A brief and tumultuous tenure
Another small item from the Horror Files:
The Trump administration has sidelined a senior Defense Department spokesman, defense officials said Thursday, ending a brief and tumultuous tenure in which he clashed with colleagues and journalists who cover the Pentagon, and aggressively defended the agency’s purge of government-produced content recognizing the contributions of minorities in the military.
He’s a bit too aggressive for the spokesy thing, but he’s not gone, he’s just moved.
Ullyot’s removal followed an uproar Wednesday over the Pentagon’s removal of an online article about the military background of Jackie Robinson, who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball in 1947, after serving in the U.S. Army. As news of the article’s removal drew widespread condemnation on social media, Ullyot released a statement attempting to explain the administration’s rationale — striking an unusually combative tone for a spokesman representing the view of a government agency with a nonpartisan national security mission.
“Discriminatory Equity Ideology,” his statement said in part, “ … Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission.”
Geddit? DEI. Hurhur, that’s so witty.
Trump and the political appointees he’s positioned throughout the federal government have worked vigorously to end initiatives that promote diversity, equity and inclusion within the workforce, and to scrub from government websites and social media accounts most references to those terms. The Pentagon issued its order last month, days after Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired several senior military leaders they deemed overly focused on diversity.
I hate to be all both sidesy about it but sometimes it can’t be helped. Some DEI stuff is overdone or intrusive or self-admiring or all those, but that doesn’t mean equality and diversity and inclusion are bad in all forms on all occasions. Not even close. I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with educating the public about talented women or immigrants or people of color.
The Jackie Robinson article was restored on the Defense Department website later Wednesday, but the reversal did little to quell the furor. On Thursday morning, ESPN television personality Stephen A. Smith took up the issue, saying he does not think the article was removed in error and that it follows what he called a pattern of the president’s supporters ignoring why DEI efforts existed in the first place.
Smith, who is Black, said on ESPN’s “First Take” that the administration is “going about the business of trying to scrub history” to the point that even Robinson is targeted. Smith noted that Robinson was drafted into military service in 1942, court-martialed in 1944 for refusing an order from a superior officer to move to the back of a bus, and honorably discharged from the Army.
See, I didn’t know that about the court martial or the disgusting order.
I may be a bit young to remember, but isn’t Reagan’s “post-racial” 80s preferable to this shit? Roadblock, Spirit, and Scarlett from GI Joe are probably too “woke” for these assholes. This has gotta be the most racist one of the two political parties has been in decades.
Reagan started the descent, with his states’ rights speech in Oxford, Mississippi, and his talk of “welfare queens”. But he was politically astute enough to keep his dog whistles at a minimum.
Bush Sr. didn’t help with his Willie Horton ads. And then there was the Jesse Helms Hands Ad.
The GOP has been dancing along the racist line for a long time, but it’s been a bit more subtle. Trump and the Muskovites don’t do subtle.
Did he though? Nixon has got to have been more racist than Reagan. Not saying Republicans haven’t been more racist than not my whole life, but they used to be getting better, I’m sure of it.
Maybe it’s just the remaining legacy Democrats defecting.
The sheer idiocy of the morons empowered by Trusk is that they think every female/black/Hispanic/gay/disabled person is there because, and only because, of DEI. They aren’t educated enough to understand that many of these historical people are there because of what they achieved, not how they got there in the first place.
Those female/black/Hispanic/gay/disabled interred at Arlington aren’t there because of DEI, but because they died following the orders of their “Commander in Chief”.
But the Muskrats do provide us with some bleak humour, such as when they scrubbed “Enola Gay” for being homosexual!
BKiSA, Nixon had his southern strategy, designed to bring southern Democrats into the Republican Party. I imagine he thought he could control them, so he was willing to play up their Christian fantasies, and their racism. I don’t know if he was a racist himself; he probably was. But if he wasn’t, he certainly played one on TV.
I recommend this American veteran’s discussion on Youtube of the contributions (horrible word) made by the Black American ‘Harlem Hellfighters’ in World War 1, and the shameful postwar treatment they received once back home (including being lynched); and in World War 2, the Navajo code-talkers, the Tuskegee airmen, the women pilots who tested newly-produced warplanes before they were used in the war (a number of whom lost their lives), the Japanese-Americans who, despite losing everything of theirs and being incarcerated in concentration camps, fought for the USA – and the shameful postwar treatment of all these people back home in the USA.
The shameful, blatantly racist and misogynistic treatment is coming back as Trump, Hegseth et al claim that they were all ‘DEI hires’ and not worthy of honouring. But no doubt this is all music to their ears for MAGA, and their enablers – the sort of people who try to defend people like George Zimmerman, Derek Chauvin and Kyle Rittenhouse.
https://youtu.be/YsbAxVUxcb8?si=9ePZ3ezKNoAThJyw
Thank you, Ophelia, for putting in my correction.
I should like to say also that these actions from the Trump regime absolutely give the lie to a favourite talking-point on the right, and often rehearsed here by a certain commentator in the past: that ‘history’ abruptly changed at some unspecified point, and since then Black Americans and other minorities (usually ‘racial’ minorities) have been in the happy position of complete equality with ‘proper’ Americans, and so have no right to complain.about anything.
The fact is that America has, historically, been a profoundly racist society, and, as is very clear now, this racism is coming to the fore again. I grow impatient with certain liberal-minded commentators (whom otherwise I largely support) who piously trot out platitudes like ’This is not who we are’ and ’This is not American’ with respect to the policies of the Trump regime. ’This’ is profoundly who a certain segment of American society are, and ’this’ is very American – though it is certainly unrepresentative of the best aspects of America, which I admire.
I should add that this rise of the right is not confined to the USA, as may be seen from the race riots in the UK last year (supported by Musk) and from the success of right-wing politicians in other European nations, and parties like the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany (also supported by Musk). Who, as in the US, also have their enablers, particularly among those who regard themselves as libertarians – an infantile school of political thought (or, rather, mere emotion) whose inadequacy where any complex society is concerned is obvious to anyone who has an understanding of governance and politics. They are like Ernst Jünger, a writer who still fascinates me, who in one of his more political tracts sought to reduce politics and international relationships to a father and his sons of the Icelandic saga era defending their homestead against an attack by some enemies bent on revenge. Although Jünger wrote an extraordinary allegory of Hitler’s rise to power, Auf den Marmorklippen, it ends in an escape into into a sort of Valhalla, a place for comrades and heroes (Jünger had fought heroically in the First World War, an experience that marked him, as it marked so many, for life). Libertarianism is no recent invention, and it ends in a sort of escapism, and usually ends by not facing up to realities and, by this default, giving tacit or not so tacit support to the far right.
Not to mention the ubiquitous ‘don’t blame the voters’ and ‘the voters were fooled by Trump’. So not true. If you were ‘fooled’ by Trump, you weren’t listening to him, because he wasn’t being coy about who he is and what he plans. Yes, you can blame the voters for wanting to see the US destroyed and turned into a whites (males) only society. White females are accepted and welcomed, but only if they know their place.
Nothing wrong with blaming the voters (I certainly do); it’s just not a tenable position for a politician. “This is not who we are” is at least a useful, aspirational fiction that places a barrier between Real Americans™ and Real Americans for real.
In any case, if you’re a small L libertarian you can’t support the far right, since they’ve got nothing but contempt for individual liberties and the free market.
Thank you, Blood Knight, though I still have small time fior libertarians with a small ‘l’ or a capital one. In practice they don’t seem to differ very much. It’s not so much they can or cannot do, but what they do do.
It’s not so much WHAT they can or cannot do…