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A Historian's Perspective: Republicans' "War on Woke" has Turned Them Into the New PC Police [1]

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Date: 2025-03-09

Republicans started their so-called “War on Woke” several years ago by lamenting cancel culture, decrying it as an attack on free speech and the ultimate result of political correctness run amok. People were being canceled, so they said, for saying the wrong term out loud or not adhering to the supposedly strict standards the “Woke Left” had for the type of things one could say or write in public discourse. Apparently Republicans’ answer to this dire problem is to cancel people for saying the wrong term out loud, and impose strict standards on what one can say or write in public discourse. And not even the Enola Gay is safe.

Reports are that Republicans in the Pentagon have scrubbed mention of the Enola Gay, the name of the World War II fighter plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, from the internet and official military media. Apparently the Enola Gay, named after its pilot’s mother, is just too “gay” to be allowed to be mentioned. The word “gay” itself is supposedly so inflammatory and promotes such a divisive agenda that it must be scrubbed from US government websites. There are even reports that active US military service members with the last name Gay are having their names removed from public-facing websites and media.

Over the past few weeks, we have learned that the Trump Administration has removed mention of the Tuskegee Airmen from US government websites, and even removed the word “trans” from the US National Stonewall Monument. Even books about slavery have been removed from libraries in schools on US military bases overseas— all to conform to Trump’s executive order eliminating “DEI” from US public life. The same people who are mad that mean books get published about Thomas Jefferson because he owned slaves are apparently willing to erase history itself so they don’t even have to think about slavery. The same people who are so upset about the use of the pronoun “they” because it denies an imagined biological fact of only two sexes, male and female, are ironically removing mention of the first female astronauts from NASA’s website because it promotes division and highlights the differences between the sexes (it seems to me a solution to this problem might be to use a neuter pronoun like “they” so we don’t highlight differences between people, but what do I know?). Apparently, the crowd that is so keen on delineating the idea of strict biological differences between people has even banned a children's book about a red-haired girl with freckles learning to appreciate her uniqueness because it *gasp* celebrates how she is different from others.

Set aside the fact that MAGA is literally trying to rewrite history and get rid of all the stuff they don’t like. The fact they are banning and removing mention of the Enola Gay because it contains the word “gay” used in a completely different context is next-level bonkers! Watch out former Supreme Court Justices Hugo Black and Byron White, I think you’re about to have your pictures removed from the Supreme Court’s website. For a political movement that likes to claim it is restoring common sense and free speech to public discourse, it sure is going out of its way to ban words it doesn’t like. In setting limits to the terminology people can use and the types of social topics people can discuss, MAGA is engaging in precisely the thing they say they hated: political correctness and cancel culture.

Republicans and MAGA are the new PC police, trying to tell the rest of us what we can and cannot say. And they are raising it to an art form. If they were upset that words like “chicks” and “broads” were disappearing from the public lexicon in reference to women, no one on the left EVER tried to ban the word “chick” from referring to a baby chicken. Can you imagine Barack Obama signing that executive order? It’s about time we throw their bombast back at them and label them as the new “politically correct.” This is not to downplay the truly chilling nature of the censorship they are engaging in, the attacks on free speech, and the dismantling of the free press that their growing authoritarianism represents. But as a matter of rhetoric and messaging, maybe being called the PC Police will at least get under their skin. I hear they’re pretty sensitive— just ask the Enola Gay.

-Peter Porcupine

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/3/9/2308926/-A-Historian-s-Perspective-Republicans-War-on-Woke-has-Turned-Them-Into-the-New-PC-Police?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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