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by Wayne Finegar, Executive Director
The continued war on anyone and anything that doesn’t match Pete Hegseth’s vision of a “warrior” has had multiple victims lately. Along with women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color, words have come under attack.
In one of the weirdest moves yet, there was a mass search and replace done on websites across the entire Department of Defense. Most of us learned in the mid-90s that clicking “Replace All” is rarely a good idea. But that is what happened on the 7th of March when anything with the word “gay” associated with it was removed from the internet. That attempt to disappear members of the LGBTQ+ community also erased the Enola Gay (the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima) and a Army Corps of Engineers dredging project (because someone in a phone had the last name Gay).
On a broader level, the purge of all things DEI has led to the removal of photos of Medal of Honor recipient Harold Gonsalves, the “unpublishing” of parts of the Arlington Cemetery’s website that told the history of women and people of color buried there, and images of the first woman to graduate from Ranger School. These images were the victims of being associated with dirty words like “respect” and “dignity.” According to the Pentagon’s spokesman Sean Parnell, these moves and others are part of efforts to remove anything that focuses on “immutable characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, or sex [or are] counter to merit-based or color-blind policies.” Apparently, saying that a soldier is a woman or that a Medal of Honor winner was a Portuguese American is enough to qualify as a focus.
At the same time as people and history are being attacked for their association with these words, Pete Hegseth and the Army are going through contortions to pretend that their words and actions aren’t racist. On top of changing the name of Fort Liberty to “honor” a recipient of the Silver Star who didn’t even have a Wikipedia page until he was snatched from obscurity because he was lucky enough to have the last name of Bragg, Hegseth repeated his contortions by renaming Fort Moore in “honor” of Fred Benning. Like with Roland Bragg, Benning’s Wikipedia page didn’t exist until the day of the announcement. The Army didn’t even manage to have a photograph of the World War I Distinguished Service Cross winner when they made the announcement. One was eventually found by the press on the wall of Neligh, Nebraska’s city hall. Without questioning these men, or their actions, it is apparent that they are not being recognized for any reason other then the convenience of their last names, so that Hegseth can deny his obvious efforts to recall the traitors those bases had been named after.
The final proof that words matter comes from Kingsley Wilson. The Deputy Press Secretary for the Defense Department has a string of posts on X.com that have been described as “racist, isolationist, and ultra-nationalist.” Additionally, she has called NATO “an international HR department” and on Thanksgiving 2022 said “the Native Americans were anything but peaceful before the arrival of white Europeans.”
Pete Hegseth and his cadre are working to reshape the military in their image. Their actions need to be called by the right words.
Racist.
Homophobic.
Misogynist.
Antisemitic.
Anti-veteran.