Our current wave of ‘historical negationism’ makes democracy a joke, with America as the punchline

Illustration by Teddy Rosen

Historical denial is a product of generational societal traumas that often culminate in reactionary or revolutionary political and social beliefs. It is a form of “negative historical revisionism” as it often serves as a means to deny jarring, traumatic historical events.

Such a practice invokes the inevitability of extreme human bias as a justification for twisting established, truthful, factual information and substantive interpretations of such history into heterodoxy and blatant falsehoods.

The French historian Henry Rousso released his most prominent work, The Vichy Syndrome, in 1987. In his text, Rousso examined the complexities of a clear “heterogeneous symptoms and manifestations revealing, particularly in political, cultural, and social life, the existence of [the] traumas engendered” by Nazi occupation and French collaborationism during World War Two.

Here, Rousso commented on the endemic denial of the Holocaust and the genocidal actions of Adolf Hitler’s regime and the enablement of such atrocities by the puppet French regime, based in the resort town of Vichy, that was led by the collaborationist and authoritarian Philippe Pétain.

He referred to such denialism of these atrocities as “historical negationism,” which could be best defined as the “practice of ignoring or rejecting unfavorable aspects of history.” The practice of ignoring or rejecting materializes as a parallel ecosystem of negationist journalists and scholars that develops to further intellectualize and institutionalize clear misinformation and disinformation.

Arch Puddington, senior scholar emeritus of the global civil liberties think tank Freedom House, wrote in August 2018 that politicized revisions of historical events, indeed, “help antidemocratic leaders justify their actions while sowing divisions at home and abroad.”

And this is perpetual. In our country, such revisionism and denial have emerged as a significant threat to our democracy.

The United States celebrated 250 years of independence over the summer—a monumental event that should be commemorated. Unfortunately, the specter of ideological capture of the country’s most prominent cultural and historical institutions goes far beyond an organizational adoption of belief accompanied by an elected president’s political preferences atop the federal government.

The Smithsonian National Museum of American History is a premier institution that preserves and recollects the complexities of the stories that formed the United States as we know it today. Warts and all, the museum, under the administration of the Smithsonian Institution, has tried for years to provide an honest and nuanced account of our founding, national expansion, and overall growth as a united melting pot, home to one of the most diverse populations in the world.

Far-right powerbrokers see the diversity in our collective stories as a threat to what they view as the national identity, nonetheless. That is a statement made truer simply by reviewing the Trump administration’s conduct at near-midterm. I have been following the administration’s domestic policy agenda targeting organizations including the Smithsonian and the National Park Service for allegedly promoting leftist “woke history” and for having “anti-American” political biases.

Public and academic historical societies are quite alarmed, to say the least, especially in response to President Trump’s ongoing enforcement of his controversial executive orders on “preserving” a right-wing, ultranationalistic narrative of American history. These efforts are proving harmful, including at a time when the administration and its allies work to establish lies as truthful facts.

Early in Trump’s second tenure in office, the president issued Executive Order (EO) 14253, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The administration issued this order in a bid to start the sanitization of American history in a move to downplay slavery, systemic racism, and the oppression of other minority populations, including groups that hold different sexual, gender, religious, and ethnic characteristics that openly run counter to Trump’s explicit monoculturalism.

EO 14235 has carried significant weight in right-wing circles since the White House announced its adoption in March 2025. It feeds the Christian nationalism dominating the Republican Party as the country’s primary right-wing party shifts further toward exceedingly far-right ideologies.

For example, the March 2025 executive order singles out Smithsonian organizations, such as the proposed Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, for promoting gender ideology by simply highlighting the accomplishments of influential transfeminine individuals, including trans women, alongside influential cisgender women.

The official language of the executive order, as it is made publicly available through the Federal Register, orders the Smithsonian to “celebrate the achievements of women in the [proposed] American Women’s History Museum and do not recognize men as women in any respect in the museum.” This is so glaringly transphobic and a clear endorsement of the memoricidal and genocidal nature of Donald Trump’s policymaking.

With such a mindset, the administration has taken actions under the guise of complying with EO 14235 by establishing an official historical narrative that outwardly promotes a cleansed, almost divine recollection of our founding fathers, the American Revolution, and historical figures such as the very first man to lead our country, George Washington.

In one of my most recent columns for The Humanist, I noted Washington’s “semi-divinity” and how the man isn’t without negative attributes—attributes underplayed or completely overlooked by heterodox historians and writers.

Writing for the magazine National Review, right-wing art critic Brian Allen echoed sentiments in the conservative and far-right flights of the American political landscape. These sentiments and those who espoused them have aggressively latched on to a July 2026 report by the Trump White House’s very powerful Domestic Policy Council that characterized the Smithsonian Institution as some anti-American outfit built with an internal organizational culture that “erases our heritage.”

The report focused primarily on the National Museum of American History, accusing leadership of the museum—namely, the museum’s director, Dr. Anthea Hartig—of explicitly adopting “an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.” The report characterizes the museum, and really the entire Smithsonian Institution, as an entity that has fallen to some faceless mythical bogeyman of “gender ideology” and social justice. Considering the scope of the over 160-page report, the evidence presented throughout is so flimsy that much of it is either misinterpreted for the partisan narrative or is, ultimately, a clear display of nonconsequentialism that contributes to defining the overt Trumpist historical rant.

One of the real “issues” with Hartig, in fact, stems from her being misquoted as it relates to work she was doing in 2020, upon taking over leadership of the museum in 2019, and shepherding the organization through shutdown orders due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Speaking during a 2020 virtual lecture hosted by the University of California, Riverside, Hartig said it is incumbent on historians to “commemorate, problematize,…remember, [and] celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the declaration of independence in 2026.”

Authors of the Trump report couldn’t get past the terminology of “problematize,” which is a common form of inquiry and research in critical theory that helps practitioners analyze inequities and established societal power structures.

As noted above, major professional societies, including the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, have criticized the findings of the report. But that isn’t enough to even stop House Republicans from criticizing the museum for this “political activism.”

This culminated in a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing at the end of July, where Republicans grilled Hartig on the findings of the report. One exchange recorded in the session that went viral was by U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina. Rep. Mace, an ardent anti-trans rights activist, literally accused Dr. Hartig of platforming “queer pedophiles, indoctrination, grooming of kids at an American history museum,” citing absolutely no facts and resorting to transphobia, tired and dry anti-LGBTQ+ talking points, and imbalance.

But this is expected. What shone through were the committee’s expert witnesses, who defended the work of the museum and the Smithsonian Institution. Sarah Weicksel, executive director of the American Historical Association, wrote that “[the] museum collects and preserves the past of all Americans and encompasses the entirety of our nation’s history.

Yet the Domestic Policy Council report severely limits whose experiences count as important to American history and characterizes the inclusion of topics such as labor, immigration, race, and gender as political activism.” And it is that “woke history” that is on display to capture a full recollection of history.

The report also prompted Trump to issue Executive Order 14416 that directs the Department of the Interior to post temporary signage and placards outside the museum that informs visitors that the Smithsonian Institution “views American history as a ‘prime tool’ to advance ideas of social justice and the radical transformation of our society” and that the museum Hartig leads “cannot be trusted to tell America’s story with honesty and gratitude.”

Ironically, EO 14416 is defined as a means to “Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution.” Such historical negation by Trump’s White House, emboldened by groups such as the Heritage Foundation, is a threat to democracy.

Historical denial like this isn’t preserving history, nor does it preserve democracy—it prepares it for the real ideological capture of the far-right, eroding independence and necessary nuance. It is when governments rewrite the past, they lay the groundwork for the future and who will win or lose.

A democracy that cannot confront its history will eventually lose the ability to defend itself.

Michael McGrady Jr is the political columnist for The Kansas City Pitch.