By Carl M. Cannon
Even if one considers Ibram X. Kendi’s “antiracism” schtick an Orwellian scam, Robin DiAngelo’s “white fragility” idiotic, and the whole “diversity, equity, and inclusion” regime toxic, the Trump administration’s anti-DEI crusade has beclowned itself.
The most recent farce is unfolding at the Pentagon in response to a memo from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s office heralding a “digital content refresh.” This “refresh” calls for the removal of content from the DoD websites that “promote Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.”
Thus, the page celebrating the life and heroism of World War II hero Ira Hayes was scrubbed. Hayes, who helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima in one of the most iconic images in American history, wasn’t a DEI hire. He was a Pima Indian who enlisted as soon as he was old enough to fight, leaving his Arizona reservation for Marine Corps basic training and his date with destiny.
Hays was a quiet man who didn’t speak unless he was spoken to, but he was loyal and unflappable under fire and possessed a keen sense of right and wrong. After the war, he walked and hitchhiked 1,300 miles to the Midwestern farm so he could tell the Gold Star parents who lived there that one of the Marines celebrated for raising the flag on Mount Suribachi was misidentified – and that it was really their son.
Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Hayes descended into alcoholism after the war and died young. He was praised in person by President Dwight Eisenhower and, after his death, celebrated in song by Johnny Cash and on the big screen, first by Tony Curtis and later by Clint Eastwood. Paying homage to his service is not celebrating DEI. It’s telling the American story.
I think I found the archived version of the Pentagon’s old page. But if you want to know more, here is a webpage from the Museum of Native American History in Bentonville, Arkansas.
I vacillate between thinking the MAGA people running the executive branch really don’t know much about this country and assuming that well-intentioned orders by people who dislike DEI excess are being sabotaged by actions like this. In this particular instance, my guess is that we’ll find out soon enough: When he served as a United States Marine, Pete Hegseth was praised, as was Ira Hayes, for his valor in combat. I assume he’ll hear about this from his former comrades in arms.
One factor that makes this digital book-burning so discordant is that Donald Trump has been opposed to historical revisionism. The first time he was in the White House, Trump was uncommonly perceptive about the dangers of bulldozing U.S. history for ideological purposes.
Remember Joe Biden’s howler of an origin story – about why he decided to run for president in 2020? Biden said (many times) that he felt compelled to run after hearing President Trump claim that the neo-Nazis who staged a lethal demonstration in Charlottesville were “very fine people.”
In truth, Biden had been running for president since 1987. More to the point, what Trump actually said was that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the debate about whether to take down a statue of Robert E. Lee.
Trump went on to ask a provocative question: “So this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”
His concern proved prescient. During Biden’s presidency, mobs imbued with their own half-truths rioted in a hundred cities and towns, tearing down statues of Lee and defacing Confederate graves. But they also ransacked minority-owned small businesses, looted stores, and beheaded statues of Christopher Columbus. Statues of Junipero Serra, Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Mary were also defaced or toppled. On the grounds of Wisconsin’s state capitol, Black Lives Matter protesters destroyed a statue of Civil War hero Hans Christian Heg.
A Norwegian immigrant and passionate abolitionist, Col. Heg was killed at Chickamauga. He literally gave his life fighting to end slavery.
In Philadelphia, a Matthias Baldwin monument was defaced with the words “murderer” and “colonizer.” Actually, Baldwin was an abolitionist who opened a school for African American children and paid its teachers’ salaries himself. In Boston, 16 public artworks were defaced in one weekend, including one honoring the black soldiers with the famed 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, half of whom were killed or wounded at Fort Wagner in 1863. In Washington, D.C., vulgar graffiti was written on various statues of other Union heroes, including Adm. David Farragut. The World War II Memorial – the monument to the men who crushed actual fascism – also wasn’t spared.
In San Francisco, 200 black-clad members of a crowd ostensibly celebrating Juneteenth tore down statues of Francis Scott Key and Ulysses S. Grant. In the same city, which is my hometown, the San Francisco school board cited Wikipedia references to justify renaming 44 schools, with predictable results. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were to be canceled, of course. But so were Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere, New England abolitionist James Lowell, and California philanthropist James Lick. (Lick’s sin was said to be funding a sculpture later deemed insensitive to Indians. Except that Lick died 18 years before the artwork was made – the school board geniuses missed the words “estate of” when they glanced at his Wikipedia entry.)
The temptation, and not everyone could resist it, was to invoke Mark Twain. (“In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”)
In my California newspapering days, I covered several school boards, and found most of the members to be deeply committed and idealistic. Yet I mention Twain’s witticism for a reason: Those upset by what Trump is doing now say that this is much worse because this is the federal government doing these things, not overheated mobs.
I take the point, but a prominent big-city school board is a partisan entity, usually run by Democrats. Meanwhile, nationally prominent Democrats gave the monument vandals a pass. When asked for her reaction to the July 4, 2020, destruction of a Christopher Columbus statue in Baltimore, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi replied, “People will do what they do.”
In a statement that irritated Maryland officials in both parties, Pelosi added, “If the community doesn’t want the statue there, the statue shouldn’t be there.”
This was a sad commentary on the state of the modern Democratic Party. The Christopher Columbus monument was once revered in Baltimore’s Italian American community – the one Pelosi grew up in. Back in the day, her own brother, who served as mayor of Baltimore, praised it.
Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and J.D. Vance should heed the warning sounded by the first President Trump. “Where does it stop?”