What The Hell America!

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S CRUSADE against “woke” and “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) may have reached an absurd nadir last week with the big oops that followed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement that he had “proudly ENDED” his department’s Women, Peace, and Security program, a “woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative” loved only by feminists and libs. A comical face-saving scramble ensued because it was revealed almost immediately that WPS was a bipartisan congressional initiative cosponsored in 2017 by then-Senator Marco Rubio and then-House member Kristi Noem (both current cabinet members), signed into law by Donald Trump, and often held up as proof of the first Trump administration’s female-friendly bona fides. Hegseth’s unconvincing attempts to explain that he really just meant to end “the Biden administration’s woke WPS initiatives” (whatever they were) and bring back the good, Trump-approved WPS were roundly mocked.

This isn’t the first time the Department of Defense under Hegseth’s leadership had to do an embarrassing walkback on woke. Following Trump’s blitz of anti-DEI executive orders upon taking office, videos on pioneering black and female pilots in the U.S. armed forces during World War II, the Tuskegee Airmen and the Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASPs), were removed from the Air Force training curriculum. After a flurry of bad publicity, Republicans such as Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) started claiming that the deletions were the result of someone deliberately subverting Hegseth’s (and Trump’s) orders to cause a backlash—so-called “malicious compliance.” Hegseth declared that “this will not stand,” and the videos were restored. Of course, there wasn’t a shred of evidence that they were removed with malicious intent: It’s far more likely that the decision was made because no one knew exactly what was forbidden under the anti-DEI edicts.

Indeed, Hegseth himself was simultaneously crusading for a maximalist interpretation of DEI: On January 31, just five days after the flap over the videos, he issued instructions that “identity months” were from now on “dead at DoD.” His edict banned any use of official resources for “celebrations or events” related to “cultural awareness months”—including Black History Month, which was just about to start, Women’s History Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month, and so forth. Service members and DoD employees were allowed to attend such events only “in an unofficial capacity outside of duty hours.” All celebrations of military heroes, Hegseth wrote, had to “focus on the character of their service” rather than identity, which served to “put one group ahead of another” and “erode camaraderie.”

Hegseth’s own boss clearly didn’t get the memo: The very same day as Hegseth’s guidance declaring identity months dead, Trump issued a proclamation recognizing Black History Month and urging public officials and others to join in observing it. In March, Trump did the same for Women’s History Month; he also appeared at a White House Women’s History Month event where he endorsed the creation of a “big, beautiful” American Women’s History Museum on the National Mall. That’s whole a lot of woke DEI.

These contradictions illustrate Trump world’s blatant hypocrisy about racial and gender diversity, which can be opportunistically weaponized either as a bogeyman or as an asset. During last year’s campaign, when right-wingers mocked Vice President Kamala Harris as a “DEI hire,” Trump refused to disavow the sleazy claim. Yet Trump can also hail his aide Susie Wiles as “the first-ever female [White House] Chief of Staff in United States history” and his Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer as “one of the first Latinas” and “the first Republican woman elected to Congress from the state of Oregon.”

This apparent hypocrisy also illustrates the rampant confusion over what “DEI” is. Does it mean requiring college faculty or corporate employees to endorse a particular set of progressive ideas about racism and sexism? Promotions and hiring based primarily on race, gender, and other identities? Or does the label also extend to any focus on the experience of population groups that have their own unique history and that, in many cases, have been denied both equal opportunity and fair recognition for much of this country’s existence? If it’s the latter, even Trump-era Republicans generally haven’t expressed a problem with it. But because all these things are lumped together under the same term, public opinion data about DEI are often contradictory or outright useless.

THE ADMINISTRATION’S ANTI-WOKE PUSH takes a jackhammer to these complex issues—and the people conducting it apparently don’t learn from experience. Nearly two months after the controversy over the Air Force training videos, the Arlington National Cemetery website, run by the Army, faced a similar embarrassment over the scrubbing of content focusing on black, female, and Hispanic service members and on civil rights-related history. (Some materials vanished completely while others simply stopped being accessible from the main pages.) Once again, the bad press was followed by backpedaling—but this time, only a partial one. The “walking tours” section of the website has gotten back the tours focusing on black military heroes and African-American history, as well as women in the military. However, those topics have not been restored to the main “education” page, and the “Notable Graves” menu is still missing the old sections on African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, and women—though other categories such as foreign nationals, artists, and athletes remain. Whether this is intentional or incompetence, temporary or permanent, remains unclear.

And then there’s the purge (apparently ordered personally by Hegseth) of nearly 400 books, judged to be too woke, from the Naval Academy’s library—notably including Maya Angelou’s classic autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Some of the banished books are recent texts associated with critical race theory or identity-focused social justice, such as Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist. (Surely one can strongly disagree with them and still think that a college library should carry notable books highly relevant to current cultural controversies.) But a lot of other volumes seem to have been proscribed simply because their listed topics include race, racism, or white supremacism. That includes a 2002 volume by political scientist Carol Swain, a prominent black conservative and current Trump supporter, whose title—The New White Nationalism in America—must have triggered Hegseth’s apparatchiks. Meanwhile, the witch-hunt against suspected “gender ideology” netted not only books on transgender identities but thirty-year-old texts on the psychology of sex and gender, scholarly works on gender roles and sexuality in Victorian or Renaissance literature, and even critiques of feminist views that downplay innate sex differences.

But the DoD is not the only offender. A Washington Post investigation last month found that the National Park Service (part of the Department of the Interior) had made drastic changes to its “What is the Underground Railroad?” webpage. The new version drastically shortened the introduction, removing from it all but one mention of slavery as well as references to “self-emancipation” and “resistance to enslavement”; the revised introduction stressed that the network “bridged the divides of race” and embodied “the American ideals of liberty and freedom expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” Meanwhile, the large photo of Harriet Tubman was gone from the page, replaced with commemorative stamps that featured Tubman along with four other Underground Railroad activists, two black and two white. The original text, far from being “divisive,” had noted that “people of all races” were involved in assisting the fugitives; the new one seemed to suggest that the Underground Railroad was, at its core, a black/white bridge-building initiative.

The reports on the changes to the site were, yet again, followed by a restoration—and a claim that the alterations did not have approval from the top leadership. Two Park Service employees who spoke to the Post on condition of anonymity shed some light on the process that led to these alterations. “Political appointees” at Interior instructed “senior career officials” to flag content that might violate Trump’s anti-DEI directives; these instructions were passed on, with “only vague guidance,” to lower-level staffers—who, fearful for their jobs amid the massive layoffs of federal workers, preferred to err on the side of ditching anything too “woke.” According to the Post, the scrubbed content on various Park Service sites included mentions of slaveholding by historical figures, a passage about the lack of recognition for black soldiers who fought for American independence, and references to “the struggle for freedom and equality” in discussions of civil rights history.

Share

NONE OF THIS BODES WELL for the Trump administration’s continuing aggressive campaign to erase wokeness from a wide range of institutions from museums and arts centers to federal workplaces to universities.

Constructive conversations about DEI can be difficult for many reasons—from fuzzy and conflicting definitions of the term to political polarization, from the refusal of some on the left to admit any problems on their side to the bad faith of right-wing culture warriors like Christopher Rufo. Nonetheless, toxic and divisive DEI programs and materials really do exist.

A minor but interesting example: The just-released report of Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias discusses a “Pyramid of White Supremacy” graphic used in some sections of a required course at the Harvard Graduate School in Education. In principle, this could be a useful way to examine the subtle foundations of overt racism; in practice, such materials tend to become a sweeping indictment of a wide range of ill-defined behaviors and ideas. This version is especially shoddy: the pyramid is filled in with an almost random mix of brainstormed words, all labeled as more or less racist. The bottom level includes “Wall Street,” “neo-liberalism,” and “Free Trade”—while “colorblindness,” “community policing,” and opposition to affirmative action and to anti-Israel boycotts are listed as forms of “covert” and “coded” white supremacy. The category of “coded” white supremacy also includes the Anti-Defamation League and the nonprofit Life After Hate, which helps people disengage from far-right hate groups.

The Harvard report rightly describes this image as “conceptually incoherent” and full of “dubious comparisons”; it also recounts that the slide was displayed “for an extended period” with no critical discussion and that one student’s objections that the image is antisemitic were treated dismissively. Such practices are a cause for concern (though, again, it’s worth remembering that this is one image used in just four out of twenty-eight classrooms in which this required class was taught, and the instructor had already agreed to stop using it by the time the report came out).

These dysfunctional, often abusive forms of progressivism and DEI have also received considerable pushback in recent years. Now, the Trump administration’s toxic anti-wokeness—and its combination of zealotry, bullying, and bumbling incompetence—is likely not only to harm the institutions it targets but to make it harder to criticize toxic DEI. In the past decade, progressives alienated a lot of moderates with hypersensitive speech policing and self-righteous witch-hunts. Now, the shoe is on the other foot, and the anti-DEI police are the baddies—and defenders of true liberalism and free speech need to focus most of their effort on curbing the empowered authoritarian right.