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PaperclipPerfector  26d ago (text post)   36915 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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I mean, on other policies, we've already had pro DEI bureaucrats in the military claiming the executive order banning DEI prevents them from teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen. Pete Hegseth then told them to knock it off and keep teaching it. But it created another news cycle of "Oh my god, the Trump administration is trying to erase the Tuskegee Airmen from history!"

Setting up a snitch hotline for employees to inform on each other and warning that non-snitchers will be punished for failing to snitch on their colleagues who are still doing DEI sub rosa is something you only do if you want this kind of panicked overcompliance. Given the racial politics of parts of the US conservative movement, I have no doubt that the kind of person who signs up to be an anti-DEI purge enforcer wants the Tuskegee Airmen removed from the curriculum, and Trump only walked this back when it became clear it was upsetting the normies. There is a reason why a powerful constituency on the right supports having a Fort Bragg but no Fort Arnold despite Benedict Arnold being a better general than Braxton Bragg.

Given the racial politics of parts of the US conservative movement, I have no doubt that the kind of person who signs up to be an anti-DEI purge enforcer wants the Tuskegee Airmen removed from the curriculum

No, the GOP thinks the Tuskegee airmen are a perfectly acceptable and normal thing to have as a history lesson in Air Force basic training.

There is a reason why a powerful constituency on the right supports having a Fort Bragg but no Fort Arnold despite Benedict Arnold being a better general than Braxton Bragg.

Because the south surrendered and accepted reintegration into the United States. Bragg is a singularly unimpressive figure, but the existence of confederate names is to celebrate the south’s American-ness. The occupation is over and it has been for centuries. We don’t want a designated villain role that allows a de-facto not de-jure occupation.

Setting up a snitch hotline for employees to inform on each other and warning that non-snitchers will be punished for failing to snitch on their colleagues

My employer's annual DEI training (required by government contracts...) for the last few years has included mandatory reporting of discrimination and harassment, with the explicit warning that witnessing such and not reporting it will result in punishment "up to and including termination". It seems more likely to me that they adopted the same reporting policy as before just with different behavior to report than that they were intending "panicked overcompliance".

There is a reason why a powerful constituency on the right supports having a Fort Bragg but no Fort Arnold despite Benedict Arnold being a better general than Braxton Bragg.

One is viewed as a rebel, the other as a traitor. To a European, the former is a subset of the latter. To Americans, not so much.

Setting up a snitch hotline for employees to inform on each other and warning that non-snitchers will be punished for failing to snitch on their colleagues who are still doing DEI sub rosa is something you only do if you want this kind of panicked overcompliance.

The snitch hotline is there because we know high level employees WILL do DEI sub rosa. ATF got caught trying to hide their DEI by changing publicly visible titles, and we have two people on this very group who have said that two different directors of national labs told their employees they would be doing DEI sub rosa. There's no panicked overcompliance, there is only malicious compliance.

Most people don't know that Braxton Bragg was a bad general. The default assumption of an uninformed person is that Fort Bragg must have been named after somebody cool. But a little digging reveals the man wasn't cool, not even by the standards of a Southern sympathizer.

Maybe the man wasn't cool, but the name is.

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