At the same time this flag allows the flags supported by the right, the Confederate battle flag, the thin blue line flag, the Dresden don’t tread on me flag, along with others. The only political flag not allowed is those supporting the LGBTQ+ community. Hugs
Montana’s Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) has passed a law prohibiting the flying of Pride flags on government property and public schools. However, the law allows “historic flags,” like the Confederate flag, to be flown even though that flag represents support for Black slavery.
House Bill 819 allegedly restricts any flags that “represent a political party, race, sexual orientation, gender or political ideology.” It also allows the flying of any flags “honoring law enforcement officers, military service members, and public service organizations [that] provide appropriate, nonpolitical recognition of their contributions to public safety and national defense.”
The law was sponsored by 25-year-old state Rep. Braxton Mitchell (R), who introduced a law banning drag shows (including drag storytime events) from taking place on public property. The law remains unenforceable due to a federal court injunction against it.
Justifying his flag ban, Mitchell said during a March 6 state House floor debate, “Government buildings, schools and public facilities serve all citizens and should not be used to promote political, ideological or activist messaging,” according to KTVH.
However, Rep. Pete Elverum (D) pointed out, “What we’re doing here is we’re expressly prescribing what speech is allowed, ‘these flags’, and what speech is not allowed, ‘these other flags’,” adding, “And as for the definition of ‘promoting a certain ideology,’ those [flags] are expressly prohibited, but at the exact same time we’re sitting here with a bill proclaiming to be about free speech, we’re expressly prohibiting some and promoting others.”
Both Utah and Idaho have signed similar laws restricting the flying of Pride flags in schools and government property. The move led the capitol city governments of Salt Lake City,Utah and Boise, Idaho to designate the Pride flags as official city flags, so they can still fly them under the law.
When Mitchell introduced his aforementioned statewide drag ban, he claimed that all drag performances are “sexually oriented,” “indecent,” “inappropriate,” and “harmful” for minors. A federal judge issued an injunction against the ban in October 2023 — saying the broadly written law would encourage “discriminatory enforcement” and “disproportionally harm … anyone who falls outside of traditional gender and identity norms.” The judge’s injunction has stayed in place ever since.
Mitchell supports far-right causes, like pro-gun protests in the face of school shootings, joined the young conservative group Turning Point USA, supported the current U.S. president’s baseless claims of a “stolen” 2020 election, and has shared images of the far-right paramilitary group the Proud Boys on social media,The Daily Beast reported.
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The National Guard plays a crucial role in the United States, both in its capacity as a reserve component of the armed forces and as a versatile asset that state governors can call on in times of civil unrest, natural disaster, or even the coronavirus pandemic. Section 502(f) of Title 32 of the U.S. Code is a long-standing authority that facilitates a range of important domestic National Guard missions. In the summer of 2020, however, the Trump administration made unprecedented use of this law to bring unfederalized, out-of-state Guard troops into Washington, D.C., to respond to protests following the murder of George Floyd. In doing so, the administration put forward an unbounded interpretation of § 502(f) that risks subverting the broader statutory scheme Congress has created to govern domestic deployment of the military. In addition, if a future president were to rely on this interpretation of the law to ask governors to send unfederalized Guard personnel into a nonconsenting state—as opposed to a non-state jurisdiction like D.C.—that deployment would violate the Constitution.
Section 502 is the primary statute that authorizes the National Guard to operate in “Title 32 status,” one of the three different duty statuses in which members of the Guard may serve at any given moment. In “State Active Duty status,” Guard personnel carry out a state-defined mission, under state command and control, and with state funding and benefits. By contrast, in “Title 10 status,” the Guard has been “called into federal service,” or “federalized,” by the president. When federalized, Guard forces carry out federal missions under federal command and control, and with federal funding and benefits. Title 32 status occupies a middle ground between State Active Duty and Title 10 status, featuring both federal and state involvement. In this hybrid status, the Guard remains under state command and control but can perform federal missions, is paid with federal funds, and receives federal benefits. Crucially, because Guard personnel in Title 32 status are under state control, they have not been federalized and are not subject to the Posse Comitatus Act. That means they are not barred from participating in civilian law enforcement activities.
Although Title 32 status was originally conceived to allow the federal government to foot the bill for the extensive training requirements that Congress requires each state and territory’s National Guard to fulfill, the purposes for which it may be used have expanded over time. Today, § 502(f) allows the Guard to carry out a wide range of nontraining, operational missions in Title 32 status. But the authority that the law provides has its limits.
The 2020 National Guard Deployment in Washington, D.C.
In early June 2020, thousands of National Guard troops from 11 states were deployed to Washington, D.C., as part of the Trump administration’s response to largely peaceful protests following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At the time, there was a great deal of confusion and controversy over the legal authority under which these soldiers had been brought to D.C.
In a letter to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who had publicly objected to the deployment, then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr offered the following explanation: “At the direction of the President, the Secretary of Defense … requested assistance from out-of-state National Guard personnel, pursuant to 32 U.S.C. § 502(f), which authorizes States to send forces to assist the ‘[s]upport of operations or missions undertaken by the member’s unit at the request of the President or Secretary of Defense.’” According to Barr, these troops had been given broad responsibilities, including authority to participate in certain law enforcement activities:
“Consistent with the President’s direction, the Secretary of Defense assigned to out-of-state National Guard personnel the mission of protecting federal functions, persons, and property within the District of Columbia. That mission includes the protection of federal properties from destruction or defacement (including through crowd control, temporary detention, cursory search, measures to ensure the safety of persons on the property, and establishment of security perimeters, consistent with the peaceful exercise of First Amendment rights); protection of federal officials, employees, and law enforcement personnel from harm or threat of bodily injury; and protection of federal functions, such as federal employees’ access to their workplaces, the free and safe movement of federal personnel throughout the city, and the continued operation of the U.S. mails.”
The deployment and Barr’s subsequent justification raise two crucial questions about the scope of § 502(f). The first is whether § 502(f) authorizes the use of National Guard personnel to perform any mission the president could conceivably request. The Guard’s June 2020 operation in D.C. was unprecedented; § 502(f) had never before been used for a federally requested deployment in response to civil unrest. Historically, when presidents have desired to deploy the military for this purpose, they have invoked the Insurrection Act and deployed either active-duty federal troops or federalized National Guard. The District of Columbia’s unusual status within the United States’s federal system presents a second question: whether the deployment of unfederalized, out-of-state Guard troops into a nonconsenting jurisdiction would be lawful if that jurisdiction were a state. The answer to both of these questions is no.
Section 502(f): a Broad Authority, but Not an Unlimited One
Section 502 of Title 32 of the United States Code addresses “required drills and field exercises”—that is, the particulars of how often and in what manner National Guard units are required to train each year. Its first provision, § 502(a), establishes the normal training requirements for the Guard, commonly summarized as “one weekend a month and two weeks a year.” Section 502(f) sits at the end of the statute and has two prongs. The first, § 502(f)(1), allows Guard personnel to be ordered to perform “training or other duty” above and beyond the standard training regimen described by subsection (a). The second, § 502(f)(2)(A), provides that this “training or other duty” may include “[s]upport of operations or missions undertaken by the member’s unit at the request of the President or Secretary of Defense.”
The word “request” in § 502(f)(2)(A) is significant. The president or the secretary of defense may ask a governor to deploy National Guard troops, but the governor is under no obligation to acquiesce. This reading is supported by 32 U.S.C. § 328, which makes clear that a governor is the party empowered to order National Guard troops to duty under either prong of § 502(f). A governor’s right to refuse was evident in the summer of 2020—the Trump administration asked a total of 15 governors to deploy their Guard personnel into Washington, but four declined to do so. This point is discussed further below.
As for the question of what kinds of missions § 502(f) is intended to authorize, the statute itself offers little guidance. The words “other duty” in § 502(f)(1) plainly permit the National Guard to carry out non-training-related missions. The critical question is how broadly “other duty” should be interpreted. Barr and the Trump administration appear to have assumed that “other duty” means any duty—that under § 502(f)(2)(A), National Guard troops provided by a willing governor may be used to perform any mission the president could request. As Barr explained, the out-of-state Guard forces in D.C. had been assigned a wide range of duties, including law enforcement activities such as “crowd control, temporary detention, [and] cursory search.”
Such a broad reading, however, is inconsistent with the statute’s legislative history, its place in the statutory scheme, and judicially established rules of statutory interpretation. In effect, it allows an end run around the procedures and guard rails that Congress has created to govern domestic deployment of the military. Section 502 was originally enacted as part of the codification of Title 32 in 1956, but subsection (f) and the “other duty” language within it were not added until 1964. On paper, the addition of subsection (f) opened the door for National Guard personnel to perform operational missions under Title 32. However, the legislative history of its adoption suggests that it was intended principally to provide funding and authorization for training-related duties beyond the specific exercises cited in the law. The provision was not used for operational missions until 1989, when Congress added specific statutory authority for one kind of § 502(f) “other duty” in particular: drug interdiction missions under 32 U.S.C. § 112.
Another type of operational mission was added in 2004, when, amid the broadening war on terror, Congress added an entirely new chapter to Title 32—Chapter 9—that authorized National Guard personnel operating under state control to be federally funded under § 502(f) while engaging in certain “homeland defense activities.” But state governors struggled to obtain Department of Defense approval for these missions because of the requirement that missions under Chapter 9 respond to a “threat … against the United States” as a whole. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and exposed disastrous shortcomings in the federal government’s ability to respond to natural disasters. The next year, Congress responded to both of these problems by further expanding the potential nontraining uses of § 502(f), this time by amending the provision itself rather than adding any new sections to Title 32.
The newly added subsection (f)(2)(A), which authorizes National Guard support of federal operations or missions “at the request of the President or Secretary of Defense,” was undoubtedly meant to simplify and ease the process by which National Guard forces could perform domestic operational missions under Title 32. However, although the legislative history for the 2006 amendment does not clearly identify the exact bounds of what Congress intended to authorize, it does suggest that Congress was concerned primarily with facilitating homeland defense activities already authorized elsewhere in Title 32 as well as the National Guard’s traditional role in responding to natural disasters like Katrina.
Indeed, the Report of the House Armed Services Committee on the 2006 amendment hardly mentions the new authority it would create for governors to use their Guard forces to support missions requested by the president or secretary of defense, and instead focuses on discussing how other parts of the same amendment would allow “reserve component personnel performing active guard and reserve duty, as well as military technicians (dual status), to … train active duty members of the armed forces” and the limitations on this new authority. In short, it is highly unlikely that Congress intended to revolutionize the landscape of domestic deployment in the United States by giving the president an easy alternative to the Insurrection Act.
A narrower interpretation of Section 502(f) is also consistent with established principles of statutory interpretation. The Supreme Court explained in Whitman v. American Trucking that “Congress … does not alter the fundamental details of a regulatory scheme in vague terms or ancillary provisions—it does not, one might say, hide elephants in mouseholes.” Similarly, when the Court held in FDA v. Brown & Williamson that the Food and Drug Administration’s authority does not include power to regulate tobacco products as drugs, it said that “Congress could not have intended to delegate a decision of such economic and political significance to an agency in so cryptic a fashion.” In short, the Court generally assumes that Congress will speak to major issues directly.
There is no doubt that Congress meant for the 2006 amendments to § 502(f) to widen the scope of the activities it authorizes. Even so, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that Congress would have buried within a section of the U.S. Code that is primarily concerned with National Guard training requirements an open-ended authorization for American military forces to participate in domestic law enforcement activities at the behest of the president, notwithstanding the Posse Comitatus Act and without reliance on the Insurrection Act. Indeed, that would be the very definition of “hiding an elephant in a mousehole.”
State Sovereignty and Deployment of Unfederalized National Guard Personnel Into a Nonconsenting State
If the District of Columbia were a state, then the deployment of out-of-state National Guard troops into the District over its chief executive’s objections in June 2020 would have violated the Constitution. U.S. states are sovereign entities, although their sovereignty is limited and made subordinate to the federal government under the Constitution. Like foreign sovereigns, their sovereignty is territorially defined. As the Supreme Court explained on multiple occasions in the early republic, “the jurisdiction of a state is coextensive with its territory, coextensive with its legislative power.”
It is a function of the states’ co-equal and territorially limited sovereignty that one state’s courts cannot reach into another and adjudicate the affairs of people living there, unless those individuals have sufficient “minimum contacts” with the forum state. For the same reason, it cannot be the case that a state, solely under its own authority, may deploy its National Guard forces into another state without that state’s permission. Simply put, U.S. states may not invade one another.
The deployment of one state’s National Guard into another state in State Active Duty status without the receiving state’s consent would therefore be unlawful. Were this not the rule—if one state could freely reach into another and exercise governmental power there—then any kind of conflict between the states would have the potential to lead to a physical confrontation between their law enforcement agencies and National Guard forces, with potentially disastrous consequences.
The crucial remaining question is whether placing Guard forces in Title 32 status obviates this sovereignty barrier, making deployment into a nonconsenting state permissible. It does not.
The principal difference between State Active Duty status and Title 32 status is that the latter allows National Guard forces to operate at federal expense and to perform certain federal missions, all while remaining under state command and control. State command and control has legal as well as practical consequences. To start, it means that Guard personnel in Title 32 status have not been federalized. The federal courts have made clear that whether Guard personnel have been federalized depends solely on whether they are under state or federal command and control.
Further consequences of state control are apparent within Title 32 itself. As noted above, § 502(f)(2)(A) makes clear that governors are free to reject a president’s request for National Guard assistance. Likewise, 32 U.S.C. § 328 provides that for any § 502(f) deployment, the governor—not the president—issues the orders to mobilize and deploy. Barr’s letter to Bowser likewise acknowledges that § 502(f) “authorizes States to send forces” to support missions requested by the president.
All of these factors point to the same conclusion: Although a deployment under § 502(f)(2)(A) is federally requested, defined, and funded, state authority is being exercised as a legal matter.
This conclusion is consistent with what the Supreme Court has said about what it means for members of the National Guard to be “federalized.” In Perpich v. Department of Defense, the Court explained that when Guard troops are federalized, they temporarily become part of the active-duty federal military. When not federalized, however, they remain state officers. The Perpich Court made clear that, when on active duty, a member of the Guard must be either a part of the federal military or a state officer—they can never be both at the same time. Since Guard personnel in Title 32 status have not been federalized, they are not part of the federal military and must instead be state officers operating under state authority.
For the purposes of the co-equal and territorially limited sovereignty of the states, then, there is no difference between State Active Duty status and Title 32 status. In both cases, National Guard personnel are state officers exercising state authority. That means they cannot operate in another state without its consent, no matter who requested their presence or who is paying them.
Conclusion
Congress should amend § 502(f) to narrow and clarify its scope. In the meantime, though, the law is not a blank check allowing the president to use military forces anywhere in the country and for any purpose so long as they can find one willing governor. Congress no doubt intended the creation of § 502(f)(2)(A) to make domestic deployment of the National Guard easier rather than harder, but it is highly unlikely that lawmakers meant to blow a gaping hole in the complex web of laws that govern the military’s domestic activities. Rather, § 502(f)(2)(A) was likely intended to facilitate missions that were already authorized by other statutes as well as traditional Guard functions like disaster relief.
Moreover, regardless of Congress’s intent, deployments of the National Guard in Title 32 status must in all cases respect the co-equal and territorially limited sovereignty of the states. As a constitutional matter, the deployment of unfederalized Guard personnel into a nonconsenting state is never permissible. If the president wishes to unilaterally deploy military forces into a nonconsenting state, then they must do so through the statutory mechanism that Congress has provided for this purpose since 1792: the Insurrection Act.
In all cases and regardless of the statutory device used, domestic deployment of the military should be treated as an option of last resort. There is a tradition in American law and political thought, with roots that can be traced to medieval England, that opposes any kind of military interference in civilian affairs outside of emergencies. This tradition recognizes the fundamental danger of turning an army inward to face its own country’s citizens. As the Eighth Circuit explained in Bissonette v. Haig:
“The use of military forces to seize civilians can expose civilian government to the threat of military rule and the suspension of constitutional liberties. On a lesser scale, military enforcement of the civil law leaves the protection of vital Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights in the hands of persons who are not trained to uphold these rights. It may also chill the exercise of fundamental rights, such as the rights to speak freely and to vote, and create the atmosphere of fear and hostility which exists in territories occupied by enemy forces.”
Domestic deployment presents risks for the military itself, too. While sometimes necessary, all domestic military operations distract and draw resources away from the military’s core national security responsibilities. Domestic law enforcement operations, in particular, are also broadly unpopular among military personnel, who did not enlist in the armed services to police their fellow citizens—a fact that is all the more significant as the military continues to struggle through a recruitment and retention crisis.
The National Guard is not immune to these risks. While the Guard certainly continues to fulfill its traditional role of providing local support in times of crisis, over the past three decades it has also been integrated into the broader United States armed forces. Today’s National Guard is a professional army and an essential piece of the Department of Defense’s “Total Force.” To be sure, Guard personnel are more likely to be trained in law enforcement than their active-duty counterparts, but many Guard units are frontline combat units trained and equipped to fight overseas, with comparatively little experience or training in responding to civil unrest.
Accordingly, when considering whether to use any part of the military domestically, leaders should not merely ask whether a deployment would be constitutional and authorized by statute. They should also ask whether it would be an appropriate use of limited military resources and whether it is consistent with the foundational American belief that domestic civilian affairs should be managed by domestic civilian authorities whenever possible.
Mayor Muriel Bowser addressed the closure for the first time in a public radio appearance Friday afternoon. She called the closing an “unfortunate error” and said she would “continue to try to lean on” the National Park Service “for a different decision.” At the same time she appeared to defend the decision, saying police had “a lot of events to be responsible for” and that “unfortunately, the public safety issue rose to the top over the public celebration.”
A cyclist draped in a rainbow Equality flag chanted “shame” as she rode loops around the park. Passersby, turned away by police from entering the circle, shouted expletives. A man, driving top-down in a convertible through the snarled traffic around Dupont Circle, shouted, sarcastically: “Oh no! I’m a heterosexual man, and I must be protected from Pride!
The park has been a historic gathering place that has hosted celebrations following the first Pride events in the 1970s, AIDS protests in the ’80s and ’90s and vigils after violent attacks on the LGBTQ community, including a vigil for the victims of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting and a Black Trans Lives Matter rally.
Earlier this week, D.C. Council members Brooke Pinto and Zachary Parker announced that the Metropolitan Police Department had withdrawn its request to close the park following backlash from community members. But federal officials proceeded with the shutdown anyway and have not responded to requests for comment.
“I am extremely disappointed and frustrated that Dupont Circle Park will be closed this weekend despite MPD’s commitment to keep folks safe there,” Pinto said in a statement to The Advocate.
“This closure is disheartening to me and so many in our community who wanted to celebrate World Pride at this iconic symbol of our city’s historic LGBTQ+ community. I wish I had better news to share.”
Underscoring their desire to implement the closure, USPP highlighted criminal incidents that were initially pointed out in Smith’s April 22 letter. Those incidents, which took place during the District’s Pride celebration, included damages to the park’s historic fountain in 2023 that amounted to approximately $175,000.
In 2019, panic erupted at the park after loud popping sounds were perceived as gunshots being fired. However, it was later determined no firearm had been discharged. Seven people were transported to the hospital for non-life-threatening injuries prompted by the chaos that had initially broken out.
Police responded to recent incidents of vandalism to Pride decorations in D.C. The suspects tore down rainbow wraps from poles in the area, according to two incident reports from the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). One incident is listed as a suspected hate crime. The suspects got away in both cases, according to MPD.
Chris De Anda said he wrapped himself around one of the poles to block the suspect from ripping off the rainbow wrap, thinking that would stop him. It didn’t.
“He starts to rip down the flag, rips my arms off trying to get into them to pull down the paper a little bit more, but the entire time I basically hold on to it,” de Anda described, saying the man scratched his arms a bit to get to the flag.
The lawless, corrupt occupation regime in DC is doing this on purpose as a way to inconvenience, snub and insult the lgbt community. Their long term goal is to silence, cancel and eradicate lgbt Americans, so expect increasing instances of these kinds of things, and worse.
So…a bunch of bigots have been vandalizing things in Dupont Circle, so they close it all off so the people who AREN’T the bigoted vandals can’t go there? Kinda sounds like they’re letting the bigots win here…
Childish petty thin skinned MAGA cultists in the White House just can’t let anyone celebrate anything that isn’t specifically a “Christian” event. I wonder what would happen in Thousands just show up to DuPont Circle enmass, what are they going to do, arrest them all???
from Heather Cox Richardson. Though our current president has little respect for U.S. veterans, that is not true of anybody I know. Even anti-war I believe our current service people and our veterans are deserving of all benefits of their citizenship and especially added benefits of their service to the U.S. Many readers here are military veterans. My mother’s brother-in-law, my (favorite!) Uncle Jack, served as a U.S. Marine in WWII. My father served in the U.S. Army during the Korean conflict. All of us know and love someone who’s served us in this honorable and unique fashion. While our president doesn’t think to respect that, or even think about it at all, the rest of us do. I know we are thankful. And now, from Heather Cox Richardson, history expert,
Today the U.S. political world was consumed today by a public fight between President Donald J. Trump and his former sidekick, billionaire Elon Musk. Musk invested about $290 million into the 2024 election, vowing to elect Trump in order to get rid of government investigations into his businesses he worried would “take [him] down.”
When Trump took office, Musk became a fixture in the White House, attending Cabinet meetings and heading the “Department of Government Efficiency.” That group set out to kill government programs by withholding congressionally approved funds at the same time that its staff sucked up information on Americans that could feed the training of artificial intelligence and killed the investigations into his businesses Musk had worried about.
In February, Musk posted on social media: “I love [Donald Trump] as much as a straight man can love another man.”
But Musk overstepped boundaries and overstayed his welcome even as his antics hurt sales of his signature car, the Tesla, inspiring Trump to do a car commercial for him on the White House grounds. Just a week ago, Musk officially left the White House on the same day that an article in the New York Times documented his heavy drug use on the campaign.
Then, on Tuesday, June 3, he took a public stand against the omnibus bill Trump desperately wants Congress to pass, posting on X: “I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”
And with that, the falling out began.
This morning, Trump told reporters he was “disappointed” in Musk. Ron Filipkowski of Meidas followed the saga from there.
“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House, and the Republicans would be 51–49 in the Senate,” Musk wrote. “Such ingratitude.”
Trump then suggested that “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
Musk promptly said he would begin decommissioning SpaceX’s spacecraft, which supply the International Space Station.
The two men continued to go back and forth, with Musk saying that “Donald Trump is in the Epstein files,” a reference to the records compiled by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, with whom Trump was friendly. Musk also said Trump’s tariffs will cause a recession, and agreed with another poster who suggested that Trump should be impeached and replaced with Vice President J.D. Vance.
Trump responded to that attack far more weakly than one would have expected, simply turning back to the omnibus bill and insisting it “is one of the Greatest Bills ever presented to Congress.”
Musk’s behavior is erratic in its own right, but if there is anything but pique behind it, it appears he is threatening Trump by making a play to control the Republican Party. In response to a post by conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer suggesting that Republican lawmakers are unsure if they should side with Trump or Musk, Musk wrote: “Oh and some food for thought as they ponder that question: Trump has 3.5 years left as President, but I will be around for 40+ years.”
It’s quite a gamble, since Trump controls the government contracts on which Musk’s fortune was built and on which he still relies. Some MAGA loyalists appear to see the fight as a victory for Trump and are thrilled to see Musk’s star fall. MAGA influencer Steve Bannon told Tyler Pager of the New York Times that he has advised Trump to cancel all of Musk’s federal contracts and launch a formal investigation of his drug use and his immigration status.
Kylie Robison and Aarian Marshall of Wired noted that TrumpCoin lost more than $100 million in value during the fight. Tesla stock lost $152 billion of value from its market capitalization, prompting Filipkowski to note that the total came to about $9 billion per tweet.
Economist Robert Reich had perhaps the best summary of the fight today when he noted, “That any of us have to care about the messy breakup of these two massive narcissists—and that they both individually wield such massive power—is an indictment of our political system and further proves the poisonous influence of Big Money on our democracy.”
Indeed, today’s White House and today’s America are very different from what they were eighty-one years ago.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his twenty-ninth Fireside Chat on June 5, 1944, and had good news for the American people. The day before, on June 4, Rome had fallen to Allied troops. “The first of the Axis capitals is now in our hands,” Roosevelt said.
The president pointed out that it was “significant that Rome has been liberated by the armed forces of many nations. The American and British armies—who bore the chief burdens of battle—found at their sides our own North American neighbors, the gallant Canadians. The fighting New Zealanders from the far South Pacific, the courageous French and the French Moroccans, the South Africans, the Poles and the East Indians—all of them fought with us on the bloody approaches to the city of Rome. The Italians, too, forswearing a partnership in the Axis which they never desired, have sent their troops to join us in our battles against the German trespassers on their soil.”
This group of ordinary men from many different countries had worked together to defeat the forces of fascism.
But FDR warned Americans that the fall of Rome was only the beginning. “We shall have to push through a long period of greater effort and fiercer fighting before we get into Germany itself,” he said. [T]he victory still lies some distance ahead. That distance will be covered in due time—have no fear of that. But it will be tough and it will be costly.”
FDR knew something his audience did not. On the other side of the Atlantic, paratroopers, their faces darkened with cocoa, were already dropping into France, and the soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Allies were on their way across the English channel.
The order of the day from their commander Dwight D. Eisenhower that day had read: “You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed people of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
“Your task will not be an easy one,” it read, but it assured the troops that the Germans had suffered great defeats and Allied bombing had reduced German strength, while “[o]ur Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!”
Eisenhower’s public confidence did not reflect his understanding that the largest amphibious invasion in military history was a gamble. On June 5, in pencil on a sheet of paper, he had written a message to be communicated in case the invasion failed.
“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops,” it read. “My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and dedication to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
On the morning of June 6, 1944, five naval assault divisions stormed the beaches of Normandy. Seven thousand ships and landing craft operated by more than 195,000 naval personnel from eight countries brought almost 133,000 troops to beaches given the code names UTAH, OMAHA, GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD. By the end of the day, more than 10,000 Allied troops were wounded or killed, but the Allies had established a foothold in France that would permit them to flood troops, vehicles, and supplies into Europe. When FDR held a press conference later that day, officials and press alike were jubilant.
The billionaire helped fund an effort to gin up fraud claims against the Democratic donation platform.
Trump’s claim that he can order the Justice Department to investigate a fundraising platform used by his political foes based on vague allegations is part of his ongoingeffort to use the government’s powers to target political enemies. It’s not a particularly realistic accusation—the fact sheet claims it’s targeting “straw donor” schemes, in which one person donates on behalf of another. Given the fairly strict limitations on campaign contributions, any straw donor scheme that wants to inject any noticeable amount of money into an electoral system that had $15.5 billion run through it is a great deal of tedious, high-risk work for a scammer.
On the other hand, in the post-Citizens United era, there are plenty of ways to inject unaccounted-for money—even, theoretically, foreign money—into the election. Super-PACs can accept unlimited donations from fairly easy-to-obscure sources, for instance, which makes the idea of anyone using a small-dollar conduit like ActBlue (or the GOP equivalent WinRed) fairly silly.
And notably, the funding for some of Trump’s “data” on an alleged ActBlue “fraud” seems to have come from just such a source: a super-PAC bankrolled by Elon Musk.
Last year, an opaque group called the Fair Election Fund began promising to pay “whistleblowers” who cited election fraud “with payment from our $5 million fund.” That never panned out, but the same organization found more success with a claim that 60,000 people who were named as small-dollar donors in the Biden-Harris campaign’s July Federal Election Commission report did not recall making the contribution when contacted by the Fair Election Fund.
As Mother Jonesreported last year, the Fair Election Fund appears to have generated this finding by blasting out ominous-sounding texts and emails telling ActBlue donors that their donations had been “flagged,” then tallying people who responded—accurately or not—by checking a box saying they did not recall making the contribution.
More at the link above
Israel carrying out ‘live-streamed genocide’ in Gaza, Amnesty says
Amnesty accuses US President Donald Trump of committing a ‘multiplicity of assaults’ on human rights.
Israel is perpetrating a “live-streamed genocide” in Gaza, committing illegal acts with the “specific intent” of wiping out Palestinians, Amnesty International has said.
Israeli forces in Gaza have violated the United Nations Genocide Convention with acts that include “causing serious bodily or mental harm to civilians” and “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction”, the human rights organisation said in its annual report released on Monday.
Israeli air strikes have also frequently hit civilians who were following evacuation orders, while its forces continued to “arbitrarily detain and, in some cases, forcibly disappear Palestinians”, the rights group said.
DOGE has made a big impact on Washington. But government spending is up.
Elon Musk and his shadowy “tech support” team have ripped through Washington, reshaping the government and culling the federal workforce with astonishing speed and scope.
Nearly a quarter of a million workers have or are expected to leave their federal jobs. That includes more than 112,000 federal workers who have opted into the deferred resignation program, according to a POLITICO analysis of previous reporting and conversations with administration officials. It also includes some 121,000 workers across agencies who have been fired, according to a CNN analysis.
DOGE has hollowed out or shut down 11 federal agencies and says it has terminated more than 8,500 contracts and 10,000 grants. It has wiped out foreign aid and volunteerism in the U.S., slashed education spending and made sweeping changes to the way the government makes procurements, hires contractors and shares data.
DOGE, after promising $2 trillion in savings, now says it has saved the government $160 billion. But even these reported savings, so far, have not led to any meaningful decline in total government spending this year, according to the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, which tracks weekly Treasury data.
In fact, the government has actually been spending more compared to this time last year, the model found.
Total spending rose by 6.3 percent, or $156 billion since Trump took office, compared to the first four months of 2024, said Kent Smetters, a Wharton professor who directs the model. Even when accounting for inflation, the federal government has still added $81.2 billion more spending to its books compared to the same period last year, he added.
I want to thank brucedesertrat who sent me the link to this substack article. I enjoy learning about history but sadly this hits home too deeply. It is so close it is scary. Hugs.
Today President Trump is threatening to pull funds if Harvard does not comply with his demands for the school to shape it’s curricula to favor Trumpism. Harvard has refused to caved to Trump’s fascist demands which clearly violate free speech.
“The University will not surrender its independence or its constitutional rights,” Harvard President Alan M. Garber
The seizure of power by the MAGA Republicans in 2025, led by Donald Trump, brought far-reaching changes to American Universities. Some caved, some obeyed in advance.
The seizure of power by the Nazis in 1933, led by Adolph Hitler, brought far-reaching changes to German Universities. All caved. All obeyed in advance.
There is a parallel in German history for this American moment when books are banned, educational institutions are battered and a brutal and barbaric anti-intellectual ethos is on the rise.
A timeline of the Nazification of Munich University
1933
Hitler demands The University of Munich restructure its curriculum in accordance with the new ruling ideology of Nazism.
Trump demands Harvard University restructure its curriculum in accordance with the new ruling ideology of Trumpism. Abandon DEI. Police your students and faculty for viewpoint “diversity”.
Those faculty members who are not Nazi sympathizers are dismissed.
Trump’s letter calls for political undesirables to be gone.
The numbers of Jews admitted to university are restricted.
Munich University is the site of book burnings led by pro-Nazi students.
With the passage of these laws, the Nazis attempted to root out any opposition to their ideology that remain in German higher education.
Trump wants all of America’s Universities to root out anti-Trumpist thought, to be citadels of Trumpism, to employ MAGA professors who will teach American students how Trumpism will make America and her institutions of higher learning great again.
1941
Munich University appoints of Walther Wüst, an Aryan ideologue, Führer-Rektor of the University. By this time the Nazification of Munich University is complete. The once prestigious Munich University employs an all Nazi faculty.
1943
Sophie Scholl, a student attending Munich University, is guillotined for distributing anti-Nazi broadsides on campus.
Under President Trump students are deported or “disappeared”. I can safely assume an American student will be martyred for resisting fascism here in our nation in t he months ahead.
Hitler visiting the University of Munich
Here is a harrowing account of the Nazification of Frankfurt University witnessed by young Austrian economist named Peter Drucker:
Frankfurt was the first university the Nazis tackled, precisely because it was the most self-confidently liberal of major German universities, with a faculty that prided itself on its allegiance to scholarship, freedom of conscience, and democracy. The Nazis knew that control of Frankfurt University would mean control of German academia. And so did everyone at the university.
Above all, Frankfurt had a science faculty distinguished both by its scholarship and by its liberal convictions; and outstanding among the Frankfurt scientists was a biochemist-physiologist of Nobel-Prize caliber and impeccable liberal credentials. When the appointment of a Nazi commissar was announced . . . and every teacher and graduate assistant at the university was summoned to a faculty meeting to hear this new master, everybody knew that a trial of strength was at hand. I had never before attended a faculty meeting, but I did attend this one.
The new Nazi commissar wasted no time on the amenities. He immediately announced that Jews would be forbidden to enter university premises and would be dismissed without salary on March 15; this was something that no one had thought possible despite the Nazis’ loud antisemitism. Then he launched into a tirade of abuse, filth, and four-letter words such as had been heard rarely even in the barracks and never before in academia. . . . [He] pointed his finger at one department chairman after another and said, “You either do what I tell you or we’ll put you into a concentration camp.” There was silence when he finished; everybody waited for the distinguished biochemist-physiologist. The great liberal got up, cleared his throat, and said, “Very interesting, Mr. Commissar, and in some respects very illuminating: but one point I didn’t get too clearly. Will there be more money for research in physiology?”
The meeting broke up shortly thereafter with the commissar assuring the scholars that indeed there would be plenty of money for “racially pure science.” A few of the professors had the courage to walk out with their Jewish colleagues, but most kept a safe distance from these who only a few hours earlier had been their close friends. I went out sick unto death—and I knew that I was going to leave Germany within forty-eight hours.
The Nazis attacked academic dissent with lethal cruelty
Some went to nearby Dachau. Some, such as our heroic young student Sophie, were beheaded.
Sophie Scholl, photographed by the Gestapo
Here is the text of the pamphlet that cost Munich University student Sophie Scholl her life. Her haunting critique of Hitler resonates eerily with the familiar critiques of our current leader:
Fellow Students!
Shaken, our people faces the downfall of our men of Stalingrad. Three hundred thirty thousand German men have been senselessly and irresponsibly rushed into death and ruin by the brilliant strategy of the man who served as a private in the Great War. Führer, we thank you!
It is festering in the German people: Do we want to continue entrusting the fate of our armies to a dilettante? Do we want to sacrifice the rest of our young Germans to the base, power-seeking instincts of a Party clique? Nevermore.
The day of reckoning has come, our German youth’s reckoning with the most abhorrent tyranny that our people has ever endured. In the name of all young Germans, we demand that Adolf Hitler’s State return to us our personal freedom, the German’s most valuable possession, which he has cheated us out of in the most disgraceful way.
We have grown up in a State where every free expression of opinion has been ruthlessly gagged. The HJ, SA, and SS have tried to make us uniform, to revolutionize us, to narcotize us in the most fruitful educational years of our lives. “Ideological training” was the name given to the despicable method of stifling our budding independent thought and self-esteem in a haze of empty phrases. A “Führerauslese”1 of a kind as fiendish and at the same time as narrow-minded as one can possibly imagine, grooming its future Party bosses at Ordensburgen [special educational centers for Party cadres] to become godless, shameless, and unscrupulous exploiters and cutthroats, to become blind, mindless followers of the Führer. We “brain-workers” were exactly right for becoming the cudgel of this new ruling class. Front-line soldiers are disciplined like schoolboys by student leaders and would-be Gauleiter; Gauleiter, with prurient jests, assault the honor of female students. German female students at the university in Munich have given a dignified reply to the insult to their honor, and German male students have intervened and stood their ground on behalf of their female classmates. That is a first step toward gaining our right to free self-determination, without which intellectual values cannot be created. We are grateful to our brave fellow students, female and male, who have led the way by setting this shining example!
For us, there is only one watchword: Fight against the Party! Get out of the Party formations, in which the goal is to keep us politically muzzled! Get out of the lecture rooms of the SS Unter- or Oberführer and the Party bootlickers! True scholarly activities and genuine intellectual freedom are at stake! No threat of any kind can frighten us, not even the closing of our universities. Each of us must fight for our future, our freedom and honor in a body politic that is aware of its moral responsibility.
Freedom and honor! For ten long years, Hitler and his comrades have squeezed these two magnificent German words and made them loathsome, have banged on them and twisted them as only dilettantes can, dilettantes who cast the highest values of a nation before swine. They have sufficiently demonstrated what freedom and honor mean to them during ten years of the destruction of all physical and intellectual freedom, of all moral substance in the German people. Even the dumbest German’s eyes have been opened by the dreadful blood bath which they have brought about everywhere in Europe and continue to bring about each day. The German name will remain forever disgraced unless German youth stand up at last, engage simultaneously in revenge and expiation, smash their tormentors, and bring about a new intellectual and spiritual Europe.
Students! The German people is watching us! It expects us, as in 1813 with the breaking of Napoleon’s domination, now also in 1943 to break the domination of National Socialist terror through the power of the mind.
Berezina and Stalingrad blaze in the East; the dead of Stalingrad implore us!
“Fresh on, my people, the flame signals are smoking!”2
Our people is rising up against the enslavement of Europe by National Socialism, in a new, trustful breakthrough of freedom and honor!
As you read her courageous words consider how and why a regime would loathe and fear such a voice for liberty.
Now is the time to stand with all who see Trump for the terrifying tyrant he is.
Now is the time to stand with all educators and students who courageously stand against this tyranny.
Now is the time to join Thomas Jefferson in swearing “upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
Now is the time to stand with Harvard University.
Now is the time to stand with all educators and educational institutions threatened by MAGA fascism.
David Fitzsimmons: Arizona’s Progressive Voice is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The two quotes from the article I added just below what I am writing give away the Fundamentalist Christian republican’s goal, which is to make those people they disagree with, that they hate, disappear from society. Their goal by taking LGBTQ+ media out of schools is to make it appear that all kids are straight and cis. No one can be different from them or their beliefs. Everyone must walk lockstep with them, their way is the only way people can live. Holy dictators. Their goal is to erase anyone different from them from the public view, from society. We must not let them do that. Hugs
A controlled production of “knowledge” maintains the marginality of other groups, and it denies exposure to multiple perspectives.
The institutionalization of a hegemonic norm functions to legitimize what can be said, who has the authority to speak and be heard, and what is authorized as the truth.
Former President Donald Trump speaks about border security at a rally at Million Air, a private airplane terminal at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, Friday October 25, 2024.
“When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.”-Adrienne Rich
The United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could possibly perpetuate the “psychic disequilibrium” that Adrienne Rich laments.
Trump’s Department of Education called the suggestion that rightwingers are trying to ban book a “hoax.”
The case arose from conflicts between those in favor of teaching LGBTQ+ topics in schools and those who believe in so-called parents’ rights on religious grounds when it comes to the education of their children. The case stems from some parents’ concerns about a policy sanctioned by the Montgomery County Board of Education requiring new elementary school storybooks covering LGBTQ+ topics that could be read in class.
One of the contested books is titled “Pride Puppy!” and is about a puppy who gets lost in the crowd during an LGBTQ+ Pride parade.
When the policy first passed, parents could opt their children out of the curriculum, but later, the board reversed that part. In this demographically diverse school district, some Christian and Muslim parents, in particular, objected. I wonder, though, whether they think parents should be allowed to opt their children out of reading age-appropriate stories about Jewish or Asian people, for example.
This case harkens back to one of the earlier curricular programs created in 1991 by the New York City Board of Education. The Children of the Rainbow Curriculum was introduced to first-grade teachers to “assist with teaching about multicultural social issues.” The board developed the program to counter the increase in hate crimes directed against members of marginalized communities.
The curriculum contained 443 pages of suggested readings, activities, and other lectures, all designed to help teachers promote academic and social skills while teaching about diversity.
Unfortunately, the section on families that covered LGBTQ+ people incited enormous criticism. Some opponents argued that it promoted sex and sodomy to kids.
The battle gained significant publicity, and the New York City Department of Education ultimately voted against accepting the entire Children of the Rainbow Curriculum.
And the moments of psychic disequilibrium continued.
Surplus Repression & Anti-Knowing
Of course, parents and other adults have the inherent responsibility of protecting young people from harming themselves and being harmed by others and of teaching them how to live and function in society within our ever-changing global community.
In Freudian terms, we must develop a balance between the individual’s unrestrained instinctual drives and that person’s restraints (repression) on these drives in the service of maintaining society (civilization) and sustaining the life of the individual.
Nonetheless, we must establish a line demarcating protection from control, teaching from oppression, and minimal and fundamental repression from what Herbert Marcuse terms “surplus repression” (that which goes over and beyond what is necessary for the protection of the individual and the smooth functioning of society and enters into the realm of domination, control, and oppression).
Authorizing the “truth”
When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder I can think at all
And though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall.
Paul Simon laments in his song “Kodachrome” that his education consisted of neutralizing, meaningless content. “Everything looks worse in black and white,” he sang of the whitewashing of his lessons.
Metaphorically, most schools teach only in black and white, whereas most students want the array of colors Paul Simon wished for: “Those nice bright colors: the greens of summers, makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah.”
Unfortunately, Simon’s educational system took his Kodachrome away: the camera film that captured the full spectrum of the rainbow from the brightest reds, oranges, and yellows, to the darkest blues and browns and deepest purples.
Schools across the nation are attempting to function amidst increased book banning and control of course content by state legislatures under the false flag of “parental rights.” It’s all part of the current tide of right-wing takeovers of educational systems.
People on the political right transform terms like “woke” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” into hate-filled and frightening epithets. In the process, they have driven us away from the underlying purpose of education.
The term “education” is derived from two Latin roots: “e,” meaning “out of,” and “ducere,” meaning “to lead” or “to draw.”
In its original translation and intent, education includes the process of drawing knowledge out of the student or leading the student toward knowledge. This is in contrast to the placing or depositing information into what some educators perceive as the students’ waiting and docile minds, or what the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Reglus Neves Freire termed “the banking system of education.”
Surrounding forces – religion, parenting, schooling, and other types of socialization – often inhibit the maintenance of critical thinking facilities in young and old alike.
Let us take, for example, the Biblical warning in Genesis 2: 16-17, related to the story of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden: “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.’”
The apples on that tree represent knowledge. When eaten, this “forbidden fruit” unlocks levels of knowing that can more than overturn the apple cart. But more importantly, it can give the knower a full-color spectrum of the workings of the world. We are encouraged, nonetheless, to think only in the black and white determined by those in power.
Figures like the biblical Eve and Greek Pandora, women, are blamed for the downfall of “man.” In fact, they were strong women who refused to be trapped under the thumbs of the patriarchy.
Additionally, the ancient Greek legend of Prometheus casts a cautionary tale on the gifting of knowledge. The chief of the gods, Zeus, punished him for offering mortals the best of the sections from a slaughtered cow while giving the gods the remaining fat and bones.
After an infuriated Zeus took back fire from humanity, Prometheus stole and returned it to mortals, thus turning the darkness from the spectrum of black and white to technicolor once again.
For Prometheus’ crime of returning light and knowledge to humankind, Zeus had Prometheus chained to the Caucasus Mountains and sent an eagle to eat his immortal liver every day, which grew back every night.
Literature and cinema likewise warn of the horrific and often fatal risks of challenging the limitations placed by the powerful on the accumulation of knowledge.
The first film in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise, released in 1968, can be understood as a recreation of the legend of Prometheus. A U.S.-based crew crash land their space vehicle on a strange planet in the distant future amounting to nearly 2000 years advancement on Earth, as they traveled at the speed of light.
The crew, led by Taylor – the Prometheus character – discover that the planet is ruled by a species of apes who possess what to the Earthlings appear as human-like qualities, including speech, high reasoning, and cultural artifacts such as museums, medicine, constructed homes, a judicial system, and written religious and governing scrolls.
A community of humans on this planet, on the other hand, lacks the facility of speech and operates on an animal-like intellectual level. The apes hunt, enslave, and murder humans to keep them from invading their gardens and stealing food and to use them in medical and psychological experiments.
Taylor rebels and protests his treatment by challenging the hierarchical ranking of apes over humans. Two apes listen to Taylor and befriend him, Zira and Cornelius, and they eventually come to believe that what they have been socialized to accept as factual was somehow manipulated and falsified.
Blond-furred Dr. Zaius (Zeus), Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith, knows the truth regarding the origins of his species and the rise and fall of humans through industrialization and the power of the atom, which terminated life as it had been once known. His primary objective has been to keep the fire of “knowledge” away from his ape community and humans.
He attempts to destroy any artifacts and other remnants of pre-nuclear holocaust human society to keep alive the myth of perennial simian superiority. Knowledge, therefore, represents overturning the proverbial apple cart, undermining origin myths, and challenging hierarchal positionings.
These genesis/origin stories are examples of the concept of “hegemony,” a term coined by social theorist Antonio Gramsci to describe the ways in which the dominant group successfully disseminates dominant social realities and social visions in a manner accepted as common sense and part of the natural order.
This controlled production of “knowledge” maintains the marginality of other groups, and it denies exposure to multiple perspectives.
The institutionalization of a hegemonic norm functions to legitimize what can be said, who has the authority to speak and be heard, and what is authorized as the truth.
This was certainly the case in Nazi Germany. In 1933, Nazi stormtroopers invaded, ransacked, and closed The Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin, founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish and homosexual sexuality researcher. The Institute conducted early sexuality research and was a precursor of the Indiana-based Kinsey Institute in the United States.
Storm troopers carried away and torched over 10,000 volumes of books and research documents calling the Institute “an international center of the white-slave trade” and “an unparalleled breading ground of dirt and filth.”
Soon thereafter, Nazis and conservative university students throughout Germany invaded Jewish organizations and libraries, confiscating books they deemed “un-German.”
The German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft) declared a national “Action against the Un-German Spirit.” On May 10, 1933, students and Nazi leaders across Germany set ablaze over 25,000 volumes. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, fired up the Berlin crowd of over 40,000 sympathizers by declaring, “No to decadence and moral corruption. Yes to decency and morality in family and state.”
In 2018, we witnessed anti-LGBTQ+ Christian crusader Paul Dorr check out four LGBTQ+-inclusive children’s books from the Orange City, Iowa Public Library and burn them in a 27-minute October 2018 video diatribe on Facebook. – Dorr is the founder of Rescue the Perishing, a group “contending against moral evil to advance the Kingdom of Christ.”
The books in question were Two Boys Kissing, by David Levithan; Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress, by Christine Baldacchino; This Day In June, by Gayle E. Pitman; and Families, Families, Families!, by Suzanne and Max Lang.
In his video rant, Dorr argued that Two Boys Kissing was “designed to get 12-to-13-year-old boys to start having homosexual sex together.”
The fight for all the colors
To build off of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famed poem:
First they came for Leaves of Grass, and I did not speak out — Because I was not gay.
Then they came for Stone Butch Blues, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a transgender person.
Then they came for Critical Race Theory and Beloved, and I did not speak out — Because I was not Black.
Then they came for Maus, and I did not speak out — Because I am a Christian and not a Jew.
Then they came for books representing my experiences and identities — and there was no one left to speak out for me.
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This video touches just briefly on child abuse in that the republicans / clergy / highly religious do in the defense of the LGBTQ+ especially trans people accused of it. The Rev. Trevors is a real supporter of the LGBTQ+ and he doesn’t like it when Christians use his god / bible to harm others. Hugs
The defense secretary, along with the wider Trump administration, has spent its months in office purging the Pentagon, military and federal government of anything it deems diversity related, which has been widely interpreted by the military services and many others to mean anything that recognizes women and people with minority backgrounds.
Hegseth issued a vague order for the Defense Department to remove all “news articles, photos, and videos promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), including content related to critical race theory, gender ideology, and identity-based programs.”
Display case at the U.S. Naval Academy which housed removed items that commemorated female Jewish graduates. (Photo courtesy of Military Religious Freedom Foundation)
The U.S. Naval Academy has confirmed that officials there removed items commemorating female Jewish graduates from a historic display ahead of a visit to the school by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, or MRFF, a nonprofit group that advocates for religious freedom, first reported on the move after its members noticed the removal of the items on display at the Commodore Uriah P. Levy Center and Jewish Chapel.
Cmdr. Ashley Hockycko confirmed late Tuesday that the historical items honoring the Jewish graduates had been removed but said that it was done so “mistakenly.” “U.S. Naval Academy leadership is immediately taking steps to review and correct the unauthorized removal,” she added.
The removal appears to be the latest example of military and defense officials removing displays, websites and other materials honoring the achievements of women and minorities within the military, often with the presumption of acting on Hegseth’s orders or reacting to his preferences and beliefs.
The defense secretary, along with the wider Trump administration, has spent its months in office purging the Pentagon, military and federal government of anything it deems diversity related, which has been widely interpreted by the military services and many others to mean anything that recognizes women and people with minority backgrounds.
Hegseth issued a vague order for the Defense Department to remove all “news articles, photos, and videos promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), including content related to critical race theory, gender ideology, and identity-based programs.”
Some of that content has been restored after the removals became public. However, Hegseth’s office has not offered a full accounting of what has been removed to date.
MRFF founder and President Mikey Weinstein told Military.com in an interview Wednesday that his organization heard from 31 Naval Academy faculty, Midshipmen and staff, who were “outraged” by the removal of the items.
According to the MRFF, the displays containing items from male Jewish graduates and service members were left untouched.
However, the items were removed for only a short time, and officials told Military.com that they had been restored by Tuesday evening, having been gone less than a day.
The military academy also purged nearly 400 books from its library around the time of Hegseth’s visit as well, an official confirmed to Military.com. The books were banned under the Trump administration push to purge materials related to diversity, and were culled from library shelves before the defense secretary’s visit to the academy, according to The Associated Press.
The move comes about a week after the Capital Gazette, an Annapolis newspaper, reported that leaders at the Naval Academy didn’t think they needed to remove any books since President Donald Trump’s January executive order banning materials on diversity applied to kindergarten through 12th-grade schools that receive federal funding — not colleges.
The Navy would not offer a list of the books removed when asked.
The orders and policies claiming to target “diversity, equity and inclusion” — a term that has taken on a difficult-to-define and amorphous meaning under the Trump administration — are leaving officials in the Pentagon and the military branches frustrated. They feel that many of the policies being released by Hegseth demand urgency but lack specifics and are open to interpretation.
One official who remained anonymous to speak freely without fear of retaliation frustratedly noted to Military.com that this dynamic sets up a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.”
If the military services and their various offices overreact and remove content that becomes a scandal, they are slammed by Hegseth and his staff for “malicious compliance.”
That dynamic played out several weeks ago when the Pentagon was forced to walk back the removal of a website honoring trailblazing baseball player and Army veteran Jackie Robinson.
In a March 21 video, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell admitted that “some important content was inadvertently pulled offline” and attributed that to “the realities of AI tools and other software.” He said content was being both “mistakenly removed” and “maliciously removed.”
Meanwhile, the official went on to note, if the services take directives at their literal meaning, which was seemingly what the Naval Academy did when it decided it didn’t need to purge its library since it was not a K-12 school, that leads to the perception of noncompliance with orders and directives.
The result, according to the official, is a very uneven and ad hoc application of policy that leaves employees and officials paralyzed, frustrated and uncertain, with little more to go on than what they see in public statements like Parnell’s videos or Hegseth’s appearances on television.
“History is not DEI,” Parnell declared in his video.
“What does that mean? What am I supposed to do with that?” the official said.
Scottie's Playtime 