southern Poverty Law Center. As community organizers across the South and others demanded an end to segregation and Jim Crow laws, confederate memorials sprung up across the country, she said.
These memorials have been coming down since 2015. After gathering information from communities, the U.S. military managed to organize and rename a number the bases.
Yet, the government is now reversing these efforts, using funding, power and muscle to repeal the progress of the last 50 years, noted veteran journalist and broadcaster, and author of “Becoming American in the 21st century,” Ray Suarez. It has replaced names and descriptions formerly noted as offensive and has even removed a Philadelphia exhibit highlighting nine people enslaved by former President Washington.
“This idea that it makes white people feel bad, or it makes white children feel guilty is … baloney,” said Suarez. This is all a power play to reassert the spotlight on whiteness, he commented.
As we approach the commemoration of America’s 250th anniversary, said Hardy, “we see communities grappling with overlapping political realities—escalating anti-immigrant attacks, the normalization of white nationalism … persistence of anti-Blackness.”
In moments like this, providing information is not enough. We must be rooted in meaning making, Hardy explained.
“People are asking deeper questions about belonging, about power, about whether democracy has room for us all.” Meaning making helps communities connect to the past and understand how power is operating, she said.
Hardy’s This Is America initiative will pull together historians, political scientists, cultural workers and storytellers to pull together a full story while resisting the whitewashing of American history.
The historians will ground us in what has been deliberately forgotten, she said, as political scientists illuminate power structures and how they endure.
The initiative connects to our Southern Narrative project, said Hardy, launched with Sony Films to help the South surface stories often distorted in the region.
The focus on the South is to counter the region as an outlier in conversations on democracy, when the South is in fact “central to American democracy.”
From Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement to today’s voting rights cases, struggles in the South have reshaped national law and public understanding, she noted.
The impact of Black journalists during the fight for civil rights reminds us of our history and gives reason reason for hope …
“of how we get through this terrible moment and how we will tell our stories on the other side,” said Hardy.
Hardy wants to create a narrative reflecting our communities, not just the one being marketed, she explained.
“When we stop pushing, the nation doesn’t stand still. It slides backwards towards the racial hierarchy, towards the exclusion, towards the violence that it was founded on.”
One of the greatest tools of authoritarian regimes is to make people in that society so fearful that they don’t fight back, added Wang. Ninety percent of Germans were simple bystanders, who did not fight within the Nazi regime, but they didn’t stand up to them either, she said. Fear was the tool.
Oppression doesn’t require imagination, concluded Hardy. It maintains itself. The resurgence of White Nationalism, anti-immigrant policies, anti-Blackness, censorship, and state violence is not just history repeating itself by accident.
“That is what happens when the work of building a more humane society slows. History has shown us, it only moves when enough people decide that maintaining humanity is worth more work,” she said.
With the government trying to dictate architectural styles and with congressional committees trying to figure whose story really matters, we need to remember that America has always been multicultural, added Suarez.
“Since day one, it always has been. It always will be, he said. It’s not just a story of White people.”
