Someone in the Trump Admin has moved to purge the cultureal history of America from the Federal Government’s faces around the country and on line….
The very ‘soul’ of ‘Who’ and ‘What’ America IS and Has come from is under attck….
It won’t work of course….
There ARE history books in schools….
There ARE history media on-line….
There IS awareness of WHO makes up America in our existence …
But like those in Communist ruled countries….Intolerance?
The guy in charge IS trying to exert HIS Reality on the Government….
Scrubbing Blacks, Women, Asians, Veterans, Gays, Hispanic’s, Native Americans and Anyone Trump doesn’t like in the name of the US Federal Government, no Less...
AGAIN?
It is NOT WHO and WHAT America IS….
We are NOT going backwards ….
Right now, the federal government is engaged in a dramatic purging of visual representations of American history and its current workforce. Some of this is a Stalinist removal of former officials. The official portraits of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, and Trump Secretary of Defense Mark Esper are gone. An NIH mural featuring Anthony Fauci was removed.
More systematically, it is also the removal of women, persons of color, and trans people, following executive orders around DEI and gender. Here, the removals signal the end one form of representation that valued inclusiveness and a broader understanding and acknowledgment of people whose stories were not always told.
Trump is a TV guy obsessed with visuals — how many times has he described someone as “straight out of central casting”? — with a very clear vision of who is in the picture when it comes to American history.
In the Pentagon, about 26,000 images have already been flagged for removal and could lead to up to 100,000 images being cut on military websites. Videos of the World War II Tuskegee airmen were removed from the Air Force. After public pushback, the Trump administration restored the content and complained about “malicious compliance” —but how exactly are bureaucrats supposed to know which images of non-white soldiers are acceptable, and which are DEI?
Army Major General Charles Calvin Rogers had been featured in a series Medal of Honor Monday which honors Medal of Honor winners. His page was removed, however, with the new web address for the erased webpage added “DEI” to the url….
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The rush to comply with government orders creates clumsiness and inconsistency. In some cases, gay people or women are being removed. In other spaces, they are maintained, but trans people are removed. Sometimes, the clumsiness is comical, or nonsensical. A Pentagon list of flagged images identified mentions of the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb. Because, gay. At the same time, a National Park website removed the representation of trans people’s role at the Stonewall uprising, praising it instead as a key moment for the “LGB” community. Here, gay is ok. But trans is out. LGB. The government redefines a movement in a way that is unrecognizable to those in it.
The representation of women or LGBTQ people or Hispanics or Asian Americans or Black people mattered because their stories had historically not been featured. Erasing them is not a return to some bygone era of color-blind merit, but of blindness to the contribution of anyone who did not fit Trump’s whitewashed vision of America.
The Trump presidency is, as much as anything, a project of purging and erasing large parts of America, of people, ideas, capacities, and knowledge. Trump has also pledged to remove the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which is an independent federal agency that supports libraries, archives and museums in America.
A presidential campaign built on the Big Lie, and incorporating lots of little lies, is intolerant of images, voices or evidence at odds with its worldview. It has only one vision of America in mind, much of it fanciful, and so it will erase anyone not part of that narrative….
image….Subsack
This sort of thing can be bipartisan.
Not too far from me, DuPage County Democrats recently voted to remove the name for Henry Hyde from the county courthouse. The reason they gave? The Hyde Amendment, something in its time that all sorts of Democrats, including Joe Biden supported.
Henry Hyde has been dead for almost a decade now. If he were around, I think he probably would have been among those standing with Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger in opposing Trump, but local Democrats had to erase him from history in a very petty and unnecessary way. Doing things like that are why so many Americans, even those who despise Trump, also think very poorly of today’s Democrats.
Almost two decades. Hyde died in 2007