A federal judge orders the National Park Service to restore slavery-related exhibits at George Washington's Philadelphia home.

OK. Geography lesson. George Washington had two presidential homes. Mount Vernon, in Virginia, is the famous one. The other one is in Philadelphia. It is on Sixth and Market. It is called the President’s House Site. It is a National Park Service property. The President of the United States lived there for seven years. The country was capitaled in Philadelphia before the White House was built.

What is interesting about that property, historically, is that George Washington held enslaved people there. Nine of them. Including one named Ona Judge, who escaped and made it to New Hampshire. The exhibit at the Philadelphia site, for years, covered this. Names. Stories. Photographs. The whole thing.

In January, this year, those exhibits came down. Quietly. Per the new directive on historical interpretation in the National Park system. The Park Service, when asked, said they were under review.

A federal judge, on Monday, ordered the exhibits put back. The judge looked at the procedural record and compared the rationale for the removal to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984. That is, in administrative law, the opposite of the softest possible language. That is language the court spent the long lunch hour writing.

Hon. Buddy. The first president of the United States held enslaved people in his presidential residence. That is a true thing. It is on the records of the time. It is, I should say, historically inconvenient, in that it is true and embarrassing both, but the job of a museum is not to spare the country its truths. The job is to put the truth on the wall.

The Park Service, in January, spared the country a truth.

A federal judge, in February, put the truth back on the wall.

This is, give or take, the whole story of the culture of the country right now. The administration removes a factual exhibit at a historical site the administration was not involved in building. The exhibit was made by historians and paid for with public money. The court puts the exhibit back. The administration has, on the public record, no comment.

I have been to the President’s House Site. I have stood in front of those exhibits. I have read the names of the nine people. Ona Judge. Hercules Posey, the cook. Austin, her brother. The names matter. They are etched.

The reason I am calling this out, hon, is that you can tell when a country is quietly trying to forget by what its government tries to take down. You take down the names of nine people in a Philadelphia museum and a judge puts them back and that is your week.

You ever notice how the people who say they love America the most are the ones who take down the parts of it that are most American?

Funny how that works.