http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43721-five-things-the-trump-administration-is-removing-from-federal-websites
[In our current social context, we (the people), are going to have to
safeguard our history and truth, as we can not trust the institutions
which are being manipulated by private interests to satisfy their greed.
For example, RESTCo has put the summaries (5 books) and over 40
technical reports from the Beaufort Sea Project on-line, because a few
years ago the Canadian federal government was poised to remove them from
the public record; the information was inconvenient to the oil industry.
(https://www.restco.ca/BSP_Reprints.shtml). Others may need to do the
same for other information which will otherwise be erased for similar
reasons.
(I still strive to ignore what so-called President Trump says, but I
remain very alert to what he and his minions are actually DOING.
links in on-line article]
Five Things the Trump Administration Is Removing From Federal Websites
Saturday, March 03, 2018 By Robin Marty, Care2 | Report
Perhaps one of the best-remembered quotes from George Orwell's dystopian
book 1984 is "Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls
the present controls the past." Over the last year, the Trump
administration has taken those words literally, using them as a
blueprint to recreate a federal government focused on big business and
socially conservative policy.
And nowhere has this been more apparent than on federal websites.
Appointees have been scrubbing and rewriting text to erase climate
change, sexual health care, civil rights -- and even our nation's history.
Here are five things the Trump administration has removed from federal
websites in an attempt to roll back progress.
1. Climate Change
As our country continues to be pounded by devastating and unseasonable
storms, the Environmental Protection Agency is pretending that climate
change remains just a theory. Removing mentions of climate change was
one of Secretary Scott Pruitt's initial actions when he took over the
agency, and he saw to it "personally," according to Newsweek.
"Recently released emails reveal that Environmental Protection Agency
Administrator Scott Pruitt personally oversaw efforts last year to strip
information on climate change from the agency's website," Newsweek
reports. "Internal messages sent in April 2017 show that newly appointed
EPA leaders directed staffers to make key changes to the epa.gov
website. Edits ordered by Pruitt demanded that data on climate change
and the Obama-era Clean Power Plan to be stripped away."
2. Our Historical Legacy of Immigration
Unless you're a Native American, there's no one in this country who
doesn't have an immigrant in their family history -- willing or forced
due to slavery. Yet in their anti-immigrant zealotry, the Trump
administration is erasing that fact from our historical legacy.
USA Today reports:
The US is no longer devoted to securing "America's promise as a
nation of immigrants." That's according to the United States Citizenship
and Immigration Services (USCIS) anyway, which changed its official
mission statement late Thursday and dropped the language to describe the
country.
3. Bilingual Content
And as another sign of the administration's stance against immigration
and racial diversity, the White House website has gone "English only"
for the first time since the 1990s, with no Spanish translations of any
information available online.
According to the Associated Press:
A year ago, then-presidential press secretary Sean Spicer said the
new administration had deleted Spanish content on the White House
webpage but its information technology folks were "working overtime" to
develop a new site. In July, the White House director of media affairs,
Helen Aguirre Ferre, said she expected a Spanish website to launch at
the end of 2017. Now, Aguirre Ferre declines to say whether there are
still plans to have a Spanish-language website.
4.LGBTQ People
One of the first actions taken by the administration was to remove any
references to non-heterosexuality from the State Department website.
Soon after the inauguration, NBC News reported:
On Tuesday, it appeared that nearly all mentions of the acronym
"LGBT" had been taken off the State Department website (the department
typically did not include the acronym's "Q," which is used by some --
though not all -- in the LGBTQ community). Entering "LGBT" into the
website's search field resulted in numerous dead links where webpages
used to house information about LGBTQ Pride month, LGBTQ refugees, LGBTQ
human rights issues, human trafficking of LGBTQ people and the Special
Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBT Persons.
Not only did such references never return, but the administration also
created a "forbidden words" list that kept many LGBTQ terms from being
used in official capacity at all.
5. Women's Rights
And finally, as the State Department prepares to release its annual
report on international human rights, women are being "pared back" when
it comes to reproductive rights and freedom from gender-based
discrimination. Politico reports:
State Department officials have been ordered to pare back passages
in a soon-to-be-released annual report on global human rights that
traditionally discuss women's reproductive rights and discrimination,
according to five former and current department officials. The directive
calls for stripping passages that describe societal views on family
planning, including how much access women have to contraceptives and
abortion. A broader section that chronicles racial, ethnic and sexual
discrimination has also been ordered pared down, the current and former
officials said.