Pentagon Disappears Non-White Military Photos Like A Common Joe Stalin
CRTL-F anti-'DEI' warriors also tagged pics of the 'Enola Gay' B-29 bomber for deletion.
In yet another part of the Trump administration’s Make America White Again agenda — and if you think we’re being hysterical, they announced this week that they would now allow military contractors to segregate their workforces — the Pentagon is scrubbing its websites of tens of thousands of photos and posts referencing anything that might be seen as “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” (If you’re wondering what the fuck that means, it means Black people, gay people, and women. Really, that’s it.) The pretext is that the government must be 100 percent colorblind and never make any distinctions between groups of humans, just like Martin Luther King Jr. never called for.
That’s why a database of photos and posts has tens of thousands of items flagged for deletion, many of which have been deep-sixed already. Among the items flagged are photos of Medal of Honor recipients, “the first women to pass Marine infantry training,” and even photos and references to the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, nicknamed the “Enola Gay” after the wife mother of its pilot, Paul W. Tibbets Jr.
Why yes, the anti-woke warriors appear to have used simple word searches to flag instances of the word “gay,” having learned nothing from the embarrassment heaped on that “Christian” news site years ago when its news feed ran multiple sports features on the records set by American sprinter “Tyson Homosexual.” How stupid is it? VERY FUCKING STUPID:
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.
Alex Jones was right! They’re turning the fish gay!
As the AP reports, the number of photos and posts marked to be sent down the Memory Hole is only likely to expand from the roughly 26,000 images flagged so far:
One official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details that have not been made public, said the purge could delete as many as 100,000 images or posts in total, when considering social media pages and other websites that are also being culled for DEI content. The official said it’s not clear if the database has been finalized.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the military to eliminate anything that highlights diversity by Wednesday, but because the Pentagon is the biggest agency in the government, there were still plenty of terribly offensive websites and photos accurately depicting American military diversity.
Now, don’t tell Hegseth about this until he’s farther into his afternoon drinking, but, for instance, the National Museum of the US Air Force site still has a completely honest multi-part history of World War II’s 99th Pursuit (later “Fighter”) Squadron, better known as the Tuskegee Airmen. As of right now, it still has this dangerously correct, and therefore divisive, introduction to some of America’s greatest heroes, even though it may make white children hate themselves somehow:
Reflecting American society and law at the time, the U.S. military remained racially segregated during World War II. Most African American soldiers and sailors were restricted to labor battalions or other support positions. One experiment in the U.S. Army Air Forces, however, demonstrated conclusively that African Americans — if given equal opportunities and training — could fly in, command and support combat units as well as anyone. These men, known as the “Tuskegee Airmen,” served with distinction in combat, and they contributed to the eventual integration of the U.S. armed services, with the U.S. Air Force leading the way.
My God, the Army Air Corps was overrun with wokeness! Even in March 1941, when that DEI hire, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, visited the flight school at Tuskeegee Institute and backed the formation of a corps of Black aviators, even before Pearl Harbor.
Then again, as the AP notes, perhaps that will be allowed, because “historical content.”
The Air Force briefly removed new recruit training courses that included videos of the Tuskegee Airmen soon after Trump’s order. That drew the White House’s ire over “malicious compliance,” and the Air Force quickly reversed the removal.
Thing is, nobody knows for sure, because “history” certainly didn’t prevent the National Park Service from scrubbing all mention of trans people (including the letter T in LGBTQ) from its page on the Stonewall Uprising. That’s the fun thing about fascism — you never know what may suddenly go from allowed to verboten on any given day.
Like Hegseth’s January 31 order declaring Black History Month and other “Identity Months Dead at DoD,” the Pentagon is also purging any posts mentioning Women’s History Month and other commemorations that make bigots sad. But despite the Wednesday deadline, the deletions seem to still be a work in regress:
In some cases, the removal was partial. The main page in a post titled “Women’s History Month: All-female crew supports warfighters” was removed. But at least one of the photos in that collection about an all-female C-17 crew could still be accessed. A shot from the Army Corps of Engineers titled “Engineering pioneer remembered during Black History Month” was deleted.
Other photos flagged in the database but still visible Thursday included images of the World War II Women Air Service Pilots and one of U.S. Air Force Col. Jeannie Leavitt, the country’s first female fighter pilot.
It’s a hell of a lot of work removing all the diversity from the military’s vast online presence, but the Pentagon wants everyone to pitch in. Like other Trumpfuckery, though, it may be hampered by the lack of staff available to do it; the Marines have only one civilian staffer available to cleanse thousands of pages and images, many of which are hosted on “social media sites were military base or unit support groups created years ago and left idle. No one still has the administrative privileges to go in and change the content.” But by Crom, they will finish the mission, or just say fuck it and set everything aside:
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.
Gosh. It’s almost as if that last bit gives away the game a little bit, doesn’t it? Purge the entire military of “DEI.” Or failing that, purge it of the previous president. Close enough for fascist government work.
[AP / Revealing Errors]
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It was a tough call deciding which historical photo to go with; I also really like this pic of a Black sergeant teaching white pilot cadets and Black mechanics about the internals of the Allison V-12 engine that powered the P-40 Warhawk, the plane originally assigned to the 99th Pursuit Squadron.
https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Upcoming/Photos/igphoto/2000982243/
How woke was the Army Air Corps back then? Not very! But a hell of a lot more than much of the country, since that photo would never be allowed in the Saturday Evening Post at the time. The magazine never ran any images of Black and white people as equals.
Never in history were the people who were purging history the good guys.