Summary
The U.S. Department of Defense removed the webpage honoring Maj. Gen. Charles C. Rogers, a Black Vietnam War hero awarded the Medal of Honor in 1970.
The page now returns a “404” error, and its URL was changed to include “DEI.” Rogers, the highest-ranking African American to receive the medal, was awarded by President Nixon in 1970 for heroism during the Vietnam War.
The deletion follows Trump’s efforts to roll back DEI initiatives in the federal government, including an executive order terminating diversity programs.
The Defense Department has not commented on the removal.
What I will say about them publicly is that if we are afforded another shot at democracy after all this, they and their fellow travelers cannot be permitted to have a voice in the political process. Just about any system of government can work if everybody involved is commited to making it work, but if 1/3+ of voters hold pluralistic, representative democracy in active disdain there is no system that can protect itself against those people engaging with the system in bad faith. This was the fundamental failing of reconstruction, and it’s shaping up to be the undoing of freedom in the US now.
I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that just letting the “marketplace of ideas” play out is tantamount to throwing the gates open to any demagogue with a big enough megaphone. Participation in the political process must be restricted to good-faith actors in some fashion, be that at the “supply side” of media and content creation or at the voting booth. Anything else is akin to a basketball team kicking, biting, and throwing punches on the court and the referees shrugging and insisting they have to be allowed to play anyway.
the thing is, the ‘marketplace of ideas’ was very strictly controlled. when was the last time you heard a communist or socialist talk on a major platform? do you even know what anarchism IS?
there was no ‘fair marketplace of ideas’ there was liberals and fascists jacking each other off, murdering everyone else, and telling you they’re all that can exist.
Yes, and I was one of that generation who believed broad adoption of the Internet would cut out the gatekeepers and lead to a better-informed electorate that would give more radical ideas a shot. And I guess it did, but the problem is that it’s primarily allowed the worst of bad actors direct, unfiltered access to a vast swathe of the most credulous, easily-manipulated idiots in the world. Arguably it’s massively tilted the field towards authoritarianism because before the Internet, left-wing activists were better-educated, and more capable of organizing and communicating. Now, though, it takes no special knowledge or effort for a right-wing conspiracy theorist or authoritarian demagogue to jump on X or Facebook or whatever other platform you like and immediately blast their message out to vast numbers of their followers – who are largely passive consumers of this stuff, waiting to given their party line and marching orders. Before the Internet, they had mostly-mainstream ideas because that was what the filter of the mainstream media gave them. Now they’re getting sucked into the far right because social media is biased for shareable outrage-bait propaganda and against validated facts and nuanced discussion.
you’re acting like the problem here is the nature of not just the internet, but any hypothetical internet, but you give the game away right in your comment:
big monopolized platforms controlled by megacorps that use algorithmic curation to decide what the products/hogs/rubes see. use a new computer-it can be a VM; I won’t tell. use it from a new connection-VPN is fine. create a fresh youtube account. search for a video of a random thing you don’t think is super politically polarized. space exploration, typography, taylor swift.
now click on the first recommendation. keep doing that. count how long it takes to start showing you literal nazi shit. if you need a bright line for that, maybe keep an eye out for the phrases “BLOOD AND SOIL” or “FUTURE FOR WHITE CHILDREN”.
see, the problem here is, it did actually work how you thought. briefly. it wasn’t clean or perfect. we got to see a lot of distended assholes in the process. some people ended up going down some crazy fucked up rabbit holes. pro-ana groups did not start on facebook. but this shit was, provably, not structural.
but, generally, the internet was moving things left. that had to be stopped. had to be butchered and dominated by a corporation. it was just a little less obvious what was happening at the time than when they did it for united fruit, with a smaller immediate body count.
I just wasted my time going into a spiel about this very same thing on YouTube. Comment was immediately removed.