Okay folks, I'd like to stop here for a moment and explain why I'm talking about what probably appear to be "small ball" stories about the Trump regime erasing government websites, changing monuments, and using its control over government funding to rewrite history in a percentage of museums and libraries. I know that to some degree it's hard to take these actions completely seriously because, after all, changing the historical record as controlled by the government doesn't actually change history, and for now there are a lot of places where you can still get the real story.
The key however here is to understand these efforts to "bleach" US history in service of a white supremacist, Christian Nationalist worldview are only one small part of a larger project whose broad outlines are already apparent in the ideological policing activities of the regime. Altering government websites, monuments and museum exhibits allows the regime to establish an officially sanctioned history or worldview; which is a necessary first step in using the instruments Trump and the nazis have granted themselves by executive order, to force the acceptance and dissemination of that official history and worldview. What instruments? Well for starters, the vague and extremely broad executive order banning "DEI" (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) effectively gives the regime broad powers to punish institutions and entities in both the public and private sector, through government funding, FCC licensing, Civil Rights litigation, and DoJ investigations. What, in this context is DEI? Well so far, it's proven to be pretty much anything the white supremacist, fascist Trump regime says it is. This process is also replicated in the regime's declarations that trans people (and thus trans history) don't exist, and its efforts to seize control of higher education institutions under the guise of fighting "antisemitism" - through most of the same instruments, with some bonus antiterrorism and national security authority thrown in. Like the Gleichschaltung period during the Nazification of Germany under Hitler, this is a process where each stage feeds into the next stage, and the vague but broad powers the regime is seeking to enact here allow for a realignment of what can be taught, expressed, or ultimately thought (by future scholars) in a nearly unlimited number of ways. This isn't going to happen overnight, but as far as I can tell, it *is* happening, and this is the process by which the regime intends to literally rewrite history - not just on government websites, but everywhere.
So, as much as it might seem like I'm losing my shit over some barely used websites and statues in museums, the truth is that the Trump regime is making no secret of its attempts to reshape our past, to control our future - which is why we started this thread with a quote from Jason Stanley's book about precisely that phenomenon. The process and application of government authority by which it is doing so is very much out in the open; it's just that nobody but some historians folks have spent decades ignoring already, has really put together what it all means.