"Wound my heart with a monotonous languor"

Restoring DEI Web Pages Proves They Were Removed By Racists, Not By Decree.

Dave Zirin, writing in the Nation, offers an excellent review of how the public pressure scored a victory against the Pentagon’s purges of history that were committed in the name of complying with DEI decrees. Pentagon web pages that chronicled the feats of Jackie Robinson in the armed forces, women in combat, a Black Congressional Medal of Honor winner, and more, were deleted for DEI-related “reasons,” and then reinstated in the face of public backlash.

We should go beyond taking a well-deserved pat on our own backs for our well-aimed, loudly-voiced outrage. We should take names. And we should take note of the fact that the disease of racism within the federal government is not a top-down infection.

The reinstatement of those pages - absent an Executive Order compelling them to do so (or purporting to compel them to do so) - proves that these deletions were never about following orders. The return of the web pages tells us that their removal was a voluntarily excessive, opportunistic attack on Black men and women who fought for a country that made itself their enemy - based on racial distinctions authored by the government, not them or those who authored web articles about them.

The erasure of their selfless heroism was an act that exposed the many bigoted bureaucrats whose bilious character has simmered and stewed for years, waiting for a call to rise up and show their asses. The decrees of the President, issued under the label "Executive Order" despite being little more than statements of intent and press releases that should have been published on PR Newswire, was their signal to abandon the dank cellars where their racism was kept on a low boil, and rise up to let it roil furiously on the front burners.

This overreach in reaction to Trump’s Executive Orders harkens back to the dilemma faced by the French Resistance waiting to assist with the D-Day landing: when would it be safe to rise up? There was a fear of rising up to expose their positions and make it easy for the Nazi occupation to round them up. In the hours ahead of D-Day, the Allied Command flooded the airwaves with “Verlaine couplets” that activated Resistance cells to rise up.

(Note: The title of this post is the English translation of the couplet that told Resistance cells the invasion would begin within 48 hours.)

The intent was to signal the timing of the invasion while causing confusion as to where the invasion would make landfall on the European continent. The fear among the Allied Command was that all the Resistance cells across France would activate and paint targets on themselves with no safe escape. Trump’s Executive Orders are akin to the broadcast of Verlaine couplets and the eager, overly enthusiastic interpretations of “DEI” are the folly of racist American bureaucrats - not the French Resistance - stupidly announcing their positions for all to see.

We see these “enthusiastic interpretations” in all manner of bureaucrats at all sorts of pay grades across the federal government, rising up and eagerly seizing upon expansive interpretations of Trump's decrees in order to express their own personal bigotry and chauvinism. This is not just a matter of identifying who's been erasing web pages. Nor is it a question of "complying in advance." It is not even the practice of complying. It is an excessive breach of duty - racist overreach freely invoked on account of a sense that executive protection will attach to their unlawful activity, no matter how brazen it may be.

The expansive interpretations of what constitutes “DEI” versus what constitutes valid government acknowledgements of race and gender in its operations are lines that are being drawn by bureaucrats, not Trump. When those bureaucrats take a liberal view of what’s hauled in by the net Trump has cast, those choices must be owned by the bigots who make them.

Celebrating the success of the first Native American to… or documenting the pioneering work of Asian-Americans… or having government engineers attend a STEM career fair at a girls’ school… are all examples of “verboten DEI” in the imaginations of people who are eager to be racist, not of people whose hands are tied on account of a decree.

Discovered in 2017, this is the earliest known photo of Harriet Tubman, taken around 1868, approximately 5 years after she was the first woman to lead U.S. troops on a military raid. It takes a racist to see this and classify it as DEI contraband.

Nobody is going to satisfactorily explain how these broad interpretations of DEI can stop girls from learning about STEM careers from the Army Corps of Engineers without eviscerating Trump’s anti-trans policies that allegedly help protect women and girls. (How would such “protections” not count as DEI programs?)

With the republication of the "DEI" web pages, we know with certainty that they knew that they were not complying with Executive Orders. They have been flaunting their bigotry in the belief that Donald Trump had given them cover to come out and expose themselves and their own personally held intentions and racist convictions.

That's what we're witnessing because they would be run out of government if they were violating a valid order from the President by walking back their asshattery. They can walk back these choices because there never was a lawful order for them to follow to begin with.

They made these choices - and there will no doubt be more of these opportunistic "decisions" made by people who happily wrap themselves in the chimeral authority of "Executive Orders" - because they were easily incited by Trump to do so, not on account of being authorized or compelled to do so. After having waited so long to unleash their racist feelings, they ran with the license they felt they had been granted to be racist with impunity.

With the restoration of the names of heroes, historians should collect the names of the shameful racists and bigots who permeate the corridors of the Defense Department bureaucracy, to enshrine their names, too, in the annals of ignominy, for posterity, never to be erased. Let their children and grandchildren learn all about and be compelled to remember the shameful actions of these boils on the ass of America.