The people who hate DEI really hate it when you say they’re racist. They claim their motivations aren’t racist at all — they’re just trying to be fair. They’re concerned that minorities are getting an edge over white people. It’s the same attitude that fueled Reagan’s comments about “welfare queens”: the idea that DEI means minorities are getting a free ride from the government because of their skin color.
It’s a lie. It’s about a visceral, racist revulsion against people who don’t look like them.
We can see the true motivation in action by examining what’s going on in the Department of Defense. They’re busy expunging minorities from the historical record.
The entry for Army Maj. Gen. Charles C. Rogers, the highest-ranking Black servicemember to receive the Medal of Honor, was briefly deleted from the list of Medal of Honor recipient, until the news media noticed. They deleted it in such a clumsy and revealing way, too: they changed the name of Rogers’ page to hide it from their search engine. They stuck a “dei” prefix on the file name.
After the DOD profile on Rogers was taken down, its URL returned a “404 – Page Not Found” message — and as noted by social media users like Brandon Friedman, an Army veteran and former Obama administration official, the page’s URL in the Medal of Honor Monday series was modified to add “dei” to part of its URL: “deimedal-of-honor-monday-army-maj-gen-charles-calvin-rogers.” Attempts to load the original page redirected to that “dei” link instead, with the 404 message.
I guess he was awarded the medal because he was black, not because of his heroic actions.
Hours before dawn on Nov. 1, 1968, a heavy bombardment of mortars, rockets and rocket-propelled grenades hit the 1st Battalion forward fire support base positioned near a North Vietnamese supply route in South Vietnam, the citation states.
Rogers braved North Vietnamese Army fire to direct his men’s howitzers to target the enemy — and despite being knocked off his feet and wounded by an exploding round, he led a counterattack to repel attackers who breached the defensive perimeter, according to his medal citation. Rogers was wounded again, but as more attacks followed, he reinforced defensive positions. He was later seriously wounded after joining a howitzer crew whose members had been hit by mortar fire.
That’s DEI? Give us more DEI, then.
That’s not all, though. They’re erasing mention of the Nisei battalions that fought in WWII. It’s not enough that we threw families of Japanese descent into concentration camps, but also now we’re trying to delete the memory of the Japanese Americans who volunteered to fight for the country that treated them with such contempt.
They also removed the <a href=”https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2025/03/17/navajo-code-talkers-trump-dei-military-websites-wwii>Nativeerican Code Talkers.
Articles about the renowned Native American Code Talkers have disappeared from some military websites, with several broken URLs now labeled “DEI.”
…
The Defense department’s URLs were amended with the letters DEI, suggesting they were removed following President Trump’s executive order ending federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Here’s a photo of a gang of DEI hires coasting through WWII.
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.
At this point, I think you can have a clear conscience when accusing the anti-DEI warriors (you know who they are) of being fucking racists.
And you thought the “memory hole” in 1984 was fiction.
When DEI is a very specific and recent initiative and the racists are labelling people and photographs as “DEI” from decades before someone first came up with it, it should be clear to even the densest of centrists that the racists mean when they say “DEI”.
The people enacting this are presumably white, and they’re not very competent. I guess a white dick isn’t such a wonderful skill set after all.
I wonder whether they’ll object to Purple Heart Warriors from the BBC world service? Dramatizing the history of the US 442nd Regiment. Will they demand that it be made unavailable in America?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xtttx
The way things are going they’ll delete pictures of any American official meeting with former UK PM Sunak because he isn’t a white dude. Maybe Liz Trust, because she isn’t a guy.
Sad thing is.. this could, in theory, be a sort of malicious compliance – “You want us to remove these things, but we are just going to relabel them, and make it so you can’t get to them easily, instead of deleting them, so when your ass is finally out of office and sanity returns we just have to do a search and replace to fix your idiocy.” It sure as hell would be what I would have come up with, if it was that easy to fuck with the idiot giving me illegal orders and threatening my job. Comply, if you have to, but make it easy to fix when the new boss finally gets his ass dragged out the door.
Real compliance would be what Trump himself would do – shred the files, and originals, then throw someone else under the bus when someone who gave a damn, and had the power to do something about it, demanded the documents back. And, we should be damned happy that isn’t the way its being done. Removing a prefix is “Fixable”, actual erasure of history though… what the F do we do when that really does happen, ask AI to recreate it?
While I have no illusions that this was motivated by racism, I can’t see why we should celebrate a medal of honour recipient from this atrocious war. We wouldn’t celebrate the military awards of Russian soldiers from the current special operation in Ukraine either.
Kind of depends on what the medal was for. It is possible, even in horrible circumstances, to do something praise worthy. If it was for, “Following orders, and achieving great objectives for the state”, that is one thing, if it was for something like, “Saving their squad, and many others from death in what we can’t say was a stupid situation, which shouldn’t have been happening, but did.”… That I give a bit more leeway too. But yeah, having something like that if it was just a, “You did good, here is your participation trophy for mass murder!”, should not be acceptable.
There are times (like with Powell’s removal from the Arlington records) if some of this is not actually racist but rather subversive compliance. That some who are doing the job are making sure the names that would be noticed get noticed, to draw attention to how bad this is. Following orders but making sure everybody knows about it.
Because one thing that isn’t coming out in the articles and memes is who actually discovered when the name disappeared. Is someone actively monitoring it, or is someone from the inside making sure somebody notices?
Subversive compliance is still a useful and powerful tool within a resistance movement. And we’re going to be depending on it more and more.
Now yeah, I could be wrong, and there could be nothing but racists all the way down. But the possibility is there.
NPR – Pentagon restores webpages of Black veterans, Navajo Code Talkers and others after outcry
While admitting no wrongdoing and continuing to lie about the function of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.
The U.S. needs to tread carefully here. Disappearing non-whites and women from our collective military history can have knock-on effects. The day may come when Blacks, Brown, Indigenous, and women say, You know what? We aren’t fighting for your fucking, bloody rag again. We give our all, and what do we get in return? We get treated like shit. Trump and co-president Musk mock us as unworthy DEI hires who should never be seen or heard from again. If a major war does come (and it will, they always do), and you need bodies to backfill your White Only ranks, there may be few volunteers. And don’t think conscription will be your savior, either. Unwilling soldiers don’t make good warriors. Look to the final years of the Vietnam War if you doubt it. There’s a reason the U.S. Army went all-volunteer. The Pentagon never again wanted to oversee a disintegrating fighting force where soldiers were fragging their own officers.
Kagehi, @6, wrote,
Frankly, this would be exactly what I would do. Or if I was directed to have my team erase people from websites, I would ask my team to do it in this fashion. Or, if I was negligent enough to not think of it, as soon as a report suggested it, I would direct the rest of my team to do so.
If the bosses can’t find it, it doesn’t exist. Which is one reason I’ve always found it useful to not tell my bosses about everything I do. That’s come back to bite me two or three times in the last forty years, but I’m also a pretty good tap-dancer and I’ve never lost my job over neglecting to tell the boss everything. I’ve gotten in more trouble, more often, by telling the bosses things they didn’t want to hear.
“The U.S. needs to tread carefully here. Disappearing non-whites and women from our collective military history can have knock-on effects.”
My thoughts exactly. Good luck invading Canada or Greenland with the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse and his merry band of overweight incel pals.
“The U.S. needs to tread carefully here. Disappearing non-whites and women from our collective military history can have knock-on effects.”
One is reminded of the treatment of Black soldiers coming home to the South after WWII.
Their forbearance at not immediately slaughtering the racist nazi-like scum that ‘greeted’ them was near-Buddhist. But was probably the wrong choice.
PZ, you posted the old Woke photo. The photo approved by SecDef Hegseth is here:
https://bsky.app/profile/continentaldivide.bsky.social
Much more reflective of American Values (updated).
That’s DEI? Yes, that’s exactly what DEI is! DEI is all about getting the right people at the right positions based on their competence instead of the umpteenth mediocre white male.
Felonious tRUMP, muskrat and their cockroaches are are burning down the ‘Library at Alexandria’ AGAIN. welcome to the new Dark Ages
https://www.rsn.org/001/the-data-hoarders-resisting-trumps-purge.html
Julian Lucas / The New Yorker 20250320
Can librarians and guerrilla archivists save the country’s files from DOGE?
The deletions began shortly after Donald Trump took office. C.D.C. web pages on vaccines, H.I.V. prevention, and reproductive health went missing. Findings on bird-flu transmission vanished minutes after they appeared. The Census Bureau’s public repository went offline, then returned without certain directories of geographic information. The Department of Justice expunged the January 6th insurrection from its website https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/25/among-the-insurrectionists , and whitehouse.gov took down an explainer page about the Constitution. On February 7th, Trump sacked the head of the National Archives and Records Administration, the agency that maintains the official texts of the nation’s laws, and whose motto is “the written word endures.”
More than a hundred and ten thousand government pages have gone dark in a purge that one scientist likened to a “digital book burning,” and which has proved as frightening in its imprecision as in its malice.
This is going to be too easy. We know their patterns, we know their path, we know their goals. How difficult will it be to dominate them? A strength we haven’t actualized, need a leader who can.
I was particularly irritated by the removal of Ira Hayes from the DOD history. Ira Hayes was a Pima Indian and, in an example of REVERSE DEI, he joined the mostly white military and served heroically. He is one of the guys raising the flag over Iwo Jima, the image of which is used to promote the Marine Corps. He got the job done in spite of being in the white man’s military. Sadly, after the war he became an alcoholic and died at age 33. He was memorialized in a song recorded by fellow Minnesotan, Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan was always one of the first to do the DEI thing in music.
We wouldn’t celebrate them but Russia would. The Japanese still honor their WWII dead regardless of the atrocities they committed.
Vietnam was a terrible mistake no doubt but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t people served honorably. BTW, I still hold the Buffalo Soldiers in high regards despite their part in the genocidal Indian Wars.
If you don’t like it, fight me.
My comment was directed to lasius @7
Snarki, child of Loki @14
WWI was worse. Several returning Black servicemembers were lynched while still wearing their military uniforms.
A reckoning is coming. I see very bad things happening to the US and it will deserve every bit of it.