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Rebecca Nagle on the Boomerang of Empire 

“What we’re seeing in this moment is those arms of our government that we thought could be authoritarian towards some people coming back home and coming back to impact everybody.”

Last spring, President Donald Trump issued the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order, taking aim at federal parks, monuments, museums, and sites that have cast the United States’s “founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” On the Fourth of July this year, the White House published its 162-page “Saving America’s Story,” attacking the Smithsonian Institution directly for “anti-white activism,” “illegal alien activism,” “transgender activism,” and more broadly for adopting “an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”

“We’re in this moment where we are fighting over how America tells its past,” journalist Rebecca Nagle tells The Intercept Briefing. “It can be scary in a moment when it feels like the stakes are really high to really interrogate the myths that we all carry, that we all hold about who our country is and where it started because it’s really tempting to want to think, ‘OK, if we just wind the clock back 10 years, if we just go back a few election cycles, we’ll be back to a democracy that’s strong, that’s stable, that’s solid, and we’ll all be fine.’ It’s much more scary to say, ‘Oh, actually, if we want to talk about where authoritarianism comes from in the United States, it’s actually at the foundation.’”

As the United States celebrates its 250th birthday this year, the Trump administration has been ramping up its efforts to erase not just the dark parts of U.S. history but also the contributions of basically anyone who isn’t a white, Christian man. That project has included taking concrete steps to remove all traces of the history of people who don’t fit that description, Black people, immigrants, civil rights advocates, women and gay and trans people — including the first people to live on this land: Native Americans.

This week on the podcast, Nagle speaks to host Akela Lacy about her new podcast series “First America,” which examines how Native people have been largely written out of the American story, and how that story informs the current political crisis in the U.S.

“One of the big claims that the series makes is that the foundation is in itself is a myth. Because at the same time that our founders were building a democracy, they were also building an empire. The way that you govern an empire, the way that you govern other people by force, is not democratic,” says Nagle, a citizen of Cherokee Nation. “This identity crisis we’re having around authoritarianism and democracy, and how could authoritarianism be sneaking into our democracy — what we argue is that it’s actually always been there.”

“A lot of what is happening now — it’s not new, it’s not un-American, it’s not unprecedented. Sometimes it’s not even unconstitutional! It’s actually just taking these parts of our government that for a long time most Americans didn’t know was there or didn’t really think about, and Trump is just pulling it into the center,” says Nagle. 

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept. 

The United States is celebrating its 250th birthday this year. 

President Donald Trump kicked off festivities by hosting a UFC cage match on the White House lawn to also celebrate his 80th birthday. 

CBS: President Trump and UFC President and CEO Dana White kicked off the historic event that started with the national anthem and a joint Air Force and Navy flyover.

VO: From the south lawn of the White House. 

AL: Then there was Trump’s two-week-long Great American State Fair in D.C., which aside from the Fourth of July, ended up being a giant bust. 

MS Now: Donald Trump’s long-awaited Freedom 250 Great American State Fair went off with a whimper this weekend with what looked like tens, dozens of people showing up for the event. 

FT: Donald Trump has said that this event is packed with happy people loving it, but it is 6 p.m. in the middle of the week, and there is hardly anyone here. 

MS Now: This was the scene on Tuesday when there were actually more people in the band on stage than there were in the crowd watching them.

AL: Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been ramping up its efforts to erase not just the dark parts of U.S. history, but also the contributions of basically anyone who isn’t a white, Christian man. That project has included taking concrete steps to remove all traces of the history of people who don’t fit that description: Black people, immigrants, civil rights advocates, women and gay and trans people — including the first people to live on this land: Native Americans.

After reviewing nearly 2,000 flagged materials from National Parks and Monuments, The Guardian found that one Trump executive order resulted in the targeted removal of signs about “Native American history, slavery, the climate crisis, and the civil rights movement.”   

Native American history is already poorly understood or misunderstood in the U.S. A new podcast series called “First America” examines how Native people have been largely written out of the American story. Host and creator Rebecca Nagle, a citizen of Cherokee Nation, argues our current political moment is 250 years in the making.

Actor: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

Nick Estes: The Declaration, which is full of these beautifully rendered sentences and paragraphs about Enlightenment ideals, does also have this darker history to it.

Actor: The merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is undistinguished destruction of all ages …

Nick Estes: If we don’t understand the full context in which our nation was founded, we won’t understand the full context in which our nation now finds itself.

Rebecca Nagle: So, it’s been 250 years since 1776. How’s this democracy of ours going?

[Ambient sounds. Clip ends]

AL: Rebecca Nagle is an award-winning advocate and writer focused on advancing Native rights and ending violence against Native women. You might remember Nagle from her hit podcast “This Land,” which focused on treaty rights and tribal sovereignty in Oklahoma. She joins me now.

Rebecca Nagle, welcome to The Intercept Briefing. 

Rebecca Nagle: Thank you so much for having me.

AL: Before we jump in, I want to let our listeners know that we’re also going to drop the first episode of “First America” into our feed so you can listen.

Rebecca, you have a new podcast series out, called “First America.” In the first episode, you open with this scene where you and history professor Nick Estes visit Fort Snelling in Minnesota. It’s January 2026. Set the scene for us? Why did you start the series there?

RN: Nick is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and a historian. We were visiting Fort Snelling, which was a concentration camp in the 1860s during the Dakota Wars.

Dakota families were held there as actually part of a broader effort to force all Dakota people to leave the state of Minnesota, and that effort included death marches, it included open-air prisons, it included mass executions. It was extremely violent. We were there, actually, really to just see how the site talked about it.

The site doesn’t really know, it seemed like, how to integrate the history. There’s this giant replica for it that school kids visit that’s mostly celebrating the military history of the site. Then in this sort of tucked away corner, if you walk down a long, snowy path, there’s a memorial to the victims of this chapter of genocide.

The history of the fort is not really integrated in the way that Minnesotans tell the history at that site. While we’re there that day, Nick got a call from his wife that ICE had just shot and killed someone; it was the day that ICE killed Renee Good. The next day, I was actually back at Fort Snelling — this time not to visit the historic fort, but actually for a protest.

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So where ICE is headquartered in Minneapolis is on the Fort Snelling campus. There’s the historic fort, but then there’s this broader Fort Snelling campus. ICE is there because it’s federal land, and it’s federal land because it was once a military reservation. So what you see is the federal government doing the same thing — rounding people up and detaining them — in the same place.

When I first started this project, I thought I was just making a history podcast. I thought I was talking about the founding and how Native people have been left out of that story and correcting the record. The project actually started as conversations between me and Nick about how Native people are left out of American history and the American story.

And then this thing kept happening where I would be somewhere learning about America’s past, and the same thing would happen in our present. What I realized is that this history — that as a country we don’t know how to talk about, that we haven’t reckoned with — the history that we keep in a memorial that’s tucked away in a corner, that history is why the present moment is happening.

“What you see is the federal government doing the same thing — rounding people up and detaining them — in the same place.”

“What you see is the federal government doing the same thing — rounding people up and detaining them — in the same place.”

AL: I also want to mention for our listeners, Nick Estes has written some really great reporting for The Intercept, which I encourage people to check out. 

We’re talking about your series a few days after the Fourth of July weekend, and the United States is still celebrating its 250-year birthday which dates back to, obviously, the Fourth of July signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a document which you dive into in the podcast.

But I will quote for our listeners who might not have it on hand. The Declaration reads, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” while also describing Native Americans as “merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”

It’s well known that this and many other contradictions exist in our founding document, but why was this important for you to underscore here? What does it tell us both about our history, but also about today?

Rebecca Nagle: One thing that is important is the meaning of the word “savages,” and what does it mean for our founders to call Native people savages?

We all know the part of the Declaration of Independence that we’re taught in school — that all men are created equal; life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. But alongside those Enlightenment ideals, the founders included really their deep hatred for Indigenous people. The word “savages” has a really specific meaning in the late 1700s, which is that there are societies and groups of people that are seen as civilized, as deserving of human rights, and then there are people that are something less than human, and those are savages.

It’s a term that at the time carries a lot of meaning, and the founders are saying, “We’re not going to extend these Enlightenment ideals to these Indigenous people, to these savages.” The other........

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