{"id":10227,"date":"2026-02-17T18:11:46","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T18:11:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/2026\/02\/17\/judge-cites-orwell-in-rejecting-trumps-bid-to-erase-history-of-slavery-in-philadelphia-ms-now\/"},"modified":"2026-02-17T18:11:46","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T18:11:46","slug":"judge-cites-orwell-in-rejecting-trumps-bid-to-erase-history-of-slavery-in-philadelphia-ms-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/2026\/02\/17\/judge-cites-orwell-in-rejecting-trumps-bid-to-erase-history-of-slavery-in-philadelphia-ms-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Judge cites Orwell in rejecting Trump\u2019s bid to erase history of slavery in Philadelphia – MS NOW"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Trying to\u00a0erase history<\/a>\u00a0is a theme of\u00a0Donald Trump\u2019s second term<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But his administration\u2019s revisionist moves hit a snag on Monday. That\u2019s when a federal judge\u00a0ruled that<\/a>\u00a0the city of Philadelphia is likely to win its lawsuit against the administration\u2019s attempt to whitewash George Washington\u2019s slave-owning history at\u00a0the President\u2019s House Site<\/a>, a location in the city that commemorates the first official presidential residence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The suit was sparked by the National Park Service\u2019s removal last month of educational panels and accompanying videos that discussed slavery. The city moved for a preliminary injunction to restore the exhibit.<\/p>\n

Granting the motion on Presidents Day, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe wrote that the federal government \u201cclaims it alone has the power to erase, alter, remove and hide historical accounts on taxpayer and local government-funded monuments within its control.\u201d The George W. Bush appointee wrote that those claims \u201cecho Big Brother\u2019s domain in [George] Orwell\u2019s\u00a01984<\/em>,\u201d specifically the dystopian novel\u2019s government Records Department.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Turning to the present day, Rufe wrote, \u201cThe government here likewise asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overwritten.\u201d But a government agency \u201ccannot arbitrarily decide what is true, based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership, regardless of the evidence before it,\u201d she wrote in support of her conclusion that the city will likely win its claims that the removal was \u201carbitrary and capricious.\u201d <\/p>\n

And though Rufe\u2019s preliminary ruling isn\u2019t the final word in the litigation, it\u2019s just one example of the resistance that the administration\u2019s efforts to rewrite history is meeting in the courts.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, a coalition of groups\u00a0filed a lawsuit<\/a>\u00a0in Massachusetts that seeks to require the federal government \u201cto cease all unlawful efforts to remove up-to-date and accurate historical or scientific information from the national parks\u201d and to restore interpretative materials that have been removed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The suit cited the Philadelphia erasure as among the litany of revisionist moves, writing in\u00a0Tuesday\u2019s complaint<\/a>\u00a0that the government campaign \u201cescalated in recent weeks, as the National Park Service, implementing an order of the Secretary of the Interior, tore down the exhibit in Philadelphia\u2019s Independence National Historical Park memorializing the legacy of people enslaved by the country\u2019s first President; ripped away signage detailing climate threats at Fort Sumter, one of the country\u2019s most environmentally endangered parks; and wiped away descriptions of history and science at countless national parks throughout the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

Subscribe to the\u00a0<\/strong>Deadline: Legal Newsletter<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration\u2019s legal cases.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

\t\t\t\t\t\tJordan\u00a0Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney\u2019s Office in Manhattan\u00a0and is the author of \u201cBizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trying to\u00a0erase history\u00a0is a theme of\u00a0Donald Trump\u2019s second term.\u00a0 But his administration\u2019s revisionist moves hit a snag on Monday. That\u2019s when a federal judge\u00a0ruled that\u00a0the city of Philadelphia is likely to win its lawsuit against the administration\u2019s attempt to whitewash George Washington\u2019s slave-owning history at\u00a0the President\u2019s House Site, a location in the city that commemorates […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10228,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10227\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}