The White House report says the Smithsonian should tell “what actually happened” as accurately as possible.

But it also requires that history be inspiring, unifying, ennobling, and worthy of Americans’ affection.

That contradiction produces practical falsehoods:

• Pilgrims become founders, but not colonizers.
  Both descriptions are true, but only one preserves the heroic story.
• Native mourning becomes anti-American.
  A real Indigenous memory is recast as disloyalty.
• America merely “inherited” slavery.
  That conceals how Americans expanded, codified and protected it.
• Christian conquest becomes sharing Christ’s love.
  Sincere faith is used to erase the coercion carried out beside it.

None of these formulations must be completely fabricated to mislead.

That is what makes them effective.

A practical falsehood uses selected facts to create a materially false understanding of what happened.

The report does not demand that every uncomfortable fact disappear.

It demands that those facts never be allowed to change the conclusion:

America must remain admirable.

That is not historical accuracy.

It is patriotic narrative discipline enforced by the federal government.