Our country's magnificent National Park System has been called "America's greatest idea."

These 433 treasures — along with our rich diversity of national museums and historical sites — each have their own stories to tell. But the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, for together they express America's egalitarian spirit and "little-d" democratic possibilities, urging us to keep pushing for economic fairness and social justice for all.

And that's exactly why President Donald Trump and his cabal of moneyed elites and right-wing extremists are out to purge, erase and officially censor the parks' historical presentations. After all, it's hard to impose plutocratic autocracy if such tangible examples of historic truth and democratic rebellion are openly displayed!

Thus, as dictated by the GOP's secretive anti-democracy clique, Project 2025, Trump's ideological Thought Police have set themselves up as an Orwellian "Ministry of Truth" to sanitize and Disneyfy the telling of our people's real history. For example, Trump complains that parks and museums hurt America's self-image by telling "how bad slavery was."

Hello, Donald — that's not an image, it's a reality as central to our national character as our historic commitment to equality. And the explosive conflict between ugly repression and flowering egalitarianism is ever-present today. Consider the push by Sen. Eric Schmitt and others in the GOP's Christian Nationalist movement to deny the unifying principle that "all men are created equal."

There's not enough whitewash in the world to cover up the deep ugliness of slavery, and it's self-destructive for government to try. The fundamental purpose of recording our shared history is to learn from it.

LET ME TAKE YOU INSIDE MICHAEL MILKEN'S MUSEUM OF GREED

Years ago in Juarez, Mexico, I wandered into a carnival sideshow that flabbergasted this Texas country boy. Stumbling out, I murmured: "Now I've seen everything ... and then some." But now, decades later, I've been even more stupefied by the news that convicted Wall Street swindler Michael Milken has just opened his own bizarre freak show in Washington, DC.

Touted as a "tourist attraction," his museum glorifies predatory capitalists (like him), hailing them as heroic American geniuses! The infamous junk-bond scammer grandiosely labels his monument the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream. It's located right across the street from the White House (though it's rumored that even his buddy Trump considered Michael's "Monument to Mammon" to be too explicitly obscene to attach it directly to the East Wing).

In a perverse bit of symbolism, the thing occupies the former headquarters of a bank that was forced to close 20 years ago because of a money-laundering scandal. How's that for Karma? But, to gloss over such ugliness, Milken has gilded his legacy mausoleum with Trumpian gold. The rooms, draperies, furniture — and even a fake tree in the atrium — all gleam with gold leaf, emphasizing Milken's credo that the goal of life is money... and the power to get it.

Educational exhibits include an interactive game on compound interest, as well as a display of Mike's high school cheerleading uniform. Missing, though, is any mention of the full presidential pardon this avaricious criminal wrangled from Trump in 2020, letting the racketeer escape prison for stealing a billion dollars from people who trusted him.

Still, if you visit his Washington freak show, the gift shop offers a memento that sums up his life: a $22 Milken money clip.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: John Deleon at Unsplash