Once an institution publicly embraces or endorses something that wasn’t that institution’s proper role to endorse, the mistake cannot be remedied without the undesirable result of appearing to reject what should never have been embraced in the first place. The reverse is also true: as EA has pointed out, when the government starts legalizing previously banned substances, it appears that society now approves of their use.

The Trump administration is falling victim to the first version of this phenomenon in its admirable purge of DEI propaganda and practices across the government and its agencies. Naturally, this is being weaponized by the Trump-Hating news media. Today’s example: “Arlington Cemetery Website Loses Pages on Black Veterans, Women and Civil War” at the New York Times.

The story goes on to say, after the deliberately inflammatory title (President Trump is a racist and a misogynist, you know!), that the pages were taken down in response to the administration’s policy of ending promotion of the woke “diversity, equity and exclusion” fad, which is designed to inject “good discrimination” and group preferences into the culture.

The cemetery is operated by the Army, and issued a statement that it is dedicated to “sharing the stories of military service and sacrifice to the nation with transparency and professionalism.” The missing pages are being re-drafted. Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, accused the Trump administration of trying to erase the accomplishments of women and people of color.

Of course he did.

The episode reminds me of the controversy over the original signage accompanying the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian’s historic aircraft collection. The leftist American history establishment had first crack at it, and what early visitors read implied that President Truman’s decision to drop the atom bomb was genocide and a war crime.

A section of the website devoted to segregation and civil rights is, at the moment, substantially reduced, with the disappearance of a walking tour to visit the graves of black soldiers and a “lesson plan” on Reconstruction. I am unpersuaded that a national military cemetery’s website should be exploring race relations and women’s rights at all, other than making the appropriate historical notes. Why should black occupants of the burial grounds be any more noteworthy than any other soldier buried there, like, just to pick an example out of the air, Major Jack A. Marshall Sr., Silver and Bronze Star recipient? What does Reconstruction have to do with Arlington National Cemetery in 2025? Why should the cemetery focus on gender and race at all?

The cemetery’s website page describing Section 27, which includes the graves of thousands of African Americans freed from slavery, and a page listing prominent African Americans such as Medgar Evers, Thurgood Marshall and Colin Powell, are both still up. However, once the cemetery’s management took it upon itself to expand its mission into recounting the nation’s previous discrimination against women and blacks, getting the anti-American propaganda under control feels like airbrushing history.