Restoring Whose Truth? Revisited
Fourteen months ago, I named the mechanism. This week, there is a photograph of it, and a federal judge with sixty-three pages on it.
This essay was not on my schedule. The events of the past few days moved me to write it. It was reported that a portrait came down at the Pentagon. A federal judge issued sixty-three pages on what such removals do to a country. There is a conversation America has to have. This is my small part. I hope it spreads.
It was reported that the Pentagon’s Air Force Art Gallery has a wall with nothing on it.
Until recently, that wall held the portrait of General Daniel “Chappie” James Jr., the first Black four-star general in U.S. military history. The Atlantic reported on June 9, 2026, that the portrait had been removed. The Department of Defense’s acting press secretary, Joel Valdez, told The Atlantic the portrait had been “relocated” without saying where. According to Clint Smith’s reporting, the Pentagon did not put a new painting in the space. The wall was left empty.
I went back this week and opened a file on my computer. It was dated March 30, 2025. I had written an essay called “Restoring Whose Truth?“ three days after Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14253, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” This was well before the Pentagon’s wall situation. The wall did not exist as news. But I had named the mechanism that produces walls like that, and I had named it on the date the executive order was three days old.
I want to walk you through what I wrote then and what the record now shows. Not because I take any pride in being early. The early reading is a working hypothesis. The reading is only worth something if the documented record bears it out. It has.
The mechanism I named in March 2025
Here is the load-bearing claim from the original essay:
“The EO’s impact requires seeing museums, historical sites, and educational institutions not just as buildings or curricula, but as vital components of our cognitive ecology. These are sites where embodied experiences (walking through an exhibit), social interactions (discussions, tours), material artifacts, and narrative frameworks converge to shape understanding and scaffold collective cognition. They are part of the distributed cognitive infrastructure through which societies make sense of themselves.”
The argument was that public memory does not live inside any one person’s head. It lives in the substrate. Museums, websites, displays, official histories, school curricula, the portraits on the walls of military galleries. Control the substrate, and you shape what the next generation can remember.
I also said this:
“Vigilance is required — not just against overt censorship, but against the subtle shaping of narratives that seek to limit our understanding, constrain our empathy, and ultimately, define who ‘we’ are supposed to be.”
Overt censorship was not the threat I named. The threat I named was the quiet move. Relocation. Recategorization. The verb “restore.” The substitution of one institutional narrative for another while the wall keeps its frame and the website keeps its URL.
That is the mechanism. The Pentagon wall is the photograph of it.
The Black press picked it up immediately
Within forty-eight hours of publication, the analysis was in print. Stacy M. Brown, senior national correspondent for the Black Press of America, cited the essay in The Washington Informer on April 1, 2025. He returned to it on April 3, after NMAAHC director Kevin Young went on leave. He returned to it a third time on September 4, after the White House sent its formal letter to the Smithsonian. The April 1 article also ran on BlackPressUSA.com, the syndication hub of the National Newspaper Publishers Association. The Seattle Medium republished Brown’s September coverage five days later.
Brown used the essay’s framing as section structure. On April 3, his subsection heading read “‘The Fight Over American Memory’“ — verbatim from the subtitle of the March 30 piece, kept in quotes. On September 4, the parallel section read “A Battle Over American Memory.” The analytical spine of his Smithsonian coverage, across the spring and into the fall, came from the essay published on March 30. Brown quoted the load-bearing sentence directly:
“This is about more than exhibits. It’s about erasing the truths that make America whole.”
That sentence ran in the Black press in April 2025. The empty wall at the Pentagon Air Force Art Gallery ran in The Atlantic in June 2026. The first describes the mechanism. The second is the mechanism doing what the first said it would do.
What the record has done since
Six documented moves since March 2025, in order:
March 2025: Arlington National Cemetery. As I was writing the original essay, Arlington was scrubbing its website of pages dedicated to Black, Latino, and women veterans. Among the names removed: General Hazel Johnson-Brown, General Colin Powell, and General Chappie James himself. Reporting by NPR, AP, BBC, and Snopes confirmed the scrub. Following public outcry, Arlington restored the pages, but moved them under generic categories like “Science, Technology and Engineering” rather than “African American History.” I had multiple arguments on Facebook about this.
That is the first move. The page was not deleted. The category was deleted. The name was relocated. The institutional record now describes James as a figure under “Science, Technology and Engineering,” which is true and beside the point. He was the first Black four-star general in U.S. military history. The category that named that fact is the category that disappeared.
August 12, 2025: The Smithsonian letter. The White House sent a formal letter to the Smithsonian Institution directing changes in line with EO 14253. I wrote about it on Medium the next day, in a piece called “Framing Whose America?” The letter named exhibitions, language, and curatorial choices the administration wanted altered. It did what the March essay said the order was for. The formal directive followed the executive order by four and a half months.
September 30, 2025: Quantico. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth addressed every flag officer in the United States military at Quantico. He said this in his own voice:
“For too long, we’ve promoted too many uniform leaders for the wrong reasons – based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts.”
That is the operating principle stated in public. The phrase “historic so-called firsts” tells you what the next actions will target. The pattern is not hidden. The Secretary said it on the record at the Marine Corps base where officer training is conducted.
February 17, 2026: The Rufe ruling. U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe, appointed by George W. Bush, ordered the Trump administration to restore an exhibit at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia that documented the nine enslaved people George and Martha Washington kept in the 1790s, when Philadelphia was briefly the nation’s capital. The exhibit had been removed under EO 14253. Judge Rufe opened her written order with a line from George Orwell’s 1984 and compared the administration’s posture to the book’s Ministry of Truth. She wrote that the federal government does not have the power “to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts.” She had warned Justice Department lawyers months earlier that they were making “dangerous” and “horrifying” claims when they said Trump officials could choose which parts of U.S. history to display at National Park Service sites.
That is institutional pushback in writing. A federal judge, in a published order, described EO 14253 as a Ministry-of-Truth operation. The mechanism I named in March 2025 now has a judicial finding attached to it.
March 2026: Promotion blocks. The New York Times reported that Hegseth had blocked the promotions of more than a dozen Black and female senior officers. Reporting by Reuters, NPR, and the Guardian confirmed the pattern. Two Black men and two women, all up for one-star general, had their names removed from the Army’s promotion list at the Secretary’s direction. The Pentagon’s chief of staff, Ricky Buria, called the report “completely false.” The reporting held.
June 9, 2026: The portrait. Clint Smith of The Atlantic published “Being Black in Pete Hegseth’s Military.” Smith interviewed two dozen current and retired Black members of the military. Retired Colonel Gerald Curry, who led the Air Force Review Boards Agency, went on the record about the removal of General James’s portrait from the Air Force Art Gallery. The portrait had hung in a prominent location. The space was kept empty.
That is the same man. James was scrubbed from Arlington’s website in March 2025. James was removed from the Pentagon Art Gallery in May or June 2026. Same first Black four-star general. Two surfaces of the Department of Defense’s distributed cognitive infrastructure. Fourteen months apart.
This is what I described in March 2025. I did not know it would be James. I did not know it would be the Air Force Art Gallery. I did not need to know. The mechanism does not care which name it targets. The mechanism cares that the substrate gets edited.
June 12, 2026: The Kelley ruling. Four days after Smith’s piece appeared, U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley of the District of Massachusetts issued a 63-page preliminary injunction in National Parks Conservation Association v. Department of the Interior. The order requires restoration, within twenty-one days, of every interpretive sign, display, and exhibit at NPS sites altered, removed, or damaged under Burgum’s May 20, 2025 Secretarial Order implementing EO 14253. Weekly status reports to the court. Six plaintiff organizations brought the case: the National Parks Conservation Association, the American Association for State and Local History, the Association of National Park Rangers, the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, the Society for Experiential Graphic Design, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Kelley wrote that the administration’s efforts, “ostensibly taken in the name of restoring dignity, instead seek to rewrite the Nation’s history with a white-out pen.” She described the parks as “America’s largest classroom” and wrote that federal stewardship “carries a responsibility to present history in full rather than in favored fragments.” That is the second federal judge to describe EO 14253 in writing. Rufe in February. Kelley in June. The order does not reach the Pentagon. The James portrait is not under NPS jurisdiction. What the order does reach is the language.
The case is no longer only mine. The Black press carried the analysis from the first week. Two federal judges have now described the same mechanism in writing: Judge Cynthia Rufe in February 2026 called it a Ministry-of-Truth operation; Judge Angel Kelley in June 2026 called it a white-out pen rewriting the Nation’s history. A peer-reviewed article in a Cambridge University Press journal by Kylie Message at Australian National University, published in December 2025, traces the same lineage from EO 14253 through the Smithsonian directives. Black press in April 2025. Judicial record in February and June 2026. Scholarly literature in December 2025. The March 2025 essay was already standing in the room they later entered.
Why “restore” is the load-bearing word
The original essay flagged the verb early. The EO is titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The word “restoring” performs work the policy depends on. It suggests there was a stable, original truth that has been distorted, and that the proper task of government is to return that truth to its rightful condition.
The work the word does is to make the new institutional narrative sound like a recovery rather than a substitution. To restore implies a prior state. The prior state implied by EO 14253 is one in which American history did not include the systematic exclusion of Black service members from promotion, command, or recognition. That prior state never existed. James knew this when he gave a 1975 interview. He said, “They didn’t give me anything. And they don’t give away stars in my service. You got to earn them.”
He said that because the question was asked. Because the question was always asked. Because James understood that the institution he served would, given the chance, recast his career as a gift rather than as work. The portrait was an institutional refusal of that recasting. The portrait said, on the wall of the Air Force Art Gallery, that he had earned the rank he wore. Removing the portrait, while leaving the frame and the gallery intact, is the institution taking the refusal back.
The empty wall is the policy. The empty wall is the executive order made physical.
What gets inherited
This is a publication about time-binding. The phrase comes from Alfred Korzybski, who used it to name the human capacity to pass forward what one generation learned to the next, through language, symbols, and the institutional substrate that holds them. Time-binding is what makes a civilization possible. It is also what makes a civilization editable.
A wall with a portrait on it tells the next Air Force lieutenant who walks past that she could become a four-star general. A wall without a portrait on it tells her something else. The thing it tells her does not need to be said. The empty frame says it.
The same is true for an Arlington National Cemetery website page that locates Chappie James under “African American History.” That page tells a researcher in 2027 something about how the institution understood the man. The same page, relocated under “Science, Technology and Engineering,” tells the researcher something different. The relocation does not erase James. It edits the institutional memory of why he matters.
This is what the March 2025 essay warned about. Not the burning of books. The quiet edit. The category relocation. The empty wall. The frame intact.
What this publication is for
When I started What Time Binds, I said it was for meaning under pressure. The pressure now is institutional. Pentagon walls. Arlington categories. National Park signs. Federal museum directives. Promotion lists. Each of these is a site where the substrate of public memory is being edited by people authorized to edit it, using a vocabulary (”restore,” “merit,” “meritocracy”) that lets the edit pass for housekeeping.
The work of the publication is to keep naming the mechanism while the editing is happening. Not to predict the next target. The mechanism does not work by hitting specific targets. It works by keeping the editing in motion.
I will keep writing about this because the wall is empty and the frame is still there. The frame is the part that matters. The next portrait the frame holds will tell us what the institution decided to remember.
The original essay closed with this:
“The story of America remains unfinished, emergent; attempts to declare it complete, and to enforce that completion, betray the democratic ideals they claim to protect.”
I would not change a word.
Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a retired Marine Corps Master Sergeant (23 years, Combat Engineer), USC Rossier doctoral graduate, and Instructor at UCI Division of Continuing Education. He writes about meaning under pressure at What Time Binds.
What Time Binds tracks what gets passed forward and what gets edited out. Subscribe to keep the receipts in your inbox. Share this with someone who should see it. Leave a comment with what you have watched from where you sit. The record is ours to keep.
Sources and prior writing.
The original March 30, 2025 essay: “Restoring Whose Truth? Trump’s Executive Order and the Fight Over American Memory.”
The August 13, 2025 follow-up: “Framing Whose America? Smithsonian Review, Political Power, and the Quiet Erasure of Dissent.”
The Black press coverage by Stacy M. Brown, senior national correspondent for the Black Press of America (NNPA), ran in The Washington Informer on April 1, 2025, again on April 3, 2025 after NMAAHC director Kevin Young went on leave, and a third time on September 4, 2025 after the White House letter to the Smithsonian. The April 1 piece was syndicated nationally through BlackPressUSA, the National Newspaper Publishers Association’s hub. The September 4 piece was republished in The Seattle Medium five days later.
The Atlantic’s reporting by Clint Smith: “Being Black in Pete Hegseth’s Military.”
The Kelley order: National Parks Conservation Association v. United States Department of the Interior, No. 1:26-CV-10877-AK (D. Mass. June 12, 2026). Coverage: CNN, PBS NewsHour, CBS News, and The Hill.
Devastating, Jim Crow has found a new century to spew its hatred and racism.