from the a-different-kind-of-gay dept
Back before the plan to destroy our democracy got started in earnest, and back before the pandemic that dominated our lives for several years (whether we thought it should or not), was a time when we were having quaint, albeit silly, arguments about confederate monuments and whether they should be removed. My memory is good enough to recall that a great cry went out from a certain segment of the population, one which declared that the removal of these monuments, setup purposefully by the losing side of the (first, for now) Civil War to intimidate former slaves, was somehow the destruction of American history. “Don’t take that monument of General Lee,” went the argument. “Leave the statue that venerated the traitor up, because it’s part of the American legacy.”
It’s a very stupid argument at best. And likely purely disingenous if otherwise. I’m fairly certain that the lack of statues of Il Duce in Italy hasn’t somehow erased his name from the lexicon of Italians.
But if that argument is going to be made, at least make it consistently. Put another way, even those who are cheering on Trump’s literal whitewashing of American government and culture, represented by his attempt to obliterate all things DEI, surely think it ought not be done in a way that removes any historical references or happenings, right?
Well, because Team Trump has all the precision of a surgeon operating on an open heart with a backhoe, mistakes will be made. We’ve already seen instances where terms sometimes associated with DEI efforts are being queried in anti-DEI efforts, which ends up removing programs or content from government efforts that has zero to do with anything DEI. A medical program getting nixed because it referred to “point of care” as “POC,” which was confused with “people of color,” is a personal favorite of mine.
And now we are in fact seeing government references to our own history being erased as a result of that same sloppiness, in admittedly hilarious fashion.
References to a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan and the first women to pass Marine infantry training are among the tens of thousands of photos and online posts marked for deletion as the Defense Department works to purge diversity, equity and inclusion content, according to a database obtained by The Associated Press.
The database, which was confirmed by U.S. officials and published by AP, includes more than 26,000 images that have been flagged for removal across every military branch. But the eventual total could be much higher.
Now, I’m fairly certain that the Trump team doesn’t actually think the flying fortress that dropped the first nuclear bomb used in war was gay itself. Instead, this is a querried search looking for certain terms that someone who doesn’t have more than two brain cells to rub together assumed would always have a DEI context. But, for the sake of clarity, the Enola Gay was not itself gay. Nor was Enola Gay herself, by all accounts, given that she was the mother of the pilot who flew the plane.
But while America’s most infamous airplane is the headlines, there is a ton of other content that is being either erroneously removed, even where the content is historical in nature.
The vast majority of the Pentagon purge targets women and minorities, including notable milestones made in the military. And it also removes a large number of posts that mention various commemorative months — such as those for Black and Hispanic people and women.
Several photos of an Army Corps of Engineers dredging project in California were marked for deletion, apparently because a local engineer in the photo had the last name Gay. And a photo of Army Corps biologists was on the list, seemingly because it mentioned they were recording data about fish — including their weight, size, hatchery and gender.
Now, in the Trump administration’s defense, it has occasionally caught whiff that some historical content was being flagged to be removed and insisted it be retained. But that defense is quite weak when those mistakes are the result of an overly broad, maliciously constructed executive order from someone that demands both swift and severe action.
No one at the top appears to really care how this gets done, so long as it gets done. In fact, it appears the Defense Department doesn’t have the resources to deal with the mandated purge of so-called “DEI” content. As the AP report notes, a single defense civilian has been given the unenviable task of vetting more than 10,000 flagged articles and photos for the Marine Corps. On top of that, they’re also expected to handle removal of content from hundreds of social media accounts maintained by that single branch of the military.
Here’s the endgame, though, inadvertently explained by the content removal memo issued by the DoD.
On Feb. 26, the Pentagon ordered all the military services to spend countless hours poring over years of website postings, photos, news articles and videos to remove any mentions that “promote diversity, equity and inclusion.”
If they couldn’t do that by Wednesday, they were told to “temporarily remove from public display” all content published during the Biden administration’s four years in office.
It’s not just about erasing women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people from the history of the military. It’s about erasing an entire administration’s contribution to this combined history.
It’s also absolutely insane to go through this exercise, if only for recruiting reasons. I can’t imagine that anyone in the Trump administration would be so ignorant to say that they want fewer recruits to the military among the protected classes. But a chill upon those recruits seems fairly inevitable, given the flat disrespect this move represents.
But, hey, just another day in Trumperica. I’m sure men wearing jackets adorned with confederate patches will show up any minute now to decry the erasure of our national history… right?
Filed Under: censorship, defense department, dei, donald trump, enola gay, pete hegseth, war on woke, woke
