The National Park Service website has an Underground Railroad page. It used to feature a large photograph of the remarkable female “conductor,” Harriet Tubman (left above). The page began, “The Underground Railroad — the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War — refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage.” But some boob or combination of boobs thought that the Trump EOs and other measures aimed at purging divisive, partisan and often discriminatory “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs from the government, education and other private institutions mandated eliminating straightforward and historically accurate information. It wasn’t just the National Parks Service, of course. The Defense Department also eliminated many pages that celebrated important minority veterans, such as civil rights champion and icon, Jackie Robinson.
So,Tubman’s photograph is gone, replaced by images of Postal Service stamps highlighting “Black/White cooperation” in the Underground Railroad (above right). Yes, abolitionists of both races were involved in the network, among them Clarence Darrow’s mother. However, stripping a page about the history of the Underground Railroad of references to Tubman makes as much sense as removing references to Babe Ruth from a page about the history of baseball. In an equally idiotic move, the old introductory sentence has been replaced by an attempt at anodyne rhetoric that makes no mention of slavery and describes the Underground Railroad as “one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement” that “bridged the divides of race.”
The Washington Post reports that political appointees directed senior career officials to identify webpages that might need to be changed. The senior career officials asked staff members to compile lists of “potentially problematic” pages, which were then sent up the management chain for consideration. An Interior Dept. employee told the Post that staff members received little guidance, so the edits were made amid a “frenzy of fear” while so many federal workers were being fired.
Of course, of course, of course! Of course low level government bureaucrats err on the side of safety rather than making a genuine effort to do the right thing. Of course the result will confirm the popular judgment that the Trump Administration is a nest of racists. Of course a braod order from the top gets distorted, misinterpreted and botched as it heads through the bureaucracy.
Remember this famous cartoon?
It’s not an exaggeration, and it isn’t really funny. The failure of Trump’s simple orders to “do something” without clear directions and guidelines—no, simply naming “key words” to flag DEI propaganda is not enough—was and is inevitable. Most bureaucratic lackeys are what and where they are for a good reason: they are not that creative, clever or competent and require close supervision. Ironically, when President Trump wants the bureaucracy to do something that needs to be done with nuance and careful consideration and planning, he will run smack dab into the reason he wants the government scaled back. If the government does anything efficiently, intelligently, quickly and well, it is moral luck.
The problem is less about who is running the bureaucracy or which party is in control, and more about the unavoidable nature of large, complex organizations themselves, and apparently unavoidable influence of the lazy, the ignorant, the careless, the cowardly, and the stupid.
Ethics Alarms 
There’s another factor that I believe is in play here, and that is “malice”, specifically the phenomenon of “malicious compliance”. The bureaucrats with cushy but useless jobs know that the thrust of Trump’s agenda is to get rid of them, or force them to do actual work. They have every reason to want to thwart that agenda and make it as unpopular as possible. It’s closely related to “Washington Monument Syndrome”, whereby the smallest budget cut is made to impact the public as much and as visibly as possible.
Second. This is an inside job. Playing dumb. Resist! “Watch this! We’ll show those bastards!”
Exactly.
It’s malicious compliance. There’s exactly no “boob” or “combination of boobs” that misinterpreted the EO.
Second time I’ve mentioned Hanlon’s Razor today. Malicious compliance is certainly possible, but typical bureaucratic stupidity is far more likely.
Given the nature of the Democrat/bureaucracy response to the Trump agenda this past month or so. More than half have a favorable posture to the assassination of both Trump and Elon Musk. And they claim to be protecting democracy. I have to respectfully disagree.
It’s malice.
Hanlon’s Razor isn’t an absolute, and unlike Occam’s Razor is meant primarily as a check on your own biases. But enough evidence that compels a conclusion of malice doesn’t mean you still default to “incompetence” just because it is a possibility.
In this case, I think stupidity gets the nod over malice, just like the Jackie Robinson fiasco over at Defense. The state of cultural literacy is such that it is not unreasonable to assume that post BBers don’t have a good idea of who Harriet was and why she’s important. I once was in love with a woman 10 years younger than me, a smart, college educated banker, who never heard of Jackie Robinson. On the cultural significance scale he laps Tubman.
I don’t disagree with much that was stated but leaders cannot define every order to such a degree that ensure that idiots don’t misunderstand a thing.
The DEI order should be obvious to the so called educated elite. DEI is like pornography it is often hard to define but you know it when you see it. History with all its warts and blemishes can never be deemed pornographic.
The best I could come up with to define what DEI is was that it uses ideas of oppression viewed through the lens of the supposed oppressed that were formulated from stories that cannot be verified with data that suggest that one group is substantially to blame for any hardship on current members of society for the actions of some undefined ancestral group and thus are obligated to make amends and provide special preferred treatment for the descendants of some oppressed group without regard to their own needs and desires.
Certainly it’s possible that low-level flunkies panicked and deleted every minority from government websites. My sister’s university has freaked out and doesn’t want legitimate landscape architecture terminology such as biodiversity and tree equity used lest they get slapped down by government officials ignorant of the profession.
I wonder, though, if some of this isn’t more deep state sabotage?
Recently, my Facebook feed has been plagued by an account known as Alt National Parks which is ostensibly a group of National Park employees bent on propagandizing and undermining Trump’s agenda. Seems like a deep state to me. Of course, being Facebook, it could just as easily be a foreign bot.
What if some of these guys decided to remove clearly appropriate information in an effort to continue starring Trump and his administration as racist?
Obviously, we must consider Occam’s Razor. It is believable that little guidance was provided to government employees and, even in the private sector, it’s not unknown for employees to be told to do superfluous, redundant or contradictory actions in unclear situations just to be on the safe side.
But I do have to wonder.
Part of me suspects they are doing this out of malice.
Part of me thinks they just don’t understand what the problem is; they do not understand what the complaint about DEI is all about. Because they think that Trump is trying to cover up “true history,” that is what they think they are supposed to do. I agree that the failure to mention Harriet Tubman (or even to downplay her significance) should be enough to show they do not understand their task.
Having said that, the sentence you quoted was not without problems:
“The Underground Railroad — the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War — refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage.”
The more I read this, the more I agree it should have been edited.
“The Underground Railroad” — good start; no problem there.
”the resistance to enslavement” — yes, the resistance. It is all the rage these days. And, yes, enslavement is the new buzzword, because a slave is not what someone is—enslavement is what is done to them.
“Through escape and flight” — accurate, but clunky and inelegant
”through the end of the Civil War,” accurate again, but I am starting to have trouble imagining how to diagram the sentence. They threw in too many “throughs.”
A better start would be to ”a clandestine network of safe houses that helped slaves escape bondage by helping them travel to Northern states or Canada.”
”refers to the efforts of enslaved African-Americans” — there is that word “enslaved” again. And, it’s just wrong; not plain wrong, but incomplete. The Underground Railroad was the effort of abolitionists to free slaves. this makes it sound like the Underground Railroad was run by slaves. And, it was run by both blacks and whites. This is wording that definitely should be changed — DEI or not — because it is misleading.
”to gain their freedom by escaping bondage.” Okay, this is true, but is about as trite as any tautology. How else would you gain freedom except by escaping bondage. Okay, you could buy your freedom to escape bondage. Maybe that is a distinction.
Anyway, maybe this sentence is geared toward a 5th Grade reading level. Even so, the writing is poor. And, there are aspects of this that smack of ideology. Not a lot, but it is there. I can see it. I don’t know if the person or committee that wrote this would see it. But, it is there.
-Jut
Clearly, some DEI hires don’t appear capable of even learning to code. Sad, really…
And yet CNN has an article up explaining how egregious it is – and how it’s Trump’s fault. My vote is on malice, as well.
When you get an ongoing parade of bad actions and you struggle to determine if it’s malicious or stupid behavior, or what the mix of that might be, the only rational conclusion is lousy leadership, at the top especially, and at the next level down. It will not end until Congress reclaims its rightful role in determining the boundaries that restrain and preclude Executive Branch maladministration.