History is written to be argued about, I have often said. Recent efforts in the Trump administration’s culture war have offered numerous examples.

In recent days, President Donald Trump’s administration removed language at Arlington National Cemetery that had described a Confederate memorial as presenting a “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy” and “highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” The memorial itself, removed in 2023, is scheduled to return to Arlington in 2027 under a plan Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last year.

History buffs may recall that the sculpture had been removed as part of a congressionally mandated effort to rid military bases and sites of Confederate names and images.

If you are one of those innocents who believe, as I once did, that the Civil War ended in 1865, guess again.

This is just the latest of many such moves by the Trump administration to restore Confederate names and symbols that had been removed as part of what some sarcastically call “the Great Awokening” of racial reconciliation efforts following George Floyd’s murder by a police officer in 2020.

The sculpture by Moses Ezekiel, often called without irony “The Reconciliation Monument,” will be returned to Arlington National Cemetery near his burial site.

“It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings,” Hegseth posted on X in 2025. “Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history........

© Chicago Tribune