Trump Begins Dismantling Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion Initiatives

 

A very limited sampling of the white nationalist/ misogynist transformation going on in the Malignant Fascist's Washington, DC.

White- and- man-washing history

The Air Force has removed training courses with videos of its storied Tuskegee Airmen and the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs — the female World War II pilots who were vital in ferrying warplanes for the military — to comply with the Trump administration's crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

The videos were shown to Air Force troops as part of DEI courses they took during basic military training.

In a statement, the Air Force confirmed the courses with those videos had been removed and said it “will fully execute and implement all directives outlined in the Executive Orders issued by the President, ensuring that they are carried out with utmost professionalism, efficiency and in alignment with national security objectives.”...

The Tuskegee Airmen?  WASPs?  You don't get any more American than that.  WTF.

Science- washing DEI from the FDA

The Food and Drug Administration has removed webpages about diversity and inclusion in clinical trials for cancer drugs.

The page for Project Equity, a 2021 initiative launched by the FDA's Oncology Center of Excellence to ensure that cancer drugs were evaluated for approval based on data from a diverse group of study participants, has gone dark.

The program aimed to develop policies to make clinical trials for treatments more accessible to people who had been underrepresented in this research in the past. The removal comes amid the Trump administration's push to terminate diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility programs and initiatives.

According to archived Project Equity pages, historically underrepresented groups included "racial and ethnic minorities, individuals who live in rural areas, sexual and gender minorities, and individuals with economic, linguistic, or cultural barriers to healthcare services."...

We can only hope it's the webpages that have been removed, not the accessibility to clinical trials. But if the information is deleted, how do people find out in order to participate (rhetorical question)?

Rolling back civil rights protections

Among the flurry of executive orders since his Jan. 20 inauguration, President Donald Trump has taken aim at rooting out diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs within the federal government. But his efforts go beyond DEI, with one recent order rescinding a Civil Rights-era rule that has helped protect millions of workers from discrimination. 

Mr. Trump's Jan. 21 order — "Ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity" — revokes the Equal Employment Opportunity rule signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 — which is still law today — had a loophole that excluded federal employees. 

Johnson signed the Equal Employment Opportunity rule to close the loophole, and those protections were signed into law in 1972. That rule bars federal contractors, who today employ 3.7 million people, from discriminating against job applicants or workers on the basis of race, gender, religion and other protected characteristics. It also gave the Labor Department the authority to take action against discrimination. 

Mr. Trump's order does not invalidate the law, and private and federal employees are still protected from discrimination as laid out under the Civil Rights Act...

We noted this last item yesterday in our "Skeets," but it bears repeating.  

Some of the above is overreaction by bureaucrats trying to make sense of the senseless flurry of orders signed by the MF, but the chaos and the white Christian revanchment are real and are all part of the plan for this ugly kakistocracy.  Of course, there's much more and there will be much more to come, and the sooner we get off our asses and fight back, the better.

BONUS:  Oliver Willis writes on "The origins of Trump's war on diversity."

(Image: via the Southern Heritage Air Foundation's 2023 Rise Above traveling exhibit)

Why Women Don't Come Forward: Brett Kavanaugh Edition

Dahlia Lithwick has a must- read article today about the broken system that "Republican Forrest Gump" Judge Brett Kavanaugh springs from and that may well advance him to the Supreme Court in spite of a sexual assault allegation:

The real tragedy is that we do not need this woman’s story to understand who the current Supreme Court nominee is. Because here is what we do know about Judge Kavanaugh: We know that he clerked for and had a yearslong close relationship with a serial abuser of women and claims he knew nothing about it. He claims he doesn’t recall being on a hypersexualized and misogynistic email list and claims he didn’t bother to search to determine whether he was. He claims that when the serial abuser of women for whom he clerked was revealed to be a serial abuser of women, he believed the victims and yet called the abuser, because he was worried about the abuser’s mental health. Worrying more about the accused judge than the accusers one claims to believe is the system protecting the system. This is why women don’t come forward. 

Here is what we do know about Judge Kavanaugh. We know that he was part of a group of young men who saw fit to write a creepy racist and misogynistic email chain—and to pledge to keep it secret. We also know that the “neutral” George W. Bush lawyer who vetted Kavanaugh’s papers (and also represents the disgraced judge for whom Kavanaugh once clerked) deemed one of those emails classified, even though it contained no national security or political secrets. Withholding that email was the system protecting the system. That is why women don’t come forward. 

Here is what we do know about Judge Kavanaugh. He had an opportunity to use all these questions around all these periods in his life to say anything at all about men and power and the female victims of that power, and about the systems that protect and reify and rehabilitate men in power, and he said nothing. Worse, he said he believed the victims of that system while still doing nothing to support or credit them. This is why women don’t come forward.

Litwick's article is a blistering indictment of an entrenched patriarchal system whose demise is long overdue. (Lithwick reminds us of what happened to Anita Hill in the confirmation process for Justice Thomas and of the many #MeToo victims who've often been further crippled by the experience of coming forward.)  We're happy to provide at least a partial response on the political side:  elect many more women into positions of power at all levels of government, starting with the 15 Democratic women running for the U.S. Senate and 187 Democratic women running for the House this year, and the 12 Democratic women running for Governor.

BONUS:  Paul Waldman on (white male) Senate Republicans' long- held knowledge of the accusation against Kavanaugh and how they chose to respond:

If you went to an all-boys high school how would there be 65 girls who knew you well enough to testify to your good character? And how long would it take to track them all down 35 years later and convince them to sign this letter? They were obviously preparing this for some time. https://t.co/gy5xVOrMgE

— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman1) September 14, 2018

BONUS II:  On the same note --

Maybe your pick for SCOTUS isn't so ideal when you knew you had to get statements of 65 women who *weren't* raped by Brett Kavanaugh before anyone even mentioned that he might be a sexual predator . . . https://t.co/xsApOILGw5

— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) September 14, 2018

The stench is sickening.