For Trump, erasure of history is part of the authoritarian plan

Removed from government websites, all in the name of purging the dreaded "DEI." But the true goal is suppressing truth and feeding Americans propaganda.

The iconic photograph from 1945 by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press of U.S. Marines of the 28th Regiment, 5th Division, raising the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, sat for years on a Pentagon web page honoring the contributions of Native Americans who served in World War II.

One of the six Marines in the photo was Pfc. Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian. The page is now gone, targeted in the Trump purge of DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—which has also removed other pages focused on the contributions of other Native Americans, women, Black Americans, LGBTQ service members and others.

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How deranged is this? How can anyone not see the censorship and the erasure of history, and note that this is exactly what Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did while trying to control public discourse by revising German history?

The Washington Post uncovered the newest missing pages:

Multiple articles about the Navajo code talkers, who were critical to America’s victory at Iwo Jima and the wider Pacific theater of the Second World War, were also removed, along with a profile of a Tonawanda Seneca officer who drafted the terms of the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomattox toward the end of the Civil War.

The purge, which also targeted multiple webpages about women and LGBTQ+ service members, highlights how aggressively military leaders are pursuing President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI mandate. Their actions mean that some of the most authoritative sources of public information about the achievements of minority service members decades before government DEI programs existed have disappeared.

First, let’s be clear that DEI initiatives in hiring or any other programs are meant to make sure that a qualified pool of people of every race and background is reached out to via various channels.

They’re not about giving jobs to marginalized groups over others; they’re simply about making sure all groups know about a specific position or program and can apply, so that there is a big, diverse pool of qualified candidates. We like diversity. It’s what America is about—or was about.

But whatever you think of DEI, how it got distorted to where it’s now about removing images and documentation about people who already performed jobs—people who made enormous contributions to our country—is the story of bigotry and hate.

More to the point, it’s the story of white supremacy. There is simply no excuse for taking away aspects of history because you don’t like who made the history. That’s pure censorship, wanting to hold up only certain Americans as true Americans while erasing others. And that’s about an attempt to reshape Americans’ views, control their thinking, and suppress truths deemed threatening to a white supremacist worldview.

We saw it begin on day one of Trump’s presidency, when mentions of “lesbian,” “bisexual,” “gay,” “transgender,” “sexual orientation,” and “gender identity,” were expunged from the White House website. The Health and Human Services Department then removed all references to HIV and groups affected, such as transgender people.

Then we saw the Stonewall Monument page on the National Park Service website altered to take out the word “transgender”—when transgender people were at the forefront of the Stonewall riots.

Last Week the Arlington Cemetery page was altered to remove all references to Black, Latino and female veterans, with the claim, again, that they were doing to so to stop practices that “promote” DEI, which is nonsensical:

On these pages, users could read short biographies about the people buried in the cemetery, including Gen. Colin L. Powell, the youngest and first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff;

Hector Santa Anna, a World War II B-17 bomber pilot, Berlin Airlift pilot and career military leader;

members of the Tuskegee Airmen, the country’s first Black military airmen whose accomplishments include completing more than 1,800 missions during World War II;

and members of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only all-Black, all-female Women’s Army Corps unit to serve overseas during World War II.

Users could also read about Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first Black person to sit on the high court, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is buried alongside her husband, Martin Ginsburg, an Army veteran.

But now they’re gone. So far, war heroes are among 26,000 images purged from government websites, all in the name of eradicating the dreaded DEI.

The twisting of DEI—and the expansive way attacks on it are weaponized to censor and discriminate—has now extended to the Trump administration no longer explicitly prohibiting businesses from having segregated facilities as NPR reported today:

After a recent change by the Trump administration, the federal government no longer explicitly prohibits contractors from having segregated restaurants, waiting rooms and drinking fountains.

The segregation clause is one of several identified in a public memo issued by the General Services Administration last month, affecting all civil federal agencies. The memo explains that it is making changes prompted by President Trump's executive order on diversity, equity and inclusion, which repealed an executive order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 regarding federal contractors and nondiscrimination. The memo also addresses Trump's executive order on gender identity.

To be clear, there are federal civil rights laws and state civil rights laws that ban such discrimination. So no businesses, whether or not they are federal contractors, can have segregated drinking fountains. But the fact that the federal government no longer explicitly restates to federal contractors that they cannot engage in discrimination—and actually took the action of changing text—raises a red flag about where this administration wants to go.

And it’s all under the cover of ending “DEI,” which is now just another term for installing fascism.