Summary
Federal employees at multiple agencies were ordered to remove pronouns from email signatures by Friday, following executive orders signed by Donald Trump to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
Agencies including the CDC, Department of Transportation, and Department of Energy issued directives citing the new policy.
Some employees expressed frustration, with one CDC worker calling it unprecedented.
The Office of Personnel Management also instructed agencies to disable pronoun prompts in email systems, marking another step in Trump’s broader rollback of DEI initiatives.
It’s a gish gallop of petty insecurity, coming out so fast and furious that it takes people off guard.
Two years from now, when Trump doesn’t have any more low-hanging fruit to pick at, this will seem quaint. But by then, we’re going to see the real damage these opening days inflicted on civil society. It won’t be “lolz, haha, guess we’ll be using a lot of proper nouns going forward” and a lot more “fuck, another airline accident that you can only learn about on Rednote and the forums of Pornhub, because every major journalist has been doing wall-to-wall coverage of the Trial of the Transgender Eleven caught providing underground abortion drugs to serially raped immigrant middle schoolers held in the prison camps of the hurricane blasted ruins of Miami.”
Ah… I feel like in times past I would have read that hypothetical and laughed at how ridiculous it is.
‘Gish gallop’ is the perfect descriptor for this onslaught of every hour insanity we’re going through.
Bannon called it flooding the zone with shit. Some keep on saying “flooding the zone” is a donvict strategy, but he got it from Bannon, most likely.
Also: Karl Rove famously had his quote, which is basically the same thing - basically putting on a pedestal those that take bold actions and lie constantly in the process:
“That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Bannon saying to “flood the zone with shit” is far shorter, but basically the same thing.
