I’d like to have a few words with the current administration.
Specifically...
^ This is a list of “disappearing” words compiled by the New York Times.
It combines several lists of banned words from various figures in the Trump administration (across several departments) who have taken the war on “woke” and “DEI” into their own hands, declaring themselves in control of our First Amendment freedoms by right of choosing the winning political party in the latest election.
As seems to be the way with any list of banned content, these lengthy lists of verboten utterances are chosen and presented with zero rhyme or reason and zero consistency. Very rarely are they signed, and little to no explanation is provided regarding who the official word-banning wizard is - or how they were given such magical powers.
Even compiling the naughty list of words was a bit of a mess for the NYT.
“Any term collected above was included on at least one agency’s list, which does not necessarily imply that other agencies are also discouraged from using it,” they said.
Adding to the confusion: “some directives are vague or suggest what language might be impermissible without flatly stating it,” which is part of the point.
American citizens given directives from the government on removing language and speech are not only removing a long list of often very mundane words, but also having to guess at which terms might inflame the current ruler. It’s a task that even members of the current ruling party might struggle with.
The consequences of those removals and the resulting guesses range from the utterly stupid to the completely rage-inducing.
Hayes was an important enough figure that the Man in Black himself, Johnny Cash, wrote a ballad about him, but that apparently wasn’t enough to avoid the ol’ race eraser.
It’s not the first time the key moments featuring heroic veterans of color have been erased.
In January the Air Force removed training courses with content on the legendary African-American military heroes the Tuskegee Airmen. They also removed content on the WASPs, or Women Airforce Service Pilots, brave women who served in the military as pilots during WWII. (Full disclosure, my sister Kate has spent most of her career as a historian writing about these incredible women, and has a great book on the subject.)
After outcry focused mainly on the blatantly racist and misogynist removal of material on the Tuskegee Airmen, the Air Force reversed course. Sort of.
“No curriculum or content highlighting the honor and valor of the Tuskegee Airmen or Women Airforce Service Pilots has been removed from basic military training,” said Air Force Education and Training Commander, Lt. Gen. Brian Robinson.
Under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s wobbly-yet-overconfident guidance, the content was reinstated buuuuut “elements of the training that previously focused on diversity, equity and inclusion are now deleted from the training.” A “lesson block” went “into revision.”
After such a rapid fire cavalcade of politically-unpopular nincompoopery, you’d think that (even just for the sake of optics) some (presumably low-level) heads would roll within the Trump administration.
Uh uh.
Instead, fascist pundits have invented a new term for when MAGA minions poorly communicate their edicts, which are then poorly executed, resulting in predictably piss-poor outcomes.
Their latest fresh hell is something called “malicious compliance.”
Here’s insufferably smug right-wing asshat Ben Shapiro on the subject:
So if we juuuust wait for alleged-former-drunk Hegseth (who once paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault $500k to prevent her from filing a lawsuit) to correct the errors made by a bunch of bumbling, hapless bureaucrats, the madness will surely end, right?
Maybe not so much.
Last week the AP reported that over 26,000 images had been flagged for removal from military websites. The less-than-brilliant fascists driving the book-burning-bus included amongst those images and content any photos or mentions of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan to end WW2.
Turns out Enola Gay has been gay for…lord knows how long ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
While the thought of some ham-fisted MAGA nutjob declaring war against homosexual planes is objectively funny (just think of the bi-planes!), what’s not funny is the way this whole censorship shitmess is impacting real lives downstream.
As we speak, universities are scouring their course listings and syllabi for terms that might accidentally perk up the ears of some right-wing idealogue, leading to a complete defunding of every federal dollar it ever received.
Professors are shaping their content in anticipatory (presumably “non-malicious”) compliance and universities are examining their allowance of student free speech, all knowing that even their best efforts to bend to the will of the new regime, it may not be enough.
Scientists throughout the U.S. are seeing their work completely defunded, upending their careers and stopping even crucial life-saving work based solely on keyword searches (often AI-aided) for red flag terms that suggest “‘woke gender ideology;’ diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); foreign aid; the ‘green new deal;’ and support for ‘nongovernmental organizations that undermine the national interest.’
Even recruitment efforts to find the diverse participants required to successfully conduct clinical trials on life-saving cancer research have been erased.
In his remarks in a joint address to Congress just a couple short weeks ago, wanna be king Trump lied from the bully pulpit: “I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America. It’s back.”
That is clearly an orange-faced lie.
What this administration has created in just a couple of month is a wide-ranging, highly-damaging, unrepentant censorship program that is both dumb and racist in equal measure.
Those of us who work in writing, or journalism, or history, or education, or communications, or politics, or science - any profession where words matter - should simply not put up with this shit.
No one should.