In Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, it became common practice to simply erase bits of history that the regime found inconvenient. If an official was purged for whatever reason, photos of official gatherings were retouched to eliminate them: They had never been there. It never happened like you remember it, because the Party said so. Contradicting that official line could be, to put it mildly, hazardous.
In whatever corner of hell where he now resides, old Joe Stalin must be smiling at the alacrity with which Donald Trump’s regime has taken up the Stalinist tradition of disappearing whole swaths of reality that it doesn’t like. And Trump’s team has the advantage of technology that the Soviet leader’s propagandists never imagined.
THE WAR ON PUBLIC HEALTH GROWS
At first, it seemed like it was just a war on public health, with Trump appointing conspiracy theorists and cranks like RFK Jr. and Jay Bhattacharya to key health agency leadership jobs. The war on public health, which is real and accelerating, would have been bad enough. But what Trump is doing is clearly much bigger than that, with the administration moving to erase anything touched by government that might counter the version of reality preferred by his generally white, heterosexual, cisgender, Christian nationalist base. And that includes much of what humanity has learned in the last three quarters of a century.
In late January, executive orders from the White House ordered all executive branch agencies to purge anything they did or said of alleged “woke” ideologies, including anything to do with diversity, equity and inclusion and so-called “gender ideology” – meaning any acknowledgment that transgender people exist. As a result, vital information quickly began disappearing from health agency websites. As NPR reported:
“Several webpages from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with references to LGBTQ+ health were no longer available. A page from the HHS Office for Civil Rights outlining the rights of LGBTQ+ people in health care settings was also gone as of Friday. The website of the National Institutes of Health’s Office for Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office disappeared. (Most of these pages could still be viewed through the Internet Archive.)”
But lots of health information that did not seem remotely ideological also disappeared, at least temporarily. For example, the web page for Atlas Plus, a CDC interactive tool with surveillance data on HIV, viral hepatitis, STDs and tuberculosis suddenly displayed a “Page Not Found” message. It was eventually restored, without immediate clarity on what information had been purged. These pages serve an important purpose: Local and state health officials, doctors and others use this information to understand what diseases are prevalent in their region and formulate strategies to address outbreaks.
Also sent into the void were some key pieces of CDC’s Household Pulse Survey, an essential collection of information “designed to complement the ability of the federal statistical system to rapidly respond and provide relevant information about the impact of COVID-19 in the United States.” Some Household Pulse pages and data tables remained accessible and at least some others, including a page of monthly-updated Long Covid tabulations, were eventually restored. As of this writing, every page on the CDC website bore this notice: “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.” It will take a while for experts to sort out what data changed or was removed.
The administration ordered suspension of essentially all public communications and correspondence with federal and state health officials from agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health. That included suspending publication of the CDC’s signature publication, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, a key means by which CDC quickly gets vital information out to doctors and health officials around the country.
And that suspension had immediate consequences, preventing or at least delaying the release of potentially important studies of bird flu, currently ravaging farmers’ poultry flocks around the US Per KFF Health News, “One of the studies would reveal whether veterinarians who treat cattle have been unknowingly infected by the bird flu virus. Another report documents cases in which people carrying the virus might have infected their pet cats.” Since the bird flu is already raising the price of eggs (hey, wasn’t inflation a campaign issue?) and has sickened a number of humans as well, this seems like important information to get out into the world.
In addition to a communications freeze, the administration also ordered a halt to hiring, travel, disbursement of grants and reviews of pending grant applications at the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest source of funding for biomedical research, as part of a government-wide funding pause. The Journal Science characterized the actions as “devastating.” While the money freeze was rescinded in the wake of fierce criticism and court orders, it remains unclear whether the money has actually resumed flowing, with the administration still intent on blocking funding for work related to now-forbidden topics like gender identity, climate change, and diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
ERASING TRANS PEOPLE
That push for government-wide censorship focused on purging anything addressing those forbidden topics, erasing any acknowledgment of their very existence. For example, one Trump executive order, titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” effectively declared transgender humans to be nonpersons according to the US government.
The order demonizes any acknowledgment of gender identity, stating that “ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women… Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.” The order insists that the only reality stems from biology at conception—with wording so odd that some opined that it inadvertently defined everyone as biologically female (the fact-checkers at Snopes disagreed, while acknowledging that the wording was ambiguous and confusing).
Reality check: This executive order is a complete crock. First, it completely ignores the existence of transgender men. And here on planet earth, the only “gender identity extremism” comes from right-wingers who refuse to acknowledge that transgender people exist. In the real world, science has understood for a very long time that one’s gender identity is separate and distinct from whatever external genitalia they’re born with (and, of course, a small percentage of people are born with ambiguous genitalia—another reality the Trump order simply ignores).
People who actually study these things know better. In an official policy statement reaffirmed two years ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics states:
“‘Sex,’ or ‘natal gender,’ is a label, generally ‘male’ or ‘female,’ that is typically assigned at birth on the basis of genetic and anatomic characteristics, such as genital anatomy, chromosomes, and sex hormone levels. Meanwhile, ‘gender identity’ is one’s internal sense of who one is, which results from a multifaceted interaction of biological traits, developmental influences, and environmental conditions. It may be male, female, somewhere in between, a combination of both, or neither (i.e., not conforming to a binary conceptualization of gender).”
The American Psychological Association explains that “gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for boys and men or girls and women” (emphasis added). The anatomy you’re born with is not the same thing as your gender, period. As Kellan E. Baker, executive director of the Institute for Health Research & Policy at health services network Whitman-Walker, told ABC News, Trump’s order is “shockingly out of step with what we know from science.”
Not only must federal agencies stop referring to transgender people, gender identity or related terms in their day-to-day work, the administration has also required researchers at the Centers for Disease Control to retroactively remove any such terminology from manuscripts already submitted and awaiting publication in scientific journals. Forbidden terms listed in the memo to staff include “gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, nonbinary, non-binary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female.” If the CDC staff are the sole authors, they must withdraw the manuscript and re-submit a censored version. If the work was done in collaboration with scientists outside of CDC, the CDC staff must have their names removed.
Unsurprisingly, the request appalled scientists both within and outside the CDC, though those inside are mostly not speaking publicly for fear of retaliation. Elizabeth Jacobs, Professor Emerita of Epidemiology at the University of Arizona, now retired from teaching and currently serving on the coordinating committee of Defend Public Health, noted that such an order distorts the scientific record. “The order to remove certain terms from paper submissions by CDC employees is the predictable yet disgraceful result of Trump administration policies,” she said. “We know that health outcomes vary by social determinants of health. Attempting to paper over decades of research to whitewash the scientific literature is harmful to all Americans.” (Full disclosure: I assist Defend Public Health with communications matters.)
Jacobs noted that nearly two dozen of her own papers, which didn’t directly deal with sexuality or gender identity, had terms that would now be forbidden, adding. “Many of the papers that had to be retracted are very likely the final product of years of research paid for by the American taxpayer, work that may have been specifically designed to shed light on questions related to gender and health outcomes. The public deserves the right to see the results of their investment.”
Healthcare providers warned that this censoring of research and information will directly harm their patients, especially those at risk for HIV. Oni Blackstock, M.D., M.H.S., a primary care and HIV physician as well as founder and Executive Director of Health Justice, said, “If these attacks continue, we risk undoing decades of progress in HIV care, shifting us back to an era when HIV was a leading cause of death rather than a manageable, chronic condition. The consequences will be devastating. We will likely see rising HIV transmission rates, higher mortality, and deepening health inequities. For patients, this means heightened fear, stigma, and barriers to life-saving treatment. For healthcare providers, it means being unable to deliver evidence-based care to their patients and navigating a system where science and health equity are sidelined by ideology.”
The order to withdraw and rewrite papers puts affected researchers in an ethical dilemma. If, for example, a study of HIV prevention strategies was designed to include transgender men and women among the groups analyzed, how on earth do you describe that study and its results without using those terms? Those who can’t just take their names off a paper and let it go forward with the co-authors’ names are being asked to distort and disguise their own research—or, presumably, bury it entirely.
But Trump’s anti-trans campaign goes well beyond research and public statements. One executive order aims to purge transgender members of the US military, another prevents transwomen from participating in female sports. (The photo opp of Trump signing the EO from that last one, beaming as he’s surrounded by oblivious white girls, could have come directly from the Stalinist propaganda playbook.) Other actions will directly impact the care and support trans people, especially youth, can receive, starting with an order directing federal agencies to begin a process designed to lead to a ban on, and perhaps even criminalization of, gender-affirming care for youth under 18. At least one California clinic has already reported losing a CDC grant that would have supported its transgender support programs.
The demand that federal agencies remove any acknowledgment of gender identity could create serious dangers for trans and nonbinary individuals. It led the State Department to alter its travel advisory page that formerly warned LGBTQI+ Americans of potential travel risks so that it now only refers to ‘LGB’ people. Passports and other travel documents will now only be issued based on so-called biological sex at birth, regardless of changes in the individual’s identity or appearance. Some trans people with passport applications pending have been left in limbo.
And many of the administration’s anti-trans actions managed to be simultaneously mean-spirited and petty. For example, employees at the Environmental Protection Agency recently found that their pronouns had been removed from their email signatures without their knowledge or permission.
GOODBYE CLIMATE CHANGE, HELLO PROPAGANDA
The administration’s war on truth goes far beyond issues of sex and gender. At a moment when the devastating Los Angeles County wildfires should be focusing new attention on climate change – they were, after all, driven by wildly unusual winds and a freakish winter dry spell in what is normally the region’s rainy season – the administration is systematically purging the government of anything and everything addressing the climate crisis.
For example, a Department of Transportation memo directs employees to begin eliminating any and all “orders, directives, rules, regulations, notices, funding agreements, programs and policy statements” that refer to climate change or greenhouse gas emissions – along with DEI and gender identity — adopted during the Biden administration. Anything to do with “environmental justice” is now verboten. Like much coming from the administration, such memos seemed to be poorly drafted. Inside Climate News reported:
“A current employee of the DOT, who asked not to be identified, told Inside Climate News that the new directives were ‘convoluted,’ ‘poorly written’ and would be difficult to implement, because they ignore other statutory requirements of the department and use ill-defined terms like ‘Green New Deal’ and ‘EV mandate.’”
“’I think a lot of them don’t say what they mean to say,’ the source stated. ‘From a basic grammatical perspective, they don’t make sense.’”
That may not help employees who dare to resist them. Information related to climate change and its effects has also been disappearing from other government sites, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the CDC, and the Department of Agriculture, among others. The Internet Archive has preserved much data and assorted activist groups, anticipating these moves from Trump, moved quickly to preserve information before it came down. But that preserved data will be frozen in time, with no further updates. And these information deletions have reportedly inspired copycat censorship by Republican-led state governments.
Combined with other orders, including one initiating a US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement and another declaring a national energy emergency to further Trump’s desire to “drill baby drill,” Trump has made it clear he plans to spend four years making the worst environmental crisis in human history even worse. So as the weather gets more unpredictable, crops are devastated, and hurricanes, floods, droughts and fires get deadlier and happen in more and more unexpected places, the official position of our government will be to cover its ears, close its eyes and yell, “I can’t hear you!!!”
The Trump war on reality doesn’t stop with the federal government. The president also wants to purge all US K-12 education of information or discussions he deems “radical indoctrination.” The order on education paints current schooling as a dystopian fantasy world in which “innocent children are compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color” and accuses educators of “steering students toward surgical and chemical mutilation without parental consent or involvement.”
The order directs federal agencies to withhold federal funds from schools that don’t follow the official line. If school systems don’t pretend that racial injustice isn’t real and ignore and demean their transgender students, they risk being cut off. Further, they must promote “patriotic education,” defined as “a presentation of the history of America grounded in… an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles; a clear examination of how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history,” and “the concept that celebration of America’s greatness and history is proper.”
The Trump administration has a clear vision of the America it wants to see, and it looks a lot like the enduringly dystopic vision of George Orwell in 1984:
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
