National Parks are to be enjoyed and celebrated, not used for propaganda or woke causes

Sherman R. Frederick/Properly Subversive

As Mineral County residents know, National parks and historic sites are treasures to be enjoyed and celebrated. You’d think we’d all agree on that. But apparently not.

Now comes an executive order issued March 27, 2025, by President Trump called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It begins thusly: 

Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.

A good bit of the EO targets the Smithsonian Institution, which the president says has been urged to replace traditional American achievements with “improper ideology.” 

I’ll leave the Smithsonian Institution for another day. Let’s stick to National Parks and historic sites. 

The Trump EO makes a point of calling out the Biden Administration for allowing Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia to be used by a fringe group to “train” rangers at the Park on how racist America is.

The EO also instructs the decision makers at the American Women’s History Museum to celebrate achievements by women and cease celebrating men who mistakenly think they are women. 

The president is on to something here. 

Our national parks and historic places should be used to highlight America’s history and tell the compelling story of our road to liberty, human rights, and happiness. 

The Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, and Yellowstone ought never be used to preach edgy political topics du jour like multiple genders, OMG climate change, and the normalcy LGBTQ+ lifestyles in Colonial America.

Or, to put the shoe on the other foot, when I visit the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, I don’t want some White House true believer making me read the report on what J. Edgar’s FBI thought of MLK. I want to remember him for his bravery and moral guidance in the American struggle for Civil Rights. 

That’s not too much to ask, is it? 

You can read the full EO here. 

For my liberal friends who will see this as a Trumpian effort to sugarcoat history, get a life. You should have been screaming bloody murder for what the Biden nutjobs did to our history. But, you didn’t.

Let’s keep the history at our national parks and historical places to the basics with a clear lean toward instilling a sense of awe for the events and people that made this the greatest country on the planet. Our history isn’t all gumdrops and rainbows. And no one wants to go to national monuments and be propagandized like Stalin era Russia. 

But there’s gotta be a good middle ground here.

(Sherman R. Frederick is a longtime Nevada journalist and member of the Nevada Press Association Hall of Fame. You can read all of his writings here.)