I wish this blog post were a April Fool's joke, but it is not. There are cave paintings in the Lower Pecos River canyon in Texas that are 5,700 years old. Some of them run over a hundred feet wide. An archaeologist named Carolyn Boyd has spent her career studying them and calls the canyons an "ancient library containing hundreds of books authored by 175 generations of painters." theartnewspaper
Rock art along the Rio Grande that dated to be 5,700 is a potential target for destruction by the Trump administration.
The federal government designated the area a National Historic Landmark in 2021. Then in early 2026, landowners started getting federal notices that a border wall would be coming through. Boyd estimates around 80 known sites would fall south of the proposed wall, with another 13 within 500 meters of it. theartnewspaper The same government that put up the landmark plaque is now potentially sending in the construction equipment.
Orwell said he who controls the past controls the future. Most people nod at that and move on. But this is what it actually looks like in practice.
And it's not just a canyon in Texas. The Kennedy Center has been politically taken over. The NEA has been gutting grants with form letter emails. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting — nearly 60 years old — voted to dissolve itself pittsburghartscouncil rather than sit around defunded and vulnerable. A third of American museums have lost government funding pittsburghartscouncil since the current administration took office. A slavery memorial got pulled out of Independence Park in Philadelphia.
Hitler understood something that polite people don't like to say out loud — art isn't decoration, it's the story a culture tells itself about who it is. So he destroyed the art that told the wrong story and replaced it with art that only told his. That's not ancient history, that's a operating manual.
You don't need bonfires. You defund the institutions. You pull the exhibits. You build a wall next to a 5,700-year-old painting and call it a security measure. Pause and think about it, 5,700 years old art predates governments. This is more than a public monument. It's a message from our past we should not lose; Even Civil War monuments of awful people should not be destroyed as well, but rather placed in a safe harbor for those who appreciate their message.
PBS and NPR weren't perfect. Nothing is. But they were oriented toward something other than profit or a political agenda. Local journalism in places that couldn't support it any other way. Emergency alerts. Classical music. Without those local stations, millions of Americans lose independent media entirely pittsburghartscouncil — the administration called it funding "radical propaganda." What it actually produces is silence.
That's always been the goal. Silence is the point. Art and independent media are how a society keeps a record of itself. Dismantle those, and you don't just win the argument — you erase the evidence it ever happened.
Those paintings survived thousands of years of floods and cartels. Whether they survive a government that called them a national treasure and then routed a wall through them — we'll see.