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.”
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References to a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan and the first women to pass Marine infantry training are among the tens of thousands of photos and online posts marked for deletion as the Defense Department works to purge diversity, equity and inclusion content.
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The database, which was confirmed by U.S. officials and published by AP, includes more than 26,000 images that have been flagged for removal across every military branch. But the eventual total could be much higher [...] when considering social media pages and other websites that are also being culled for DEI content.
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The vast majority of the Pentagon purge targets women and minorities, including notable milestones made in the military. And it also removes a large number of posts that mention various commemorative months — such as those for Black and Hispanic people and women.
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In some cases, photos seemed to be flagged for removal simply because their file included the word ”gay,” including service members with that last name and an image of the B-29 aircraft Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II.
AP
Did they imagine they would find any photos of actual LGBTQ military people labeled "gay"? Fucking idiots.
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.
They culled anything with the word "gender"? Jesus wept.
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.
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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.
"Malicious complaince." Highly unlikely. Almost certainly untrue. It's just plain idiocy and dumbfuckery.
Asked about the database, Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot said in a statement, “We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms. In the rare cases that content is removed that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct components accordingly.”
He noted that Hegseth has declared that “DEI is dead” and that efforts to put one group ahead of another through DEI programs erodes camaraderie and threatens mission execution.
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A Marine Corps official said every one of its images in the database “either has been taken down or will be taken down.” The Marines are moving on the directive as fast as possible, but as with the rest of the military, very few civilian or contractor employees at the Pentagon can perform content removal, the official said.
In the Marine Corps, just one defense civilian is available to do the work. The Marine Corps estimates that person has identified at least 10,000 images and stories for removal online, and after further review, 3,600 of those have been removed. The total does not count more than 1,600 social media sites that have not yet been addressed.
Many of those 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.
The Marine official said the service is going through each site and getting new administrative privileges so it can make the changes.
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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.
Government efficiency.
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