On Tuesday night, ESPN MLB writer Jeff Passan shared that an innocuous article on the Department of Defense website honoring MLB legend Jackie Robinson's sporting and military career had been removed. Trying to access the old page redirected to a new, inoperative page with a URL that had "DEI" jammed into it. The Robinson article was part of a series called "Sports Heroes Who Served." Other such articles, like the one for fellow MLB Hall of Famer Bob Feller, remained live and un-DEI-ified. Now what could possibly explain the difference between Robinson and Feller?
The removal of the Robinson article followed an internal memo from Feb. 27, calling for a "digital content refresh" to "remove and archive DOD news articles, photos, and videos promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion." When asked about the removal of the page, DoD press secretary John Ullyot sent ESPN a statement, which is worth quoting in full for its self-satisfied derangement:
As Secretary Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military. It Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services' core warfighting mission. We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms. In the rare cases that content is removed — either deliberately or by mistake — that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content accordingly.
Quite possibly after remembering that Robinson is just about as universally beloved as public figures come—one praised by Trump himself just a month ago, when the president announced plans to build a statue of the baseball great for his proposed National Garden of American Heroes—the DoD sent another statement that softened the tone a little. The new statement starts with "Everyone at the Defense Department loves Jackie Robinson, as well as the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee Airmen, the Marines at Iwo Jima and so many others," a thuddingly inept twist on the old "How can I be racist, I have a black friend!" move.
Not long after those statements, the page was restored on the DoD website, without "DEI" in the URL. As tipster John points out, Ullyot, the spittle-drenched author of the DoD's statements to ESPN, had to resign from his position in the communications team of the Department of Veteran Affairs during Trump's first term. Back then, a FOIA request turned up emails Ullyot had sent to the VA's chief diversity officer, discouraging her from saying anything too harsh in the VA's statement about the tiki-torch neo-Nazis at 2017's Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. Turns out DEI really stands for Doing your job like an Enormous fucking Idiot, and it is alive and well in the Department of Defense.
