The Words They're Afraid Of.

The words they're afraid of.

(Read on our blog.)

The recently appointed Department of Defense head Pete Hegseth (formerly Fox News pundit, perpetually soused creepy uncle, and current group chat leaker of classified intel) banned images of the Enola Gay from the Pentagon’s website for the offense of “DEI” language. In keeping with the far right’s stated war on anything vaguely resembling diversity, equity and inclusion, even historical photos are up for cancellation. When a literal weapon of mass destruction is censored for being a bit fruity under the Trump administration’s war against inconvenient truths, what exactly is left untouched?

This is clown show stuff, but the stakes are far from funny. While some might be hesitant to compare the current administration to the very worst history has to offer, we can at least all agree that they are dyed-in-the-wool grammar Nazis. Policing language has been the objective of the MAGA culture war long before Project 2025’s debut—the wave of book bans orchestrated by astroturf movements like Moms for Liberty, and Florida’s 2022 Don’t Say Gay bill have already had a profound effect in the arena of free speech and freedom of expression (despite the far right’s long tradition of doublespeak performative free-speech martyrdom to the contrary). Don’t Say Gay ostensibly targeted K-3 education, but LGBT+ content at all levels of education (and beyond) was either quietly censored or entirely preempted in practice. The results were not just a war on so-called ideology, or words alone—but on reality and essential freedoms.

Now, words as innocuous and important as racism, climate change, hate speech, prejudice, mental health, and inequality are targeted as subversive. Entire concepts are being vanished from government institutions, scrubbed not only from descriptions but from metadata, search indexes, and archival frameworks.

If you don’t name a thing, does it exist?

These words are as numerous as they are generic: women, race, Black, immigrants, multicultural, gender, injustice. But what is painfully unserious is also particularly dangerous in its real-world consequences. The process of controlling words is a well-worn authoritarian tendency. Fifty-two universities are now under investigation as part of the President's effort to curb “woke” research and thought crimes. Institutions are being coerced to comply with a nebulous set of ideological demands, or face budgetary annihilation. That means cutting funding for entire departments, slashing financial aid, defunding scientific grants, and pressuring faculty to self-censor.

The possibilities for censorship extend far and wide—interfering, by extension, in everything from reproductive healthcare programs, to libraries and museums. The Trump administration’s proposed budget slashing all federal funding for libraries, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services, will effectively gut an infrastructure that supports over 100,000 libraries and museums across the country—community centers, educational lifelines, internet access points, and archives of marginalized histories (starting with the Smithsonian Institution).

When you erase access, you erase participation. And when you erase participation, you erase people, and the means by which future generations might even learn they existed. A culture that cannot remember is a culture that cannot resist.

The erasure is, yet again, unsurprisingly targeted at minorities and LGBT+ people. The National Parks Service quietly revised the Stonewall Monument’s website to remove references to transgender people—a fundamental part of the original protests. Not an oversight, not a mistake, but a deliberate excision—one point in a wider plan of erasure depicted in stark detail in Project 2025, a blueprint to dismantle civil rights, defund LGBT+-related healthcare, and rewrite history from the ground up.

Dehumanization by deletion—welcome to the reactionary resurgence of doubleplusungood governance. In Trumpland, words are weapons—but not in the way they intend. Their fear of language betrays its power; that’s why they’re trying so hard to police it.

Words hurt them.

Hurt them back.

- the Ellipsus Team