John Swain
Appearances
Today, Explained
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That's right. On President Trump's first day back in office, he issued an order titled Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing. And basically, this order reversed something that Joe Biden had ordered very early in his term, which was the Biden administration made it government policy to pursue equity.
Today, Explained
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And that means we need to make the issue of racial equity not just an issue for any one department of government. It has to be the business of the whole of government.
Today, Explained
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That involved training and programs in the government, to make that happen, and President Trump's order scrapped all that. It said, we're not going to do that anymore. It's immoral, it's wasteful.
Today, Explained
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A key step in this sequence was the Defense Department under Pete Hegseth taking President Trump's executive order and kind of running with it, saying that it applied to the Defense Department's web presence and kind of publications.
Today, Explained
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They called it a digital content refresh. which explicitly ordered the Defense Department to take these things down. And my reporting on this area began there. We found that several notable veterans from minority groups, so Native Americans, African Americans, pages that had been published celebrating their achievements, and one in particular that we focused on was one of the
Today, Explained
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Marines who hoisted up the flag at Iwo Jima towards the end of the Second World War. Those pages had just been taken down. So other government departments, federal agencies, seemed to take the lead from the Defense Department and start doing the same thing. So we at The Post We really wanted to look at more broad historical themes.
Today, Explained
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Was the government looking at places online where the government wrote about American history and possibly making any changes there? And so we went looking, really, for places online where the federal government writes about American history.
Today, Explained
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It wasn't really what the Marines at Iwo Jima did. We all know the image of them hoisting the flag, the U.S. flag, as a sort of emblem of the victory in the Second World War.
Today, Explained
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One of the Marines was a Pima Indian. His name was Ira Hayes. And a page on the Defense Department's website celebrated the fact that he had been a Native American and that he had taken part in this sort of emblematic, iconic moment in U.S. military history. And it was just a page that talked about his life. You know, his life actually had ended quite sadly.
Today, Explained
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He wasn't really supported after the war and he had problems with alcohol and he died relatively young without a family. But this page was just a sort of small tribute to the small role he played in a big part of American history. And it was just taken down because it had focused on his ethnicity, basically.
Today, Explained
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So when we turned our attention to the National Park Service, we found quite quickly, actually, that several themes kept coming up. Pages that dealt with women's rights, pages that dealt with civil rights and the sort of struggle for racial equality in the 20th century, and pages that looked at the Civil War and even earlier, sometimes the founding and the Revolutionary War,
Today, Explained
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and slavery around that time in the 18th and 19th centuries, there were changes being made.
Today, Explained
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And we noticed that in the most part, they were going one way, which was to soften the accounts and to remove some of the references to enslavement, to slaves, to the pursuit of equality by civil rights advocates, and to remove mentions of some of the struggles that women in the Park Service, for example, had had when they were working there.
Today, Explained
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One of the cases that really leapt out was the Little Rock Nine. So people may remember in the 1950s, nine brave young African-American students walked through an angry mob to integrate their high school in Arkansas.
Today, Explained
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The Little Rock High School where this happened is now a national parks monument, essentially. It's a site, an historic site, and it has a web presence. And we found that on like half a dozen pages on their website, a reference that had been there to the fact that the Little Rock Nine had opened doors for people around the world seeking equality and education. had been changed to just education.
Today, Explained
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So their pursuit of equality and the opening doors to other people pursuing equality had just been erased. And I called one of them, Elizabeth Eckford. She appears in some of the very memorable photography from the time. And I just talked her through it and said what was happening to the website. And she was shocked. She said they were trying to rewrite history.
Today, Explained
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And the true racial reconciliation would never come until the painful past and the wrongs of the past were acknowledged.
Today, Explained
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I did speak with some current employees, and it was a couple of things. First, they said that the Park Service is overseen by the Department of the Interior.
Today, Explained
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And they said that early on in this Trump administration, political appointees at the Interior Department had directed senior Park Service people to have their employees scour the websites for potentially problematic content in light of President Trump's executive order.
Today, Explained
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This was at a time, as people will remember, suddenly tens of thousands of federal employees were being fired from their jobs or their projects were being cut. And I think people were scared that they might lose their job if they didn't do a strong enough job in this request. And so that was one way.
Today, Explained
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But one employer I spoke to told me about an even more interesting thing that happened, I think, which is that some corners of the Park Service that weren't even given this instruction
Today, Explained
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took it upon themselves to do it anyway, because they'd heard on the grapevine that things were happening, that people were changing websites, and they too were scared that their projects might lose funding, that they might lose their jobs, and they kind of thought, well, we'd better get our house in order and make it acceptable to the political appointees above us, because if they stumble upon our website and it's full of championing equality and so on, we could be in trouble.
Today, Explained
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And so some people, without even being told, were making these changes off their own back.
Today, Explained
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I think the next thing to look for is the Smithsonian Institution. While we were reporting on the National Park Service, President Trump issued another executive order saying, specifically targeting the Interior Department and the Smithsonian on what he called a sort of liberal rewriting of history that had happened prior to him coming back to office.
Today, Explained
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And so he has directed the Smithsonian and the Park Service to make sure that exhibitions, monuments and statues and markers at historical sites do not do what he calls sort of unfair traducing of Americans past and present. I think, well, it's clear that lots of historians are very worried about this because we all know that historic figures are complicated.
Today, Explained
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The founding fathers, many of them held slaves. There are these parts of history that are uncomfortable and unpleasant that have to be reconciled. I think most people agree with the good and the heroic. And I think a lot of historians are concerned that President Trump wants to get rid of the uncomfortable and the unpleasant.