Is the White House Erasing History?

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. As the war on DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion continues, what kinds of IED, just reverse the letters, inequality, exclusion, and discrimination might be taking their place? Refugee programs are being cut, gutted for people from many countries, like those fleeing the Taliban in Afghanistan.

While The New York Times reports, the Trump administration is ramping up refugee outreach to White South Africans. The Washington Post has an article called Amid Anti DEI National Park Service Rewrites History of the Underground Railroad. It says, "For years the National Park Service webpage introduced the Underground Railroad with a large photograph of its most famous conductor, Harriet Tubman." The page began with the words The Underground- The resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War. Refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage. That was all on the webpage as it was.

The Post says the introductory sentence is gone. It has been replaced by a line that makes no mention of slavery. Another one like that. The New York Times had an article over the weekend called The White House Frames the Past by Erasing Parts of It. The Times is cataloging words and data in various of their articles being removed from government websites.

The article in this case mentions content about vaccines, hate crimes, low income children, opioid addiction, and veterans. Plus, many mentions of words like Black, women, and discrimination, all gone. We'll talk to Times reporter Tiffany Hsu now. She wrote that story. She covers misinformation and disinformation for The Times. That's her beat. Tiffany, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Tiffany Hsu: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: You cover misinformation and disinformation, and in this case, missing information, or disappeared information. Would that be a fair way to put it?

Tiffany Hsu: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: We'll go through some examples, but as part of the frame, you quote several people who see all this erasure of history, and health data, and other things online as consistent with authoritarian leadership that they've seen elsewhere in the world. What's the argument there?

Tiffany Hsu: That's right. I spoke to many archivists, academics, researchers, librarians, people who have tracked the disappearance, and the preservation of public records for many, many years, and they're all very concerned, because what's happening now echoes to them incidents in the past, where authoritarian regimes, at their outset, have started by trying to clear the past, by trying to create a narrative in the negative space of the disappearance of historical fact.

Brian Lehrer: Well, I want to invite listeners in right from the start. Any questions for New York Times misinformation and disinformation reporter Tiffany Hsu, especially, about her latest article, The White House Frames the Past by Erasing Parts of It. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text, or help us report this story. Maybe you wrote one of those web pages, or tried to access one of them, or anything else. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. What vision? Again, we'll go through some examples, but again, on the frame for this, what vision of American history are they aiming for here?

Tiffany Hsu: It's hard to say exactly. Some of the experts I talked to, said, "It's unclear whether or not this erasure is the result of incompetence." There have been websites that were taken down that the agencies then put back up, because they disappeared without their knowledge. Some of the experts suggested that this is a malicious attempt to write a specific version of history by clearing out any references to DEI, or maybe it's a mix.

Maybe it's the government fumbling, because it's making changes so quickly, while also trying to pursue this particular vision of what America's past should look like, instead of how it actually looks. For example, there was a page about the B-52 bomber that carried the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan. That bomber is called the Enola Gay, and a profile of that aircraft was scrubbed from a government page.

People think because it contained the word "gay", which obviously, has nothing to do with homosexuality, was just likely caught up in the net of the government's attempt to get rid of any words related to LGBTQ+ identity.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. One of the paragraphs in your article that jumped out at me, I'm just going to read this. It says, "A key source of federal funding for public records depositories nationwide, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, was named in an executive order calling for its elimination to the maximum extent consistent with apparent applicable law."

You say, its acting director said he planned to, "Restore focus on patriotism." What does that mean, if you have a sense of it? What notion of patriotism are they trying to restore a focus on by doing what?

Tiffany Hsu: Well, the Trump administration has been very clear, largely, through the President's executive order, is that it wants mentions of specific ideas, or identities to be stripped from government records. This is the attempt at the DEI purge. We've chronicled lists of words including women, disability, or queer to be removed from government funded pages.

The attempt to clear the record of any mention of transgender. The administration is looking to recraft an understanding of American history that doesn't include terms like that, and so when you restore focus on patriotism, you're also getting rid of ideas like Black Lives Matter. There is actually an interesting example where in Washington, D.C., the phrase "Black Lives Matter" had been painted onto a street. Very large block yellow letters that were painted on, I think, back in 2020. Those are now gone, because the Congressional Republicans had threatened Washington's mayor with funding cuts if those words weren't removed. There's an effort to kind of purge the digital space of terms like this, but also the physical space.

Brian Lehrer: I don't know if you reported on, or have seen that example that was in The Washington Post article that I mentioned in the intro about Harriet Tubman, and how they frame what the Underground Railroad was about at the top of that National Park Service website. Apparently, what they did was, take a solo photo of Tubman off, and replace it with a photo of a group of abolitionists, Black and white, that included Tubman.

They changed the language that I read from what was the intro to that page that didn't mention-- That did mention slavery originally, or enslavement, and removed the word "enslavement", and made it more about civil rights using that term, which maybe weakens it a little bit. Again, like with the photo, the emphasis seemed to be moved toward showing what white people and Black people did together. I wonder if that's consistent with what you're seeing in some of the things that you cover.

Tiffany Hsu: Absolutely. I had a number of archivists said that, what was especially concerning to them, is that this wasn't a wholesale attempt to take web pages off. In addition to the deletion of webpages, there's also a fair amount of editing happening, and so if not for efforts like the Wayback Machine, which we can talk about later, we wouldn't know what the government is removing in many cases, because often, the web pages are just being altered.

There's an example in the story of the website for Arlington National Cemetery, which had a section for notable women that included the first American woman to legally vote. That section was taken out, but the website is obviously still there. It's just that you can't get to this particular page that had talked about important women in the history of the cemetery.

That page is now archived in the Wayback Machine, which is part of the Internet Archive, which is an organization that tries to preserve the Internet at various points in time. That's just a specific part of our history that's been removed. There wasn't any fanfare around it. It's not like the government said, "We're taking down this specific mention of notable women." It's just gone.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned the Wayback Machine. A lot of our listeners don't know what that is, but one of our listeners is calling about it. Let's bring Scott in Huntington right into this conversation. Hi, Scott. You're on WNYC. Hello.

Scott: Hey, Brian, how's it going?

Brian Lehrer: Good. What you got?

Scott: Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you.

Scott: Oh, so sorry. Yes, I did mention the Wayback Machine. It's in a very important repository. It backs up the World Wide Web, as we know it, and is searchable. It's publicly accessible and free. It's a great way to go back to any point in time and see things deletions, or websites being taken down wholesale. That, just to help clarify what that is, but my question was actually a little bit more about the complicity of big tech in executing this strange and terrible order from the executive branch to rewrite history, essentially.

I remember when Google came out, their motto was, "Do no evil." I believe that, along with Mark Zuckerberg and some of the other big players, they've pulled in about faith, obviously, for political expediency. I'm just curious what your guest has to say about her knowledge, or suspicion of the complicity of some of these big companies. Thanks.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting question, Scott. Take one step back, Tiffany, and explain to people what the Wayback Machine is. Scott's question is, could they be erasing these web pages without the complicity of some of the big tech companies?

Tiffany Hsu: Yes. I think the government manages its own web pages. I don't think, for example, that Facebook is saying, "Yes, government, we're going to take down mentions of notable women in Arlington for you." I think the government is perfectly capable of doing that itself, and it has been. What is interesting is that, there's been a larger-- There's been larger pressure on public records beyond this administration.

Last year, for example, Google removed cached results from its search. What cache results were, were basically, a snapshot of web pages at a point in time. In the past, when you searched for something on Google, often you'd be able to access the cached pages for the search results. You'd be able to see what the page that you were looking for looked like a year ago, two years ago, however long it had existed.

The effect of that was that, it was a bulwark against what's known as link rot or digital decay. That's the-- Something like 38% of web pages that have disappeared from the Internet in the past 10 years. By creating a record, an archive of those pages that are no longer live, you create a track record of history, and that's effectively what the Wayback Machine is also doing.

The Wayback Machine is a project that's run by the Internet Archive, which is based in San Francisco. It's this effort that's been going on for decades at this point that, essentially, sends crawlers out into the web to preserve what the web looks like at any given point in time, so they've created this really incredible archive of, I think it's something like 700 terabytes of archived web pages of any webpage.

It's not just government Web pages. I could look up the awful science project that I put online when I was in college, for example. In the past few months, the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, along with a number of other partners, have really ramped up their efforts to specifically preserve government pages.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "Their whole effort." Sorry. "This topic is right out of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, wherein the principal character is Winston Smith, whose job was to continually rewrite history books, and historical news articles to reflect Big Brother's latest war or changed alliances, and to completely delete historical persons when deemed necessary."

Another listener writes, "A lot of the work my agency does, without mentioning it, focuses on LGBTQ health equity, and we rely heavily on government data, like from the CDC or NIH to make our case inside corporations and institutions. That data helps us move from conversation to action, but under the Trump administration, much of it, especially around HIV, AIDS, and LGBTQ health more broadly, was quietly erased. Now, when we go to make those same arguments, we're told, 'There's no data to support it,' even though it existed before. That erasure isn't just symbolic. It's actively creating roadblocks to progress in real time." Interesting post from that listener, right? Which leans into the stakes here beyond being just what words are on a webpage.

Tiffany Hsu: Oh, absolutely. I had mentioned earlier that there are now efforts-- There's several efforts to preserve government web pages. Those efforts attempt to address that exact concern, which is that if you delete parts of history selectively, then you're allowing the people who are doing the erasing to present a form of history that they can support, because there's no data to argue otherwise. If you want to put forth a storyline, a specific narrative, then you want to-

Brian Lehrer: Sure.

Tiffany Hsu: -get rid of any option to suggest an alternative, which is what's happening now.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. Pablo in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Tiffany Hsu, The New York Times misinformation and disinformation reporter, who's got a new article. The White House Frames the Past by Erasing Parts of It. Hi, Pablo.

Pablo: Hi. I haven't read the article, but as far as I can tell through the conversation, you guys are clearly caught in the weeds. You're not asking the right questions, you're not asking why. I mean, it's clear. There was a Nazi salute at the--

Brian Lehrer: I thought we were asking about that, what they're after, what the frame is, and what the goals are, but go ahead. What do you think is missing, Pablo? Go ahead.

Pablo: Well, there was a Nazi salute at the inauguration. This is an authoritarian takeover. Nazis and authoritarians and fascists are misogynist, homophobic, racist, and it's all about white male supremacy. These are-- That's what these organizations are. They're preparing us, clearly, for apartheid, or something like that. I'll take the response off the air.

Brian Lehrer: Pablo, thank you very much. I mean, we don't have to go right to Nazi with every, I think, strong critique of what's going on here, or conversation, and assume that they're heading toward "apartheid", but you hear, Tiffany, how this strikes people, and why wouldn't it strike a lot of people like that in the way that they're selectively removing things under the frame of fighting DEI?

Tiffany Hsu: You know, I quote Lawrence H. Tribe, who's a constitutional scholar, and a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, and he says, "There are tectonic plates that are shifting, and it's a new version of truth that is being portrayed." That, I think, is the most profound danger we've ever faced as a country. I mean, the stakes are high. People are very, very nervous about what could happen if the administration is allowed to present its own version of truth.

If you don't allow the public record to exist in full, then you're cherry picking history. It's interesting that Pablo, the listener, mentioned the Nazi salute, because that salute was at the center of another threat to the broad collection of public data, and that's on Wikipedia. Wikipedia, of course, is an online encyclopedia that's compiled and edited by average participants. It's a nonprofit. It's not run by a specific cohort of people.

The entry for Elon Musk, who of course is running DOGE, which is, this group that's executing a lot of Trump's executive orders around the government. The entry on Wikipedia for Elon Musk mentions this salute that looked an awful lot like Nazi salute. That's what the entry says, that Musk made a gesture that looked like a Nazi salute. Musk railed against Wikipedia.

He said that it was Wokepedia and that it should-- That his followers shouldn't support it through donations. One of the co-founders of Wikipedia went on X, which is Musk's social platform, and said, "What is wrong about this? Every single word in that entry about that gesture is completely accurate." You see there in a microcosm, this effort by a powerful person to question the historical fact by targeting a public record.

Brian Lehrer: That's worth reading again. I thought that part of your article was very interesting. Read that Wikipedia language again, which I think like journalistic language, was being very precise and very measured, and not just saying like maybe the caller was going to, he's a Nazi, or even he was giving a Nazi salute. Read that language again, as you just quoted it.

Tiffany Hsu: The exact language as it had been, as Musk thought was, "In his speech during the second Trump inauguration, Musk twice extended his right arm towards the crowd in an upward angle. The gesture was compared to a Nazi salute, or fascist salute--[crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Was compared to, right? Those are key words there.

Tiffany Hsu: Right.

Brian Lehrer: That's how a lot of people saw it. It was being described that way. It certainly looked that way. Then, we saw Steve Bannon at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, repeat it, and some others, I think, trying to mock liberals as they see it, who are accusing Musk of doing a Nazi salute, but at the same time, leaning into raising the hand for Trump, so there's all those layers of it.

Tiffany Hsu: Yes. Musk responded to this entry.

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Tiffany Hsu: On. On X, and says, "Since legacy media propaganda is considered a, 'Valid source by Wikipedia,' it naturally simply becomes an extension of legacy media propaganda." Then, Jimmy Wales, who is one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, says, "Is there anything you consider inaccurate in that description? It's true you did the gesture twice, and that people did compare it to a Nazi salute. Many people. It's true that you denied it had any meaning. That isn't MSN propaganda. That's fact. Every element of it."

Brian Lehrer: Right. Which goes back to the original frame where we were talking about authoritarianism, and only the government's official version of history, in this case Elon Musk's official version of his own actions get preserved, and others, there's an attempt to strike.

Tiffany Hsu: You mentioned Orwell earlier, and it's true that several experts I talked to described what's happening now as an attempt to create a MAGA branded memory hole. When I visited the Internet Archive, I found it fascinating that there were also references to, to the number 451, which is a call to Fahrenheit 451, which is the Bradbury story about a dystopian future where books are outlawed, and that these "firemen burn any books that they find," which also, there are echoes of that happening right now.

Brian Lehrer: Another example from your article you wrote, "Even Utah's Republican lieutenant governor called on Mr. Trump to, 'Bring back our history,' after the first American woman to legally vote was removed from the website for Arlington National Cemetery along with a section on other notable women." You add, "Her profile is once again available, but the women's history section is not." Can you talk a little more about that example?

Tiffany Hsu: Yes. I referenced it a little bit earlier, but it's a good example of what's happening across many web pages, where it's not the entire webpage that's come down, or it's not the entire website that's come down, it's bits and pieces of it, which makes it really hard to track. Some of the archivists that I talked to are trying to piece together differences in government web pages from pre and post inauguration.

It's really hard to say what of these changes are just the standard changes that happen when an administration starts. Right? Of course, if you're a new president, you want to come in, and articulate your policy goals. You don't necessarily want to amplify your predecessor's policy goals, so you're going to change some websites. Everyone I talked to has concluded that this is unprecedented in its scale.

I start the story with the example of what's happening on the White House website. Of course, if you're a new president, you want the White House website to reflect your goals. Your goals might not be simpatico with the previous president's goals. Ever since there's been a White House website almost, there have been certain sections on there. There's a section on all the past presidents with profiles of their accomplishments.

There's been a section that informs visitors about the constitution. That's all gone from the Trump website. I have a spokeswoman from the Trump White House tell me, "Well, we could add that thing back later. Don't rule it out." For now, it's been specifically taken off of the website. Those resources are no longer there.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. Lauren in the Bronx has an interesting question, a relevant question, I think. Lauren, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Lauren: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I had two questions, but the first one is that when Trump was elected, Liz Cheney said that, "Now, we all have to be the guardrails of democracy." My question is, where are the library associations with making some kind of public demonstration or protest? Where are the universities, and where are the law associations?

Where is the Bar association, the American Bar Association, the New York City Bar Association with making some kind of action, at the very least, taking out a full page ad in The New York Times, it seems there's not enough opposition. That is not being a guardrail of democracy, that's rolling over, in my view. The second point is. I think that with-- There isn't-- I think there is some elements of justification in the Trump approach, in the sense that, for example, with Jackie Robinson, everybody knows who Jackie Robinson is, but nobody knows who is the white team owner who got him on the team.

I think that part, or everybody knows who Ruby Bridges is. Nobody seen, or very few people know who was the white teacher who stayed to teach her. I think that if some kind of overtures were made to, "Well, wait, before you erase this, how about if we add this to it to make it more, less," I don't know, how do you say it, but with less kind of adversarial in approach, because all of these. I'd like to know if any kind of overtures have been made in that direction.

Brian Lehrer: Lauren, thank you very much. That's what they seem to be doing with that Underground Railroad webpage. I'm on that page now. It says, "This is a story of ordinary men and women coming together in harmony, united to pursue the extraordinary mission of helping those in their journey to freedom. It was a testament to the power of unity, courage, and a shared commitment to liberty."

It looks like what they're trying to do there is add the white people who aided the Underground Railroad to the center of their framing on that, and interpret that however you want. What about Lauren's question about where the universities are, where the libraries are? I know it's not in this specific article, Tiffany, so I don't know if you've covered it, but where the pushback is on this, where the protest is on this, from institutions that have to do with information and archiving?

Tiffany Hsu: Yes. I mean, look, there's definitely pushback. We mentioned earlier that the administration is targeting the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, and that's, obviously, a major source of federal funding for libraries around the country. When that targeting was announced, more than a dozen library, museum, and scholarly groups issued statements immediately saying, "This is short sighted, this is an assault on-- This is a problem."

Beyond statements, it's hard for a lot of these groups to do much more, because they're vulnerable, they're being attacked. You've seen what's happened with the administration and law firms that have government contracts. You've seen what's happened to librarians that depend on this kind of funding. You've seen what's happened with universities that have students being hauled away in handcuffs, and their funding threatened.

A lot of this is being called a campaign of silencing, and it's working. These groups are being intimidated, because the administration has found a really key pressure point, and that's funding. I do also want to just quickly address what the listener had said about making some overtures. I think you're right there, there have been some efforts as with the Underground Railroad, but then, you also have examples like the National Park Service taking down any reference to transgender people from the webpage for Stonewall National Monument.

Brian Lehrer: Right.

Tiffany Hsu: How do you make an overture when just all references are gone? I don't think any kind of compromise would convince the administration to put back those references, because it doesn't want those references there.

Brian Lehrer: We've talked about this many times on the show. It's one of the most explicit forms of erasure that they've been engaging in right from the start when Trump declares there are only two genders, male and female. There's the erasure of even the existence of people who are non-binary, and people who are trans. That's one of the most explicit and ongoing examples when they take out people who were obviously leaders for people who know the history of Stonewall, of that movement at that time, who were trans, and then they get erased. They get taken. That word gets taken out from the webpage, really. Let's take one more call from John in Baltimore, who may have some personal experience with some of these pages. John, you're on WNYC. Hello.

John: Hey, Brian, Great to be on. First time caller, longtime listener. Yes. I was the former specialist in geographic information science at the Library of Congress, and I'm a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. One of the things that we're dealing with right now is, not only the loss of history, but the loss of data. Things like the USAID site that has gone down, contained very detailed health surveys, demographic surveys from around the world, which have disappeared, and are no longer available for GIS analysis, and health analysis. People to actually formulate policy based on fact.

This is happening all across the administration, and all across websites. There's a project now called the Data Rescue Project, which is a group of librarians from around the country, across university libraries, government libraries, who are trying to scrape the web right now, and pull this data down. It's not only just history, but data. For history, there's a lot of other sources that you can go to for the information that's being pulled down. As far as the government data goes, that's critical to policy analysis, there are no other sources.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for that. We're going to talk about that more explicitly with our next guest who covers health and human services. Tiffany, anything from you on that?

Tiffany Hsu: Yes, actually, that exact concern was something that was raised a lot, because if you're just crawling web pages to try to preserve a snapshot, you're often not able to get the underlying data that you have to download from the page. I had archivists say that these projects like the Data Rescue Project, or the End of Term Web Archive, or Environment Data and Governance Initiative, or the Open Environmental Data Project, those are really important, because they're specifically trying to grab data sets.

If you just perform a sweep, you can get a sense of what the web page look like, but it's really key to preserve those data sets. We have to try to maintain a repository for the vast, vast amount of scientific study of demographic studies that the government has done, because if someone mentioned to me, it's all well and good to say, "Well, we can try to replicate these data sets out of government control," but the government is huge, and because it's huge, it's able to achieve a kind of scale in data collection that very, very few, if any other organizations can. When a government data set disappears, that's a problem, because that's probably data that is very, very hard to recreate.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. On the white supremacy track, which we've certainly talked about before, and will continue to, one of the things that we could add by way of contrast, is that they're restoring the names of Confederate leaders to military bases. Even if you go back to 2017, that infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, when Trump said there were very fine people on both sides, who were the very fine people on the right, who he was referring to, people who were there to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.

Even as DEI is being erased, whatever you want to call the opposite of it, white supremacy, maybe. Sure. Why not? At least, potentially, or some other label that leans in that direction. It's important also to talk about the things that are being restored.

Tiffany Hsu: Right. As I was conceiving the story, I was thinking about this strategy by the administration. Part of what it's trying to do is, yes, erase, censor, create an absence of information, but also what it's doing is, it's manipulating information, it's adding information. It's actively trying to craft something that's new.

Brian Lehrer: Actively trying to craft something that's new. Finish by going back to that Lawrence Tribe quote. Would you recite that for us again? Where you think that leaves us, where he thinks that leaves us, as the country is continuing to grapple with what kind of cultural, as well as political, and as I said at the beginning, inequality, exclusion, and discrimination regime maybe getting planted here?

Tiffany Hsu: I'll do you one better, actually. I'll recite this quote that's in the story, and then I'll tell you another quote that he gave me that didn't make it in. In the story, he says, "There are tectonic plates that are shifting, and it's a new version of truth that is being portrayed. That, I think is the most profound danger we have ever faced as a country." What he also said is, "That's what's scary. If it were possible simply to give everyone collective amnesia, looking backward, that would be horrible enough, but it's a revised path in accord with the approved views of those in power, so that they can accumulate greater power."

Brian Lehrer: Tiffany Hsu covers misinformation and disinformation for The New York Times. Thank you for joining us.

Tiffany Hsu: Thank you for having me.

 

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