Editor's note: This headline has been updated, and the article has been updated to include an additional quote from Judge Rufe's order.
A U.S. District judge invoked anti-totalitarian author George Orwell to deliver a sharp rebuke of the Trump administration’s removal of items honoring the history of slavery in the United States from a Philadelphia exhibit.
“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not,” declared U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe.
The lawsuit by the City of Philadelphia against U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum concerned the removal of slavery exhibits at The President’s House, which is part of Independence National Historical Park.
Judge Rufe wrote that, “in its argument, the government claims it alone has the power to erase, alter, remove and hide historical accounts on taxpayer and local government-funded monuments within its control. Its claims in this regard echo Big Brother’s domain in Orwell’s 1984.”
She also quoted from the iconic novel. A portion of that quote reads:
“The largest section of the [government’s] Records Department . . . consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of the Times [a newspaper] which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophesies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it.”
Rufe wrote that the U.S. government “asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overwritten. And why? Solely because, as Defendants state, it has the power.”
She also blasted the government’s actions, which “impede the separation of powers instituted by the Constitution.”
“Defendants acted in excess of their authority as agencies authorized by Congress within the executive branch,” she added. "An agency ... cannot arbitrarily decide what is true, based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership."
In her 40-page memorandum, posted by Politico’s Kyle Cheney, Judge Rufe found that removal of historical panels and other items would constitute irreparable harm, and ordered that “Defendants reinstall all panels, displays, and video exhibits that were previously in place..”
