Tuskegee, tip of the iceberg
This past weekend, after Trump issued his executive order to get rid of DEI in all federal agencies, a massive air force training base in Texas eliminated any and all courses making any mention of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black pilots in the US military.
There was a massive outcry against this decision, even among Republican senators. Even though the Pentagon initially defended the decision, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was eventually forced to publicly decry it. Not long after, the decision was reversed by the head of Air Education and Training Command.
Like many people, I’ve long had a sense that Trump and his right-wing cultural warriors were poking at a hornets’ nest when it comes to institutional race politics, with a base of opposition coming from deep within the US military, which is one of the most diverse institutions in the US. I could be wrong on this one, but my hunch is that this fight over the Tuskegee Airmen, which the Trump people lost, is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg.
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3 Comments
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carldavidson
Point taken. They are exploring the terrain, working to find both allies and adversaries.
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Rachael Sotos
Wait til you learn about the covid health measures! Wait! All your critical thinking skills didn’t reveal that one? You didn’t know that Fauci is a psychopath who came to the NIH from CIA infested Cornell Medical School in 1968, when they were still running Tuskeegee and there weren’t pesky review boards? That all his mentors were doing bioweapons research?
Readers of Hannah ARendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism may want to note that DEI is the mirror image of the SS practice of hiring tall blonds. It attempts to create a practically functioning fiction. It is also the means of reducing people to data points so that a non-consensual form of “governance” can be imposed totalitarian style.
Populism isn’t bad thing. Global public health is not a thing. Chestfeeding is not a thing. Commonsense isn’t right wing extremism. I feel so sorry for the kids at university who have genuine questions and have to endure indoctrinated “political theorists.” SAD
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Instead of imagining Trump did this or that “orders,” think Stephen Miller, Trump’s loyal neo-fascist nativist adviser/ speechwriter the past 10 years.
