The quiet purge at our national parks

Subtle changes in promotional material show that historical revisionism is underway.

There are many ways to erase a country’s memory. One is to forget. Another is to be told what not to remember.

This spring, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to review all signage, exhibits, and educational content at U.S. national parks to ensure it did not “disparage Americans.” A July 3 order promised higher fees for foreigners and a refreshed focus on “America’s splendid national treasures.” But beneath the language of majesty and marketing of these orders was something quieter and more dangerous: a bureaucratic mechanism to sanitize the past.

(Brian O’Neill)

The March directive had already ordered staff to identify and remove displays, merchandise, and materials that might express “improper ideology.” That included anything referencing systemic racism, historical injustice, or even the climate. Gift shop books on slavery and the Civil War were under review. Park staff were instructed to report signs or content that failed to “focus” on “the beauty, grandeur, and abundance” of the nation’s parks.

Last month, new signs went up across the parks, inviting visitors to report any displays they consider “negative about either past or living Americans.” The QR code leads to a submission form under the March directive. In other words, visitors have been deputized to help.

We now know these “revisions” haven’t just begun—they’re underway. One of the most telling examples lies along a lonely stretch of U.S. Route 395 in California.

Manzanar National Historic Site sits in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada, just north of the town of Lone Pine. Manzanar was the first of ten camps used to incarcerate Japanese Americans during World War II. I’ve visited twice. The first time was when I traveled to the area to climb Mount Whitney. My second ascent up Mount Whitney was this past August, and my wife accompanied me on the trip out west. I wanted to show her the historic site.

(Brian O’Neill)

Manzanar is among the most thoroughly preserved and documented historic sites in the national park system—painstakingly rebuilt by survivors and their families and descendants of local Paiute and Shoshone communities. The site includes original structures, restored latrines, mock classrooms, a cemetery, and hundreds of oral histories recorded over decades. The Manzanar Advisory Commission, formed by Congress, helped ensure accuracy and authenticity.

My wife was stunned by what she saw on display, including testimonials from those interned. She stood before the preserved barracks and detailed exhibits, heartbroken by the clarity and honesty of what the site revealed. She turned to me and asked: Do you think this truth will survive if Trump wins again? Turns out, she was right to worry.

The visit wasn’t comfortable. But it was honest.

Now, even that honesty is under threat. I pulled out pamphlets I’d saved from earlier visits. The framing is no longer about incarceration. It’s about shared experience. Nostalgia dressed up as history. Smiling photos. Normal gatherings at tables.

Images that were burned in memory, which I photographed, are missing. Compare these images with those on the park website.

(Brian O’Neill)

I originally worried Manzanar might be shuttered entirely—under the pretext of budget cuts. That could still happen. But this version of erasure is more cunning. It leaves the shell intact and hollows out the meaning. The site remains open. The signs still stand. But the story begins to drift.

And that’s the point. Erasure doesn’t always come with wrecking balls. Sometimes it comes with QR codes. It’s Orwellian—not through spectacle, but through the quiet machinery of the “memory hole.”

It is disturbingly ironic that this cleansing—a word that carries its own grim weight—is underway even as the administration shows no hesitation in displaying the cruelty it has inflicted on immigrants these past months. The brutality is showcased when politically useful, as with the twisted marketing of “Alligator Alcatraz.” But the overseas gulags in El Salvador and elsewhere provide just enough distance to conceal an even greater cruelty. And as accounts from Kilmar Abrego Garcia and others confirm, deportees are sent to be forgotten, as were those “disappeared” by Argentina’s military dictatorship in its “Dirty War” in the 1970s and 1980s.

What can you do? Start by preserving what’s already been told. Go through your belongings. Look at the pamphlets, photos, and booklets from your park visits. Save them. What seems like tourist memorabilia today might soon be evidence of what we once documented, and what we might have to reconstruct.

(Brian O’Neill)

A volunteer effort called Save Our Signs is building a public archive of signage, exhibits, and text at national parks that could soon disappear. You can upload the images at saveoursigns.org. What seems like an ordinary placard or pamphlet today might soon be gone, rewritten, or rendered unrecognizable.

We’re not burning books, not yet. But as Ray Bradbury warned in his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, forgetting doesn’t always need fire. Sometimes all it takes is neglect and the right submission form.

We might need these fragments for the time—soon, I hope—when the full record of this country’s truth can be restored.

Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech. His Safehouse Briefing Substack looks at what’s ahead in global security, geopolitics, and national strategy.

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