Proliferating Memory Holes

George W. Bush appointed judge invokes Orwell

In a recent ruling, a federal judge ordered the Department of the Interior to restore exhibits at the President’s House site in Philadelphia. The exhibits had been removed because they were about slavery and the people enslaved by George Washington. The judge opened the opinion with a quotation from Orwell’s 1984, suggesting that the federal government is acting like a “Ministry of Truth.”

That ruling concerns a physical site, but revisionism and censorship have intensified in the second Trump administration, which relies on established totalitarian methods. The first administration openly displayed climate denial, circulated lists of words “forbidden” within federal agencies, and imposed travel bans targeting Muslim-majority countries. It also normalized broader patterns of racialized othering.

What is new in Trump II — discussed in more detail below — is the pervasiveness of these practices: the disappearance of congressionally mandated climate assessments, the repeal of the EPA’s Endangerment Finding, and the policing of language in scientific grants.

The Silencing Science Tracker web site documents many disconcerting examples of authoritarian administrative overreach. One example is NIH Pauses Grants that Include Terms like “Health Equity” and “Structural Racism”. The opening paragraph reads:

The Trump administration has paused funding for National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants that include terms such as “health equity” and “structural racism” while they undergo additional review, according to new guidance issued to agency staff. The guidance stipulates that the review must first be conducted using a “computational text analysis tool” to scan for these and other terms that do not align with the administration’s priorities.

This is not policy. It is the narrowing of what may be said, studied, and remembered — and parts of the public record are quietly disappeared. 2026 is become 1984.

We stand and rebuild the record — alongside the Silencing Science Tracker and others.

The following may be “old news” — but given that human shortsightedness may make humanity itself “old news”, it is worth quoting the Columbia University Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Under the heading National Climate Assessments Removed from Federal Websites , it states:

As of June 30, 2025, the National Climate Assessments were no longer accessible on federal websites, with no explanation or referrals to other sources. The assessments are mandated by the 1990 Global Change Research Act and must be conducted every four years, but the administration canceled a key contract and dismissed the experts working on the next edition of the assessment earlier in the year, causing concern that the sixth NCA was “effectively destroyed.” The Congressionally mandated assessments are used by state and local governments, as well as the general public, to understand what to expect and how to prepare for a changing climate.

Two related but distinct actions are described here. First, the completed assessments — NCA1 through NCA5 — were removed from federal websites. Second, the process for producing the next assessment, NCA6, was reportedly dismantled. The former concerns public access to congressionally mandated science. The latter raises questions about compliance with the mandate itself.

The five congressionally mandated national assessments — NCA1 through NCA5 — can currently be found at the Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center.

These are lengthy reports — and even their summaries are not light reading. In a country where money matters matter most, the following will get attention:

In the 1980s, the country experienced, on average, one (inflation-adjusted) billion-dollar disaster every four months. Now, there is one every three weeks, on average. Between 2018 and 2022, the US experienced 89 billion-dollar events (Figure 1.7) year — a conservative estimate that does not account for loss of life, healthcare-related costs, or damages to ecosystem services.

Endangerment Finding

The Endangerment Finding is the EPA’s 2009 determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare — the legal cornerstone for regulating climate pollution under the Clean Air Act.

Dear reader, if you made it this far, you may also want to read this DeSmog report on the EPA’s final repeal of the Endangerment Finding: Trump EPA Abandons Climate Working Group Report in Endangerment Finding Repeal .

Apparently, the working group’s contrarianism collapsed under its own weightlessness.

Blizzard of 2026 special

The climate deniers are predictably treating this storm as proof that warming has vanished. They ignore a basic point: as global temperatures rise, energy and moisture in the atmosphere increase as well. That added energy also amplifies volatility — meaning swings between extremes can be sharper — even as cold extremes become less frequent overall. For more on this, see Cold snaps and climate demagoguery. Heavier snowfall and extended cold snaps are entirely consistent with an overall warmer atmosphere.

Evidence for the cold end of the temperature distribution is naturally sparse — extremes, by definition, are rare. The physics and thermodynamics are not controversial: the wetter the sponge, the more water it releases when squeezed harder.