In early June, The Washington Post published a follow-up to earlier stories on a Trump administration plan to remove thousands of photographs from Defense Department websites because of “DEI-related content.” Illustrated with more than a dozen samples of the targeted photos (which the Post‘s reporters were able to find reproduced on non-government websites), the Post‘s new story offered more details on the images marked for deletion because they were deemed to touch on diversity, equity, and inclusion issues—overwhelmingly depicting subjects identified as “gay, transgender, women, Hispanic, and Black.”

The headline over the story didn’t mince words: “Here are the people Trump doesn’t want to exist.”

Identified from a database obtained by the Associated Press, the targeted subjects included Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star Jackie Robinson, pictured during his Army service before becoming the first Black to reach the major leagues in 1947; the Tuskegee Airmen, who were the nation’s first Black military pilots during World War II; and the Navajo Code Talkers, a Native American Marine Corps unit who used their tribal language on the radio for top-secret communications during the war against Japan. Other banned photos showed women who broke significant gender barriers like Major Lisa Jaster, the first woman to graduate from the Army’s Ranger School, and Colonel Jeannie Leavitt, the Air Force’s first female fighter pilot.

Also deleted were multiple pictures of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber (named for the pilot’s mother) that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. That was thanks to an artificial intelligence technique in which computers searched government websites for a list of keywords indicating possibly unacceptable content and inserted “DEI” into the web addresses where any of those words were found, flagging them for removal. For obvious reasons, “gay” was on the banned-word list and, with no human eyes to spot the context, the Enola Gay photos were excised.

I'm reminded of a likely apocryphal tale of the copyeditor who dutifully changed Enola Gay to Enola Homosexual to conform to then-current AP Style.

But bluntly, I don't think near enough attention is being paid not only to [insert colour of your choice here]washing but also to the mounting attempts to literally erase history. If you're cheering for that, you're not a conservative, and you sure as fuck aren't a patriot.

You're a useful idiot. Have fun losing Medicaid.