Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is mobilizing the military against its historical archives and he’s going to war with photos that could be deemed supportive of DEI.
The Pentagon has authorized a picture purge of over 100,000 images and online posts, AP News first reported.
The effort is a part of Donald Trump’s initiative to rid the government of DEI. Hegseth himself has repeated this claim, noting that in the Pentagon ‘DEI is dead.’
The effort was to eradicate images that could promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) content, according to an official with knowledge of the matter.
Many of the images taken off of Pentagon sites are ones showing women and minorities.
It also has stripped the site of commemorative months for non-white people.
The effort has also led to images of the WWII nuclear bomb plane the ‘Enola Gay’ being taken down because of, well, you may be able to guess why.
It appears that because the B-29 plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima included ‘gay’ that images of the craft have been taken down.
the Boeing B-29 named the ‘Enola Gay’ is seen on Tinian in the Marianas Islands.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has declared that ‘DEI is dead’
armorers and other ground personnel undergo training at Chanute Field, Ill., during World War II
The same seemed to happen for service members with the last name ‘gay,’ according to the report.
Multiple pictures of an Army Corps of Engineers project in California were also marked for deletion because one of the people in the images had the last name Gay.
Also in the database were images of the Tuskegee Airman, the nation’s first black military pilots.
There were over 26,000 images marked for the trash bin following the review, AP reports.
Many images have already been removed from the database, including some of the Tuskegee Airmen.
‘We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms,’ Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot said in a statement.
‘In the rare cases that content is removed that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct components accordingly.’
The database of 26,000 images was created as a part of an effort to comply with Trump’s new anti-DEI mandate, the official revealed.
World War II Medal of Honor recipient Pfc. Harold Gonsalves, an image that was not thrown into the DEI database
Staff Sgt. Krysteena Scales, a 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron Flying Crew Chief, performs pre-flight checks before departing on a mission in a C-17 Globemaster III, March 19, 2009, at an undisclosed location in Southwest Asia
However, other images of the first female fighter pilot and all female C-17 crew are still accessible.
As are images of notable female military academy graduates.
Many images were also put in there with no apparent connection to DEI.
