The Great Erasure: When Deleting History Turns Into Deleting Us
Protestor holding a sign that reads “First They Came for Immigrants.” Photo by Barbara Burgess via Unsplash
The Systematic Erasure of Progress
The latest attack isn’t just about policies—it’s about wiping history clean. Over the past 90 days, the federal government has been scrubbing websites, erasing language, and rolling back acknowledgments of marginalized communities. It’s not just omission; it’s a deliberate strategy. A gaslighting tactic designed to make people question whether progress ever happened in the first place.
Gone are references to LGBTQ+ rights and women’s suffrage celebrations on government sites.
Black History Month has even been erased from official calendars.
The Department of Defense is deleting thousands of images—many simply because they contain the word "gay."
And now, in a stunning reversal of civil rights protections, the DOD will no longer require military contractors to prohibit segregated facilities—rolling back a safeguard that has been in place since 1965.
What does this mean? It means a company working with the military can now legally separate employees by race, religion, or gender identity without consequence. It’s not just LGBTQ+ workers who are impacted—this opens the door to racial segregation, religious exclusion, and systemic discrimination at a level we haven’t seen in decades.
And just like that, civil rights protections vanish—not with an announcement, not with a debate, but with a quiet deletion.
The Playbook of Erasure: Gaslighting on a National Scale
When a government wants to control people, it doesn’t always do so through overt force. Sometimes, it just makes history disappear.
That’s what’s happening right now.
Erase the evidence. Delete mentions of Black history, LGBTQ+ contributions, and women’s rights from public records. If people can’t find it, did it ever happen?
Rewrite the narrative. Claim that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts were always “divisive,” and that rolling them back is about “unity.”
Deny, deny, deny. When people notice the deletions, pretend they never existed or were never necessary.
Make people question their own memory. Gaslight the public into thinking these protections were never really that important—or never existed at all.
Sound familiar? It should. This is the same strategy authoritarian regimes have used throughout history to consolidate power.
The Psychological Toll: What Happens When Your Reality Is Erased?
For marginalized communities—especially queer, Black, Indigenous, and other historically erased groups—this is nothing new. We’ve always had to fight to be remembered. To have our existence acknowledged in the public sphere.
But this kind of mass erasure? It does something deeper. It creates doubt—and that doubt can be soul-level destabilizing.
For highly sensitive people, perfectionists, and anyone who already struggles to feel like they belong, this erasure hits even harder. It mirrors the emotional terrain of complex trauma—being told you're imagining things, being punished for speaking up, being labeled “too much.”
It’s not just political. It’s personal. This is system-level gaslighting that echoes the same psychological tactics many trauma survivors have already fought to escape.
Real Clients. Real Fear. Real Stories.
I’ve had clients—students, activists, and people of color—tell me they’re afraid to leave the country right now.
Not just because of global tension, but because they worry they won’t be let back in.
Others have stopped posting political opinions online, afraid they’ll be flagged, watched, or penalized later.
And I get it.
When Trump was in office the first time, I had to go through a routine background check for my therapy license.
I’d done it before without issue.
But this time?
I got flagged—for an arrest when I was 20, protesting the Trojan nuclear power plant in Oregon.
I had to write a letter.
And explain myself.
To the goddamn FBI.
Forty years later, that arrest suddenly became an issue.
Not because I’d done anything wrong, but because dissent itself had become suspicious.
And back then, I thought that was bad.
Who’s Being Silenced Right Now?
Just last month, a Palestinian student at Columbia was targeted for deportation—for protesting genocide. A judge ruled he could be deported—even as white supremacists who stormed the Capitol were pardoned.
Another U.S. resident, Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, was grabbed off the street by a man in a hoodie, then thrown into an unmarked vehicle by masked ICE agents. Her screams were caught on video by a neighbor. Her crime? Writing an op-ed critical of Israel’s bombing of Gaza. No charges. No evidence. Just state-sanctioned silence.
We’ve also seen a gay man—Andry Hernandez Romero, a 31-year-old makeup artist—wrongfully deported to El Salvador. He had no criminal record, but was accused of gang affiliation based on two crown tattoos, honoring his mother and father. Romero had fled Venezuela, seeking asylum from anti-gay persecution. Instead of protection, he was sent back—alongside 237 others now held at CECOT.
Potential life in prison for being a brown person with tattoos?
What the actual fuck?
National Security Cosplay: Real Lives, Fake Vests
A week ago, GOP lawmakers toured CECOT—the infamous El Salvador prison where García is being held. It’s been condemned as a human rights disaster: overcrowded, violent, and routinely described as a modern-day gulag. Naturally, they posted selfies and praised it as a model of strength.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration seems more invested in optics than accountability.
There’s no real policy—just photo ops.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been showing up to field operations and Fox News appearances in a branded bulletproof vest and full makeup—earning her the nickname “ICE Barbie.”
In one particularly dystopian video staged at CECOT, men in shackles are dragged from planes, their heads shaved, forced onto buses, then shoved into overcrowded cells. No trial. No rights. Just rows of bodies on cold concrete, sitting in silence, looking like their souls had been disappeared.
In another photo op, Noem stood in front of shirtless imprisoned men—covered in tattoos, crammed together in a cage, denied basic human rights—no contact with the outside world, no letters, no phone calls, not even mattresses—while she posed in full makeup wearing a goddamn Rolex.
Not to be outdone, FBI Director Kash Patel recently posted photos of himself in tactical gear at a training exercise—like a cosplay cover shoot for a regime fantasy calendar.
But when Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) flew to El Salvador to advocate for García, he was denied access to the prison. His convoy was stopped by military forces. The U.S. embassy has not even been asked by Trump’s administration to check on García’s well-being.
UPDATE – April 18, 2025:
After public pressure and political noise, Senator Van Hollen was eventually allowed to meet with García.
Instead, in a bizarre made-for-PR moment, the two sat down in a restaurant, with García in street clothes.
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele mocked the meeting on social media, writing that García was “sipping margaritas with the senator.”After the photo op, García was moved to a less abusive facility, and yet another federal judge issued a ruling rebuking the Trump administration for refusing to comply with court orders.
And still—the administration is now attempting to push the case back to the Supreme Court, dragging its heels instead of honoring a basic legal mandate.
So yes—raising hell works.
And no—this isn’t over.
“It’s Time for You to Leave the United States”
In case you thought this only applied to students, asylum seekers, or protesters—last week, a U.S.-born immigration attorney from Massachusetts received a letter from Homeland Security that read:
“It’s time for you to leave the United States.”
It continued:
“If you don’t, the federal government will find you.”
That’s the second immigration lawyer to receive this kind of letter. The first was a U.S. citizen born in the Dominican Republic.
Both women. Both legal professionals. Both told—by their own government—that they don’t belong.
A U.S.-born physician also received the same letter. Students in Utah and Georgia, legally in the U.S., have been told to leave within 7 days.
These letters are going out across the country—and the fear and rage is rising.
Some days, yeah—it does feel like it might be time for me to leave, too.
What the Actual Fuck
We are only 12 or so weeks into Trump’s second term—and already, due process, international law, and constitutional rights are optional.
Eighty-seven days in, and the fire alarms aren’t just ringing—they’re being ignored.
At this point, it’s hard to know what’s worse—the cruelty or the performance. People are being disappeared, mocked, used for propaganda, and erased in real time while government officials pose for photos in tactical cosplay and designer watches.
We’re watching the playbook of fascism unfold in real time. And it’s working—because it’s making people too scared to speak, too exhausted to resist, and too unsure of what’s real to push back.
The Disappearing Infrastructure of Truth
NOAA — The government’s primary climate research arm is being gutted.
Climate labs and weather offices are being shut down with no plan to replace them.
CDC — So many things have been cut—including all cruise ship outbreak inspectors and the lead epidemiologist—despite multiple outbreaks already this year.
Social Security Administration — Plans are in motion to cut regional offices by 90% and shift public communication exclusively to X.
Yes, X. Because apparently now we expect our grandparents to create an account on Elon’s hellscape app just to get updates about their benefits.
You cannot make this shit up.
It’s not just disinformation—it’s disconnection. Isolation.
And the emotional fallout is real.
And yeah—here I go again, writing another political blog.
But how could I not? Politics is mental health.
If you're queer, Bi+, neurodivergent, disabled, a person of color, an immigrant, or any kind of outsider—then policy is personal.
Pretending it’s not? That’s part of the gaslighting.
What Therapy Has to Do with All This (And Why I Write About It)
If you’ve read my blog before, you know I didn’t exactly set out to be a political mental health writer.
But here we are.
Because if you’re a Highly Sensitive Person—or queer, Bi+, a perfectionist, neurodivergent, or someone who’s been gaslit by systems your whole damn life—this is your mental health.
And this is what I see in session after session:
Clients anxious about the future and afraid to trust their own perception.
Clients who’ve spent years trying to heal from childhood invalidation—and are now watching their reality get deleted in real time.
People exhausted by the emotional labor of staying alert and staying human.
That’s why therapy matters. That’s why writing about this matters.
Therapy can’t erase the chaos, but it can help you navigate it—with clarity.
It can help you not lose yourself in the confusion and bullshit.
It can give you space to feel the weight of the world—and still come back to yourself.
As an HSP therapist, I know how hard this is. But I also know how powerful it is to stay awake in a world that wants you to go numb.
You are not overreacting.
You are not imagining it.
And you are not alone.
Why This Matters (And Why We Have to Fight Like Hell)
Erasing history is about control.
It’s about shaping the future by manipulating the past—who gets remembered, who gets erased, and who gets to write the next chapter.
If we let this happen without calling it out, it sets a precedent:
If they can delete Black history, LGBTQ+ contributions, and women’s rights today, what stops them from deleting voting rights, worker protections, or disability rights next?
If we don’t remember history, we can’t learn from it.
And that is exactly what they’re counting on.
And now—this isn’t just about erasure. It’s about escalation.
In the last 48 hours, Trump has added two more groups to his list of targets:
“Homegrown criminals” are next to be sent to El Salvador.
He also announced plans to deport people with mental illness.
Let that sink in: Every single U.S. citizen who’s received a “It’s time to leave the United States” letter so far has been a woman. And now the Trump administration is floating the idea of removing mentally ill people from the country altogether—with no mention of what qualifies, how it’s determined, or where it ends.
This isn’t just erasure. It’s exile.
How to Fight Back
Speak up. Talk about what’s being erased. Share the deleted information widely. Make it impossible to ignore.
Archive everything. Screenshots, PDFs, saved documents—because once something is gone, it’s hard to prove it was ever there.
Call your representatives. Demand answers. They rely on people being too exhausted to fight back.
Refuse to be gaslit. The deletions are real. The erasure is real. The backsliding is real. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
This is a moment of reckoning.
If they can erase history, they can erase rights.
And if they can erase rights, they can erase people.
We can’t let that happen.
Want more truth-telling from a therapist who’s still doing her own work?
Join me on Substack, where I share rebellious reflections for highly sensitive, burnout-prone badasses trying to stay awake in a world that wants us numb.
Therapy. Rebellion. Burnout. Queerness. All the stuff polite people don’t talk about—but we do.
👉 Subscribe here.
Disclaimer: This blog reflects my thoughts on mental health and isn’t a substitute for therapy. The advice is general and may not fit everyone. If you’re struggling, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.
