Editor’s Note: This article is Part 2 in our series, “The War on Facts: How Political Interference Threatens Core Democratic Institutions.” Read the Series Overview, Part 1: Science and Statistics Under Siege, Part 3: Regulatory Independence Under Attack, Part 4: The Information Warfare Ecosystem, and Part 5: Defending Democracy’s Infrastructure.
Introduction: When History Becomes Ammunition
By August 1, 2025, news outlets reported that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History had removed a label describing Trump’s impeachments from its exhibit on the American presidency. Museum officials called it a routine content review. Critics saw something more sinister—the real-time editing of history to suit political convenience. On August 8, after public pressure, the museum installed a revised label that restored the impeachments but used softened language and fewer details about the charges Trump faced.1
This episode captures the essence of America’s memory wars—battles over who controls the narrative of our shared past and how that narrative shapes our collective future. Unlike the statistical agencies examined in Part 1, cultural institutions like museums, libraries, and schools don’t just record what is; they preserve and interpret what was, making them equally vital to democratic governance and equally vulnerable to political pressure.
This is Part 2 of “The War on Facts,” examining how the institutions responsible for collective memory—our museums, libraries, and educational systems—have become frontlines in a broader assault on shared reality. When these memory keepers are compromised, societies lose more than historical accuracy; they lose the ability to learn from experience, to understand how they arrived at the present, and to make informed decisions about the future.
How Memory Institutions Work (and Why They’re Targeted)
Cultural memory institutions serve as society’s hard drives, storing and organizing the experiences, lessons, and narratives that define who we are as a people. Museums construct narratives about meaning and significance through what they choose to exhibit and how they contextualize objects. The National Museum of American History’s mission statement promises to help visitors “understand the past in order to make sense of the present and shape a more humane future.”2 But this curatorial power makes museums potent tools for shaping collective memory. Public and school libraries represent perhaps the most democratic of cultural institutions, providing free access to information regardless of economic status or political affiliation. Educational institutions serve as the primary mechanism for transmitting cultural memory to new generations through curriculum choices, textbook selection, and classroom discussions. This responsibility makes schools inevitable battlegrounds in memory wars, where fights over teaching slavery, the treatment of Native Americans, or LGBTQ+ history are fundamentally disputes about which aspects of the American story deserve preservation and transmission.
Case Study: The Smithsonian Under Pressure
The August 2025 impeachment exhibit controversy offers a revealing window into how political pressure operates on cultural institutions. According to Washington Post reporting, critics claimed the removal came after White House pressure and accusations of partisan bias, though the Smithsonian denied direct pressure.3
The sequence of events reveals a sophisticated approach to historical manipulation that follows a three-step playbook. First, create the pretext: political authorities don’t directly order removal of historical content but instead question the institution’s overall “objectivity” and threaten funding, creating an atmosphere where preemptive compliance seems prudent. Second, enable plausible deniability: when content disappears, officials can truthfully claim they weren’t “ordered” to remove it, framing changes as voluntary “content reviews.” Third, control the narrative: when public criticism mounts, institutions don’t simply restore original exhibits but create new versions that include contested information with softened language that minimizes significance and removes specific details.
This pattern—indirect pressure, plausible deniability, and controlled restoration—represents a more sophisticated approach to memory manipulation than outright censorship. It achieves the goal of historical revision while avoiding the appearance of direct political interference.
The Scale of the Memory Wars: A National Phenomenon
The Smithsonian controversy reflects broader national trends in memory manipulation across all three types of cultural institutions.
The Book Banning Surge
The scale of library censorship has reached unprecedented levels. According to the American Library Association, there were 1,247 attempts to censor library books and resources in 2023—the highest number in over two decades of tracking. 2024 saw 821 attempts—down from 2023 but still far above pre-2020 levels.4 These aren’t isolated local disputes but coordinated national campaigns. PEN America documented 10,046 instances of school book bans during the 2023-2024 school year, affecting over 4,200 unique titles.5 The bans disproportionately target books by authors of color (30 percent) and books with LGBTQ+ characters or themes (30 percent).
Legislative Warfare on Memory Institutions
State legislatures have become active battlegrounds for memory control. EveryLibrary’s 2025 report documented over 130 bills affecting libraries and book access across the country in just the first half of the year.6 These bills follow predictable patterns: funding threats that tie library support to compliance with content restrictions, liability creation that makes librarians and teachers personally liable for providing “inappropriate” materials, and definitional vagueness using broad terms like “sexually explicit” or “age-inappropriate” that encourage over-compliance.
Curriculum Battles and Historical Erasure
Educational content has become a primary target for memory manipulation. Florida’s 2022 Stop WOKE Act restricts instruction on systemic racism, while Texas’s 2021 HB 2497 (“1836 Project”) codifies a “patriotic education” initiative. These efforts follow international patterns of authoritarian memory manipulation seen in Hungary’s restrictions on teaching about LGBTQ+ issues, Poland’s 2018 “Holocaust law” that initially criminalized speech about Polish complicity in Nazi crimes (later amended to remove criminal penalties), and Russia’s new history textbooks promoting state-approved narratives while minimizing Stalin-era crimes.
The Psychology of Memory Wars: Why History Matters for Politics
Understanding why political movements target cultural memory requires recognizing the deep connections between historical narrative and contemporary politics. Historical narratives shape individual and collective identity—the stories we tell about our past determine how we understand ourselves in the present. They provide moral justification for political positions, with movements emphasizing different aspects of history to support their contemporary arguments. Perhaps most importantly, historical narratives shape perceptions of what’s possible: stories of progress encourage political engagement, while narratives of decline discourage hope for change.
The Economic Dimension: How Funding Shapes Memory
Financial pressure represents one of the most effective tools for controlling cultural memory institutions. Even prestigious institutions like the Smithsonian depend on federal appropriations—the Institution received $1.09 billion in FY2024 federal appropriations—making them vulnerable to political pressure.7 Public libraries face even greater vulnerabilities, with approximately 86% of public library operating revenue coming from local government sources.8 School districts depend entirely on public funding, making them the most vulnerable of all cultural memory institutions to state and local political pressure.
The Technology Factor: Digital Memory and Control
Digital technology has fundamentally changed how cultural memory operates, creating new vulnerabilities and possibilities for manipulation. Unlike physical books and artifacts, digital content can be altered or deleted instantly and completely. Government websites regularly disappear or change during political transitions—climate data vanished from EPA websites during Trump’s first term, as documented by EDGI’s research on the 2017 EPA climate web removals.9 Major technology platforms increasingly control access to cultural memory, and their policies can inadvertently suppress historical content. The antidote is redundancy and public custody: mirrored archives, FOIA-friendly hosting, and independent scrapers.
International Parallels: Learning from Global Memory Wars
America’s memory wars aren’t unique. Viktor Orbán’s government has systematically reshaped Hungarian cultural memory through museum control and curriculum revision, while also forcing Central European University to relocate to Vienna in 2019 after the “Lex CEU” law. Poland’s Law and Justice party implemented a comprehensive “historical policy” that included the controversial “Holocaust law.” Putin’s Russia offers perhaps the most comprehensive example of memory manipulation as political strategy, with criminalized discussion of Soviet war crimes, mandated teaching of approved historical narratives, and use of “memory laws” to prosecute historians and activists.
Resistance Strategies: How Memory Institutions Fight Back
Despite increasing pressure, many cultural memory institutions have developed strategies to maintain independence. Professional organizations like the American Library Association provide crucial support through professional standards and ethical codes that give individual professionals frameworks for resisting political pressure. Strong community support represents the most effective defense, with libraries and museums that have deep community roots able to mobilize public support when faced with threats. First Amendment protections provide important but limited defenses, though legal protections are weakest precisely where political pressure is strongest—in public institutions dependent on government funding.
The Stakes: Why Memory Wars Matter for Democracy
The battle over cultural memory institutions represents more than disputes about individual books, exhibits, or curricula. Cultural memory institutions provide essential infrastructure for democratic deliberation—citizens need access to accurate historical information to make informed political choices. These memory wars represent conflicts over intergenerational justice, determining what future generations understand about their inheritance and responsibilities. Ultimately, they threaten democracy’s capacity for learning and adaptation, as democratic societies must be able to honestly examine their past failures in order to avoid repeating them.
Looking Forward: The Future of American Memory
The memory wars represent a critical juncture in American democracy. Several trends will likely shape the future of these institutions: increased polarization as both progressive and conservative movements view control over historical narrative as essential; technology-driven change creating new vulnerabilities while democratizing access; generational transition as digital natives develop new approaches to balancing accuracy with political pressures; and legal evolution as courts face more cases involving cultural memory institutions.
Conclusion: Memory as Responsibility
The war on facts extends far beyond statistical manipulation or scientific censorship. It encompasses a systematic effort to control the stories America tells about itself—who we were, who we are, and who we might become. Cultural memory institutions stand at the center of this conflict because they serve as democracy’s memory banks. When these institutions are compromised, societies lose more than access to information; they lose the capacity for honest self-reflection and learning.
The Smithsonian impeachment exhibit controversy may seem like a minor administrative adjustment, but it represents something far more significant: the real-time editing of history to serve contemporary political purposes. When present-day political pressures determine which aspects of the past deserve preservation and which should be forgotten, democratic societies lose their ability to learn from experience.
Defending cultural memory institutions requires recognizing that historical accuracy isn’t a luxury or academic indulgence—it’s a prerequisite for democratic governance. The memory wars are ultimately about whether America will maintain the institutional capacity for honest self-examination. The outcome will determine not just what Americans know about their past, but whether they retain the ability to learn from it.
Coming up in Part 3: Regulatory Capture: When Drug Approvals and Environmental Protections Bow to Politics Instead of Science—examining how political interference in regulatory agencies threatens public safety and undermines evidence-based policymaking.
References
- Kingsberry, Janay & Maura Judkis. “Smithsonian restores Trump to impeachment display … with revisions.” Washington Post, August 8, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/art/2025/08/08/trump-impeachment-exhibit/
- Smithsonian Institution. “Mission, Vision and Strategic Plan.” National Museum of American History. https://americanhistory.si.edu/about/mission-and-vision
- Kingsberry, Janay. “Smithsonian removes Trump from impeachment exhibit in American History Museum.” Washington Post, July 31, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/2025/07/31/trump-impeachment-smithsonian/
- American Library Association (OIF). “ALA reports record 1,247 demands to censor in 2023.” March 14, 2024. https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/challengedmaterials
- PEN America. “Index of School Book Bans 2023–2024.” https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025/
- Jensen, Kelly. “EveryLibrary’s 2025 Report on 130+Bills Across the Country That Affect Libraries.” Book Riot, July 25, 2025. https://bookriot.com/everylibrarys-2025-report-on-130bills-across-the-country-that-affect-libraries-book-censorship-news-july-25-2025/
- Smithsonian Institution. “FY 2024 Appropriations: $1.09 Billion.” January 2024. https://www.si.edu/content/pdf/about/budget-fy2024.pdf
- Humanities Indicators (AAAS). “Public Library Revenue by Source.” 2018 data showing 86% local government funding. https://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatordoc.aspx?i=302
- Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. “EPA’s Climate Page Removals.” 2017 research documentation. https://envirodatagov.org/epa-climate-change-website-changes/