By KIM BELLARD

I’d love to be writing about something fun. Something that makes us think about things in a new way, or something exciting that will take us into the future. There are lots of such things happening, but there’s too many Orwellian actions happening that I can’t be silent about.

Diversity, we’re told, is actually a pretext for racism – against white people. Equity is foolhardy at best and pernicious at worst. Inclusion only matters if you are the “right” kind of person. “Meritocracy” is the new buzzword; we want only the “best and brightest,” with none of the lowering of standards that we’re being told comes with trying to ensure that everyone has a fair chance to prove their merits.

The Trump Administration has declared war on DEI. It has fired scores of workers whose jobs involve DEI, has asked other workers to inform on people they think may be involved in DEI, and is searching out even workers who attended diversity training (mandated or not). All that would be horrifying enough but it isn’t ending there.

Federal websites are being cleansed of any references to anything that might be construed as DEI. Pages are being edited, or taken down entirely. The NIH has ground to a halt until the appropriate authorities can ensure that no grants are being even to anything that might possibly be related to DEI. The CDC has been forced to pull papers from its researchers that are up for publication for similar review.

The Atlantic reports: “the government was, as of yesterday evening, intending to target and replace, at a minimum, several “suggested keywords”—including “pregnant people, transgender, binary, non-binary, gender, assigned at birth, binary [sic], non-binary [sic], cisgender, queer, gender identity, gender minority, anything with pronouns”—in CDC content.”

Thousands of pages of data from the CDC and Census Bureau have “disappeared,” and the same from other agencies. Health data is prominent among the missing. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, told Science: ““I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t know it was going to be this bad. It’s like a data apocalypse.”

Elon Musk, who has no official power yet seems to have control over government IT and the data it contains, is shutting down U.S.A.I.D., who provides almost $40b annually in health services, disaster relief, anti-poverty, and other social mission programs. Previously the Administration had shutdown, then reinstated, PEPFAR, a vital international HIV program that has been credited with saving millions of lives.

The President and his team even tried to blame last week’s Washington D.C. plane-helicopter collision on DEI.  That’s just “common sense, ok,” according to President Trump.