The influential social media account @ChrisO_Wiki, a self-described “independent military history author and researcher,” on Sunday published a long thread which began: “1/ The US Government has quietly removed a memorial to Black soldiers who died in World War II from the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, South Limburg. The move follows a complaint from the right-wing Heritage Foundation to the American Battle Monuments Commission.”
U.S. Army veteran and retired Judge Bob Orr, who served as Associate Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court (1995-2004), responded by amplifying the post and writing: “Read this entire posting. It is disgraceful beyond adequate description what @Heritage and the Trump cowards in the administration have done here. Main stream [sic] media, get off your collectives hands and cover this.” (The Dutch source referenced in the thread is the NRC, a prominent Netherlands daily known for quality journalism.)
Read this entire posting. It is disgraceful beyond adequate description what @Heritage and the Trump cowards in the administration have done here. Main stream media, get off your collectives hands and cover this. https://t.co/AnwhHg8Es0
— Judge Bob Orr (@JudgeBobOrr) November 9, 2025
Note: Orr was a delegate to the 2016 Republican National Convention, where he told a reporter that he would not vote for his party’s nominee, Donald Trump, and said that Trump would be “a danger to the country.” His comments led him to leave the convention early. In February 2021, Orr left the Republican party.
Larry Sabato, the Robert Kent Gooch Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, where he is also the founder and director of the Center for Politics, which works to promote civic engagement and participation, responded to the alleged removal of the memorial: “It’s hard to be shocked by this administration anymore but we ought to be disgusted by this action.”
The thread also cites veteran Dutch politician Theo Bovens of the conservative Christian Democratic Appeal party, who reportedly pledged to address the issue with the new Trump-appointed American ambassador Joe Popolo.
(NOTE: Popolo is a Trump loyalist who supported the President in 2016 and whose “donations to Republican candidates, conservative-affiliated PACs, and Super PACs in the 2024 election cycle amounted to $2,971,408.87,” according a profile in The Heights, a magazine from Boston College, his alma mater.)
11/ Theo Bovens, the chairman of the Black Liberators in the Netherlands foundation and also leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Appeal party, says that he intends to raise the removal with the new US Ambassador to the Netherlands, Joe Popolo.
— ChrisO_wiki (@ChrisO_wiki) November 9, 2025
Professor Kees Ribbens, senior researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, is also quoted in the thread, being credited with identifying the Heritage Foundation as the genesis of the complaint about the monument, which allegedly “evaded Trump’s executive order to halt policies promoting diversity and inclusion.”
Kees lists his chief academic interest as the exploration of “how memories of war, genocide and mass violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are represented in words and images.”