Scrambling to comply
So “DEI” includes discussion of the Holocaust? I did not know that.
Articles about the Holocaust, September 11, cancer awareness, sexual assault and suicide prevention are among the tens of thousands either removed or flagged for removal from Pentagon websites as the department has scrambled to comply with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s order to scrub “diversity” content from all its platforms.
A database obtained by CNN shows that more than 24,000 articles could be purged, with many gone already. The scrub goes well beyond just the removal of images from the Pentagon’s visual database, known as DVIDS, and includes articles from across more than 1,000 websites hosted by the department.
The Pentagon previously said in a memo last month that it would be removing news and feature articles promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) content.
Well, those are three inherently squishy words, so I suppose it’s not surprising that Trump’s Pentagon defines them very broadly. The Pentagon bosses don’t want him yelling at them or telling Musk to purge them.
At least half a dozen articles already removed are about the Holocaust and now have the word “DEI” in their URL.
So mentioning the Holocaust is trendy far-lefty bleeding hearty lefty bullshit, is that the thinking? So the Holocaust was not a bad thing?
The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, told CNN that “we are concerned by reports that the Department of Defense has removed Holocaust-related content, including survivor stories, under the label of ‘DEI.’”
“Honoring the memory of the Holocaust and those who survived is not a matter of political ideology — it is a moral imperative and a vital component of education, remembrance, and the fight against antisemitism,” Greenblatt said.
Well it is also a matter of political ideology. How can it not be? The Holocaust is entirely a project of a warped crazed ideology. The Nazis were ideologues down to their toenails. It’s not really possible to “honor the memory” while walling off the originating ideology. The two are necessarily intertwined.
This photo from the US Air Force shows Kitty Saks, a Holocaust survivor, displaying the star she wore during the Holocaust to distinguish her Jewish faith in her home in Norfolk, Virginia, in April 2016. An article about Saks posted to a US Air Force website has been removed as part of the Pentagon’s effort to remove “news and feature articles promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) content.” This photo is still available on the military’s Defense Visual Information Distribution Service.
That makes me feel profoundly ill.
It’s obscene. I have a friend at the CDC here in Atlanta (whose daughter was wrongfully terminated the CDC as well), who told me a few weeks ago that she and her team had spent all day scrubbing anything DEI or LGB related from their website. Trans too (but I include that separately). I wonder what whitewashing all these government websites (reportedly many government agencies have been given similar directives), is going to accomplish, other than satisfy the current administration’s Aryan ideology. I also have a friend with the US Forest Service who, the last time I saw him, was frantically downloading all of his work history and current projects, in the event his employment were to be terminated. The overt white nationalist agenda of this administration is a social and global disaster for the US. Also the constitutionality of these actions is highly questionable, and (hopefully) eventually actionable. These bastards don’t represent me or anyone I care about. They are an embarrassment to decent Americans, political leanings notwithstanding.
The reversal of all of this chaos is years away. Meanwhile there are so many people’s lives who have been disrupted, or their careers terminated, or their lives virtually ruined by this small group of unAmerican shitbags who only have contempt for us — the decent people we know and care about. I hate to think civil war is nigh, but depending on what media outlets you pay attention to, there is potential for a hellish result. Trump in his vengeance (along with his flying monkeys), are playing a risky game. A game they will certainly lose, but at what cost…
I remember during the Bush 43 years, there was a scrubbing of things like global warming; people were archiving it before they removed it, and I think there were some people in Canada archiving some of it, as well. I hope that’s being widely done this time. If this madness ever ends, that information will be crucial to put the country back together.
So tell me if I’m wrong here; the devil’s bargain that right wing Jews made with these guys is essentially “you block all criticism of Israel and give them weapons and we’ll back you; we can probably emigrate there before it gets to hot in the United States”.
The historical records (documents, pictures and the rest) are the social memory to be passed for each generation to the next. A society purging its history in this manner can only be likened to self-inflicted radical brain surgery, and on a mass scale.As such, it is an understandable and commonly expressed desire on the part of autocrats and their wannabees.
Next event in this carnival of fools is likely a massive book burn, like those the Nazis organised in the public squares of Germany. And so Trump nee Drumpf has his go at repeating history. The first time through was definitlely tragedy. This second time will hopefully just be farce; but with Trump in charge, who knows.?
I smell DARVO.
That makes me think it was done via some script that goes through all files, compares against a list of suspicious vocabulary, and renames any matching files.
I’m betting those articles were flagged for having words like “oppression” and “homosexuals” and sentences like, “When we think about diversity, it seems like we often focus on racial or gender differences that we strive to celebrate and embrace.”
These examples from the first three articles CNN linked would get dinged in an initial keyword search for DEI content.
Oh, look, they did. Process working as predicted.
The original offense was inserting DEI’s tentacles into everything. If it angers you that the removal process has collateral damage–and it should–direct that anger at those who spread the infection in the first place.
Er, no, to the extent that I believe in agency, those who spread the “infection” (disgusting terminology) no longer have it. I’m angry at the racist fucksticks Ctrl + Fing the Enola Gay out of existence; they’re the ones choosing to do this stuff.
By the way, not a fan of the Smithsonian museum’s framing punctuality as whiteness, never have been. Was I mad at people then? Yes, but if these racist Neo Bolsheviks had stuck to just firing DEI commissars I’d probably be less angry. They *choose* to be the vile monsters that they are. This statement comes from a different sort of monster.
The idea that this process is being carried out by individuals manually “Ctrl + F-ing” through history is fundamentally mistaken. No administration, regardless of resources, could realistically manually review every government document, research paper, and webpage in the span of a single presidency. The sheer scale of the data involved makes an automated process the only viable approach.
The choice isn’t between automated vs. manual review—it’s between different types of automated review, each with trade-offs. A fully manual process would take decades, not years, making it a non-option. On the other hand, an AI-driven, context-sensitive filtering system would require significant training, oversight, and computational resources, and would still produce false negatives and false positives due to the limitations of machine learning.
That leaves rule-based automation—where documents are flagged based on predefined lists of terms related to DEI ideology—as the most efficient and auditable option. This method is fast, relatively easy to implement, and ensures that decisions can be logged and reviewed. But it also comes with the inevitable downside of collateral damage: any document that contains flagged terms—regardless of intent or historical relevance—risks being caught in the net.
The alternative that people seem to imagine—that historical topics like the Enola Gay or the Holocaust could simply be “excluded” from the search—assumes that these exclusions could be made perfectly and without unintended consequences. But creating exceptions isn’t straightforward:
* Who decides what qualifies as a necessary exclusion?
* How do you craft rules that prevent a keyword-based filter from catching historical discussions of policies without also allowing DEI advocates to reframe their ideology in ways that evade detection?
* How do you prevent targeted actors from exploiting those exclusions to keep their content in circulation?
* How do you catch those documents that already have DEI ideology incorporated in a way that exploits those exclusions?
Any rule broad enough to preserve historical documents without human review will also create loopholes that prevent the removal of DEI content, undermining the entire initiative. The reality is that some collateral damage is unavoidable, and what matters is whether a transparent restoration mechanism exists for wrongly flagged materials. If the media were honest about the process, they’d focus less on cherry-picking examples of unintended removals and more on explaining why automation is necessary and what its limitations are.
But no, they’d rather frame the whole thing as being done by racist fuck-sticks and creepy 22-year-olds.
Which really, really pisses me off, because I’ve been the creepy 22-year-old developing methods to sift through a massive corpus of data on several occasions.
Ah, the media – and their dishonesty: it’s all their fault, and there is not a hint of racist fuck-stickkery and no sign of the involvement of creepy 22-year-olds. And a bit of ‘collateral damage’ that is only corrected when there’s an uproar about it – what does it matter? It’s all in a good (and very obviously ideological) cause, after all. There comes a point when innocence about what is actually going on comes across as being no longer innocence.
And the innocence is not made more innocent by reducing the matter to the difficulties of sifting through massive corpora of data. Those poor, hard-working, over-burdened, if creepy, 22-year-olds! We should really sympathise with them as they fire nuclear-energy experts & air-control officers, and generally make it difficult or impossible for any government agency to work properly. They are, after all, white, hold all the alt-right political opinions, and if Black Americans, Jews, Native Americans, and numerous other classes of people, get kicked in the teeth, whether collaterally or not, it’s of no great consequence. But in this case it is that bugbear of a certain kind of mind: DEI — so we may all happily chant, ” DEI BAD! DOGE GOOD!” in true Animal Farm manner. No wonder the latest wheeze is closing down the Department of Education.
I also suggest, Nullius, that you should consider the nature & origin of your moniker, nullius in verba, which is the motto of the Royal Society, and essentially means respecting facts rather than prejudiced rhetoric, before informing us about the trials & tribulations of those wrongly maligned ‘creepy 22-year-olds’ who are making things hell for a great number of people, and talking blithely about ‘collateral damage’ as being ‘unavoidable’. Well, how much collateral damage is being done? Do you know? How much of this ‘collateral damage’ is not being reported since nobody, including you, knows about it? For how much ’transparency’ is being provided? The lack of transparency has in fact been brought up again & again in the ‘media’ you affect to despise. I think you should provide yourself with a new and less pretentious moniker. I am sorry to be so harsh, but I am afraid that these last two posts of yours have angered me a great deal.