Last Saturday saw the fourth annual Women’s Rights Day with demonstrations all over the nation, many in very inclement weather. This year’s march was fueled in part by the calendar: 2020 is the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, expanding the ability to vote to those without that icky Y chromosome.

I have slightly mixed feeling about that. Every egalitarian victory should be celebrated, but, damn, why should we get all enthused over 144 years of denying half of our population the right to participate in our vaunted democracy? Whereas I can hold a grudge until it screams, we should be educating citizens current and future to all the limitations we have placed on women, including those many that have not been sliced from our massive national discrimination pie.

However, the National Archives celebrates that victory by layering it with a purposely misleading patina of truthiness. They maliciously chose to alter it, and in complete contradiction to their mission, they celebrated women’s suffrage under a veil of lies.

At their women’s rights exhibition, our National Archives offered up for public gawking a wonderful, human-filled shot of the first Women’s Rights Day march in Washington DC, held on January 21 2017, the very day after Donald John Trump’s inauguration in the very same city.

The fact that the Women’s Day march attracted a much, much larger audience than Trump’s inauguration must have made Donald’s tiny orange willy shrivel up, turn black and bounce onto the ground.

Yeah, that’s fair. But it’s not my point. The aforementioned National Archives exhibit of photos from that first Women’s Rights Day march was edited. Photoshopped. In fact, censored. The National Archives is a government agency, so their action meets the dictionary definition of censorship. Our government workers blurred signs that criticized Trump and/or noted various articles of women’s naughty bits. Guess which word on the placard that read “If my vagina could shoot bullets, it’d be less REGULATED” was blurred. The fact is… the statement on that placard is a fact.

This was brought to the attention of the National Archives masters and, after considerable publicity and condemnation, they apologized for their willful acts of deceit and revisionism. I gather they wanted to hold off any attempt from concerned citizens circling the building, dancing around and singing “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

I see no reason to perceive any lessening of emotion on either side. Just waddle out to the Capitol Building tonight around 2 AM and ask Moscow Mitch what he thinks of the National Archives and their need to pander to his party. This sort of thing can happen again; odds are, it probably will.

History is supposed to be about the truth. Purposely lying about our history by an official government agency is a crime against humanity. By severely editing that photograph and redefining the concerns of the demonstrators, these mendacious chroniclers of reformed reality foster a very important apprehension – and a very frightening one at that.

What else has the National Archives been lying about?