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Adminstration Cracking Down on UnAmerican National Park Service Gift Shops

   Published Date: July 13, 2025  1 Comment on Adminstration Cracking Down on UnAmerican National Park Service Gift Shops

Yesterday I saw that there si a crackdown on UnAmerican gifts shops when I was reading Kevin Levin’s Substack..The Interior Department is following President Trump’s Executive Order to clean up how the National Parks present America to its visitors. After telling visitors to report UnAmerican park Rangers, it is now doing a comprehensive review of what is sold at the NPS gift shops to spare visitors from learning about racial discrimination and LGBT communities. The story was covered in the Washington Post. Here is what it said:

Trump officials have directed staff at national parks to review all items in gift shops for anti-American content, according to an internal directive reviewed by The Washington Post. The move is part of the administration’s wider campaign to scrub federal institutions of “corrosive ideology” recognizing historical racism and sexism.

The directive instructs park staff to report by Friday any retail items that have content that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living” or that includes “matters unrelated to the beauty, abundance or grandeur” of a natural feature in its description.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March seeking to reshape how American history is told at federal institutions including parks and the Smithsonian museums, blaming former president Joe Biden for casting historic U.S. milestones in a negative light. That order spurred an initiative asking national park visitors to report anti-American signs, which instead drew positive comments in support of the parks and criticisms of Trump officials for staff and budgetcuts, according to a Post review of leaked comments.

Park advocacy groups say they are concerned that the Trump administration is attempting to sanitize American history.

“It’d be a shame to pull an actual historical accounting and a well-researched book off the shelves,” said Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group.

The National Park Service said in a statement that it was acting in line with a directive by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to implement Trump’s executive order, which also applies to park associations and concession operators.

“We’re working closely with them to facilitate an efficient review that does not hinder or impede retail operations,” the Park Service said.

Brengel said park leaders face a choice of following the administration’s directive to flag everything that could possiblybe deemed anti-American or following an individual park’s mission, which may be to inform the public about the civil war, Indigenous history, slavery or other topics this administration might consider defamatory of historical Americans.

“Will this result in the book stores just selling coffee table picture books? I don’t know,” she said.

She said the directive adds to the workload of parks that are already severely understaffed after the administration fired hundreds of employees and cut funding. “There is no park that can read every book on the book shelves in this time frame,” Brengel said.

National park gift shops are generally run by the staffs of “cooperating associations,” nonprofit groups that essentially adopt individual parks, but the Park Service has control over what is sold there.

Western National Parks, one of the largest such associations, is aware of the directive and will cooperate with park staff on it, spokesperson Julie Thompson said.

“Nothing has been dramatically impacted in terms of what we’re carrying on our shelves,” Thompson said….

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Author: Patrick Young

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