Japanese American Internment Camp 'report any negative US history' warning signs posted by Trump

[IrishBubbaLiberal]

Signs to police 'negative' history went up at Manzanar. Historians are nervous.

By Olivia Hebert,
News Reporter
June 16, 2025


https://www.sfgate.com/california-parks/article/signs-negative-history-manzanar-historians-20376758.php

On the orders of the Donald Trump administration, National Park Service employees hung two highly controversial signs this week at Manzanar National Historic Site, a museum examining the property’s former role as a prison where the U.S. government incarcerated more than 10,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

Displayed on a site where American citizens were held against their will for more than three years, the signs encourage visitors to report any depictions of U.S. history that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” or fail to highlight the “beauty, abundance or grandeur” of the landscape, according to a Manzanar official.

Identical signs are now posted at every national park site across the nation, regardless of whether that site’s purpose is to educate the public about horrifying mistakes and grave injustices perpetrated by the U.S. government. Although it’s unclear how and where the president’s directive will be enforced, park advocates and historians are bracing themselves for a drastic reframing of the darkest chapters of the nation’s history.

“If this administration has its way, [Manzanar is] probably one of the stories they’d rather see go away,” Dennis Arguelles, the Southern California director of the National Parks Conservation Association, told SFGATE.

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[Solly Mack]

1. Wonder when the White People are Best signs go up?

[Staph]

2. I can't wait to hear George Takei's response to this.

Though he was not at Manzanar, he and his family were interned in the stables at Santa Anita Racetrack, at Rohwer Lake, Arkansas, and Tule Lake, California. He has spoken out for years about the experience, and he wrote a Broadway play, Allegiance, as well as several books, They Called Us Enemy, and My Lost Freedom: A Japanese American World War II Story, about his childhood in the camps.