All the "Woke" History that Trump is trying to Erase

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And as promised, here is the script from my video:

Social media post: They banned “woke” history, so I decided to teach it.

The more you try to silence history teachers, the louder we’ll get

I’m Mr. Beat, and I teach American history
And I’ve noticed a trend. NeeDohs
They’re so satisfying
But I’ve noticed ANOTHER, much more troubling trend than Needohs
The Trump administration is trying to erase history. In some cases, they are straight up trying to revise or even rewrite history.

And ok, to be fair to them, REINTERPRETING history happens all the time. Well, by historians. Last I checked President Donald Trump wasn’t a historian. But also in their defense, they say they are trying to get rid of ideological bias. And indeed, historians are often biased, just as ALL human beings are often biased. But this is starting a dangerous precedent. 

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past"
-George Orwell, 1984

The Trump administration has made it seem that whoever holds power gets to decide what is true and who matters. When history is treated as a political weapon instead of a scholarly record of human events, the shared factual basis needed for a democratic society completely breaks down. Scholars, not politicians, should be determining what gets remembered and how we should remember it. And sure, Trump is not the first politician to try to erase, revise, or rewrite history, but his dramatic, coordinated effort to reshape public records in his second term in particular is, in my view, exceptionally messed up. His administration has removed thousands of federal web pages, archives, and cultural exhibits. It has heavily altered or straight up deleted exhibits documenting systemic racism, slavery, LGBTQ+ history, and the contributions of minority military veterans and women.

In this video, I’m going to cover all the history that Trump has recently tried to rewrite, revise, or erase…because….he may be able to take down plaques and exhibits, but he’s not able to take down YouTube videos…..at least not yet. 

So here’s the REAL history. Here’s what THEY aren’t telling you.

Woke history fact #1: Slavery existed in the United States

During his second term, the Trump administration ordered the removal of several high-profile federal slavery exhibits, most notably using crowbars to dismantle a 15-year-old outdoor display in Philadelphia that detailed the lives of nine enslaved people George Washington once held. Similar physical removals or alterations occurred at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park and within specific exhibits at the Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C., focusing on the economics of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

For more than two centuries, the institution of chattel slavery existed as a foundational and brutal reality in the United States. Chattel slavery meaning one person permanently owning another person as property. Pretty messed up.  And yes, even foundational figures like George Washington participated directly in this system, holding hundreds of men, women, and children in bondage at his Mount Vernon estate and his executive mansion. This vast system of forced labor was originally fueled by the Transatlantic slave trade, a devastating and catastrophic global enterprise that forcibly displaced millions of Africans under inhumane conditions. Throughout their lives, enslaved individuals were treated horribly, often subjected to systematic violence, the forced separation of their families, and complete denial of their basic human rights. Even after the United States made slavery illegal for everyone outside of a prison, African Americans would face discrimination and persecution for generations afterward.

Woke history fact #2: Women played significant roles in the Space Race

During his second term, Trump ordered NASA to scrub its websites of specific diversity-related phrases like "underrepresented groups" and "women in leadership." I’m not joking. To comply with this mandate, NASA used automated filters and manual reviews to delete dozens of biographical profiles, interviews, and video retrospectives featuring female employees.

The women and African Americans highlighted in NASA's history include pioneering scientists, engineers, and astronauts who broke racial and gender barriers to help America win the Space Race and explore the cosmos. These figures include the women made famous through the film Hidden Figures, the brilliant mathematicians Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, who all calculated the complex flight trajectories for the first American astronauts in the 1960s, back when racial segregation was still a thing. They also include trailblazers like Sally Ride, the first American female in space, and Mae Jemison, the first African American female astronaut, as well as hundreds of modern female and minority engineers who designed rovers, managed mission control, and led cutting-edge aerospace research.

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Woke history fact #3: The Tuskegee Airmen helped the United States win World War Two

During his second term, Trump ordered the United States Air Force to stop teaching soldiers about the heroism of the Tuskegee Airmen. Not only that, it pulled down thousands of media posts, articles, and profiles of minority veterans from military websites.

Due to the public backlash, much of this stuff got put back up, but I’m going to teach it again JUST TO MAKE SURE PUNKS.

The Tuskegee Airmen were the first African American military aviators in the United States Armed Forces. They played an EXTREMELY important tactical role in helping the Allies secure victory in World War II by achieving an outstanding combat record in Europe. These pilots flew more than 15,000 individual fighter planes across Europe and North Africa, where they successfully destroyed hundreds of German planes, trains and supply lines. Famously known as the "Red Tails" for the distinct red paint on the tails of their P-51 Mustang fighters, they also earned a legendary reputation for their elite skill as escort pilots, defending American heavy bombers from enemy fighters and boasting one of the lowest bomber-loss rates in the entire Army Air Forces. By proving their exceptional capabilities in the face of intense institutional racism and segregation at home, the Airmen not only dealt a major blow to the Axis powers but paved the way for the desegregation of the American military just a few years later.

Hey related to this….
Woke history fact #4: The Navajo Code Talkers helped the United States win World War Two

During his second term, the Trump administration took down a bunch of web pages that told the history of the Navajo Code Talkers.

Again, due to public backlash, these web pages eventually got put back up, but let me educate you in case this crap “accidentally” happens again.

The Navajo Code Talkers provided a critical, decisive advantage to the United States military by creating the only spoken military code in modern history that was never broken by an enemy. Serving in all six Marine divisions across the Pacific Theater from 1942 to 1945, these hundreds of bilingual Navajo Marines transmitted top-secret tactical information regarding troop movements, artillery coordination, and battlefield strategy via field telephones and radios. Because the Navajo language is ridiculously complex,  it was completely unintelligible to the Japanese military. By substituting native words for military terms…for example using the Navajo word for "iron fish" (besh-lo) to mean submarine and "hummingbird" (dah-he-tih-hi) for fighter plane….the Code Talkers could securely transmit an encrypted three-line message in just 20 seconds baby, a process that conventional code machines took up to an hour to complete. Boom!  Their unmatched speed and total accuracy saved thousands of American lives, prompting Major Howard Connor, a 5th Marine Division signal officer at Iwo Jima, to famously declare that without the Navajos, the Marines never would have taken the island. 

And speaking of Native Americans…

Woke history fact #5: The United States government routinely treated Native Americans like crap

During his second term, Trump directed federal agencies to systematically review and remove public signage, educational materials, and museum displays that detailed the forced displacement, broken treaties, and violence experienced by Native Americans. This has led to the removal of displays highlighting historical atrocities by American soldiers and the federal government breaking legal treaties with Native nations. Not only that, the administration has targeted plaques detailing the generational land loss of tribes like the Timbisha Shoshone in Death Valley and has stripped out terms describing any suffering of Native Americans from national park educational materials. 

Yeah the United States government stole nearly all Native American land. Duh. According to one study, nearly 99% of it.^1 Geez. This massive transfer of over two billion acres of land was executed systematically over generations through broken federal treaties, state-sanctioned forced military removals….ya know….like the Trail of Tears….and legislative acts like the 1887 Dawes Act, which alone stripped tribes of over 90 million acres of reservation land. Today, more than 40% of historically documented tribes possess no federally recognized land base at all, leaving a pretty profound legacy of economic and geographic displacement.

Woke history fact #6: The United States government forced Native Americans to give up their culture.

During his second term, Trump had the National Park Service take down or modify interpretive signs at Montana’s Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument that detailed how the American federal Indian boarding school system used forced assimilation to violently erase Native American cultural identities and languages. 

I made an entire video about this, but here’s what specifically was on those signs at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. The signs said the federal government "violently erased cultural identities and language" through forced assimilation, using institutional power to deliberately strip Native American children of their heritage. Institutions like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School forced Native American kids to cut their hair, abandon their traditional clothing, and give up their birth names in an effort to “kill the Indian to save the man.” These institutions violently punished kids for speaking their native languages and prevented them from seeing their families for sometimes years at a time.

Woke history fact #7: Women and children worked at textile factories in terrible conditions.

During his second term, Trump directed the Lowell National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts to stop showing historic educational films detailing the horrific working conditions women and child textile workers went through during the 1800s. 

What did this film they stopped showing say? Well, it said that, by 1837, more than 6,000 women worked in the Lowell mills, which were extremely dangerous places to work in. Some of these women were, in fact, children….as young as 10 years old. They often worked 14-hour shifts every day, six days a week. THAT’S 84 HOURS A WEEK HOLY MOLY. They got few breaks. Most earned between $3 and $3.50 a week. That’s $104 a week in today’s money HOLY FREAKING RAVIOLI. And of course, they had to LIVE basically at work and the factories charged them to live there, so really they had about $75 left over in today’s money for their own spending after rent. When the mills tried to cut their wages, these mill women organized mass strikes to protest. These efforts later paved the way for the Massachusetts legislature passing a law saying that workers couldn’t work more than 10 hours in one day. 

Woke history fact #8: Queer and transgender people exist and have existed for a very long time.

During his second term, Trump and his followers in Congress have banned all federal funding from being used to teach about the idea of gender existing on a spectrum separate from biological sex. Critics have said this has caused a chilling effect, as school districts have stopped teaching about the existence of transgender historical figures or the evolution of modern gender equality movements out of fear of losing important federal aid. Did you know that some school districts get more than 88% of their funding from the federal government?

So, the word “transgender” didn’t actually pop until the mid 1900s, but people who have crossed or bent traditional gender lines have ALWAYS been part of the American story. Long before even European settlers arrived, many Native American nations recognized “Two-Spirt” folks, or those who fulfilled multiple gender roles. We’wha, a famous Zuni leader who once met President Grover Cleveland, was such a person. Now, European culture dominating the United States often meant strict legal and religious gender binaries enforced. But over the past 75 years that has changed. In 1952, a World War II veteran named Christine Jorgensen traveled to Denmark for gender-affirmation surgery and returned to the United States getting a lot of media attention. Transgender women, particularly women of color like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, were right at the front lines of the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City, sparking the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. In the decades since, the community has fought a grueling legal and cultural battle for basic civil rights—from the founding of support groups like STAR in the 1970s to the landmark 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County Supreme Court decision, which finally ruled that federal law protects LGBTQ+ employees from workplace discrimination.

And that was just SOME of the history the current administration has censored over the past year and a half. I didn’t even get into all of it.

Look, you don’t need to feel bad about all the bad stuff that happened in American history. You just need to learn from it. The main reason why we learn history is to learn the lessons of the past, and in order to learn many of those lessons, we need to learn about the mistakes we made. That doesn’t mean we also can’t celebrate the good stuff from the past, too. I love learning about the victories. I love learning about the glory. About the times we all came together to do great things for humanity. But if we only focus on the good stuff our ancestors did, we might repeat the BAD stuff they did. Come on!  Again, Oliver. YOU didn’t do anything wrong. Well, other than aggressively stretching that NeeDoh I loaned you that caused it to leak. But no, Oliver, you shouldn’t feel shame learning history. It was our ancestors that made mistakes. Not us. Well, except you made that mistake with the NeeDoh so I’m not loaning you this one. Sorry buddy.
 
But what did I miss? What are OTHER ways the federal government…or any other government for that matter….trying to erase history? Let me know down below.
And now it’s time for a shout out for my Patreon supporters who donate at least $15 or more each month to my channel. Starting with my biggest donors in alphabetical order, thank you to…

Thanks to ALL my Channel Members and Patreon supporters, and thank YOU for staying curious!
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^1. https://environment.yale.edu/news/article/near-total-loss-historical-lands-leaves-indigenous-nations-us-more-vulnerable-climate
Sources/further reading:
https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-takes-action-eliminate-dei#:~:text=Identification%20for%20removal%20of%20over,schools%20and%20institutions%20of%20higher
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-trump-administration-is-erasing-american-history-told-by-public-lands-and-waters/#:~:text=In%20February%202025%2C%20the%20National,in%201969%2C%20and%20erasing%20them 
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/restoring-truth-and-sanity-to-american-history/
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/agency-memo-defending-women.pdf?emrc=3f64db
https://time.com/7284644/trumps-erasure-of-women/
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/06/opinion/lowell-mills-history-erased-trump/ 

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