Hoo boy, these last couple of months have felt like decades. But we have to find some levity — after all, as my grandmother says, if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry!
Earlier this month, the Trump administration apparently tried its best to be anti-“woke” in one very particular way — seemingly removing every mention of the word “gay” from Department of Defense data.
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The Associated Press published a list of over 26,000 items, like websites and photos with the word, that were flagged for removal.
While the apparent intention was to scrub “diversity” content as part of its rollback of DEI, they seemed to have overlooked some key images I’d venture to say they didn’t want to delete.
Some of these images include Paul Tibbets, the US Air Force pilot who piloted the plane that dropped the first of two atomic bombs on Japan during World War II. The plane’s name? The Enola Gay, named for Tibbets’s mother.
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That’s right…the Trump administration may have removed documentation of a pivotal piece of American war history because the plane was named “Gay.”
Rachel Maddow discussed the blunder on her show earlier this month, and people were all for it. The clip has racked up nearly 2.4 million likes and nearly 15 million views on TikTok, plus nearly 1.8 million views on YouTube, where it got comments like this:
During her segment on the removed assets, Maddow said, “Included in that database, marked for deletion by Donald Trump, is this photo of Paul Tibbets and the Enola Gay.”
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“And that’s curious, right? I mean, it is the most famous plane in modern history? Why would the Defense Department want to scrub that photo from the internet?” she goes on. “It’s not like deleting this photo is going to make people forget that we dropped that nuclear bomb on Japan.”
Then she reads from the AP: “‘…tens of thousands of Department of Defense website images that have been flagged for removal, or already removed due to having content that highlighted diversity, equity, or inclusion.'”
“They searched the whole Defense Department website for the word gay and then ordered all the gay to be deleted,” Maddow says, smiling incredulously. “And, I mean substantively, it’s confusing. This is like, the straightest thing I’ve ever seen, right? It’s a giant metal machine from the 1940s.”
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“But maybe because he named it after his mom, does that mean he’s sensitive? Does that make it kind of gay?” Maddow jokes.
MSNBC/CPA Media Pte Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo / TikTok
But it didn’t end at the Enola Gay. “I should mention it’s not only the photo of the gay plane,” Maddow says. “This is Sergeant Major A.C. Gay. His photo has also been flagged to be deleted by the Defense Department because his name is Gay.”
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Maddow then drew a comparison to when, in 2008, right-wing news website OneNewsNow.com (now American Family News) changed all uses of the word “gay” to “homosexual” — which eventually resulted in a report about Tyson “Homosexual’s” (aka Tyson Gay’s) Olympic track performance.
“Except now it’s not some fringy conservative website, it’s the US Defense Department,” she says.
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People in the comments were amused in that way you can only be when everything is crumbling around you. “we are living in an SNL skit,” this person said.
“MAGA is so afraid of WORDS,” someone wrote.
Many pointed out what they see as carelessness and “incompetence” on Trump’s part.
A few commenters worried that the planned deletions signal worse things to come. “One step away from burning books,” this person said.
“Erasing knowledge is a GO TO for dictators. Knowledge is the enemy of power hungry people,” another commented.
And some just commiserated about living in what we can only hope is the darkest timeline.
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You can watch the full Maddow clip here.
MSNBC / TikTok / Via tiktok.com
What do you think of all of this? Sound off in the comments.