(Dobbs) DEI Purges Have Carried The Day.

Deserving icons who honorably served were taken down by the Pentagon.

Gee, I didn’t know that baseball great Jackie Robinson had been a DEI hire. Apparently the Pentagon sees it differently.

Sure, thanks to the courage of then-Brooklyn Dodger owner Branch Rickey, Robinson was the first black man signed to play in the major leagues. But if he had been a DEI hire, he probably wouldn’t have won Major League Baseball’s Rookie of the Year award in 1947, he probably wouldn’t have been an All-Star for six consecutive seasons, he probably would’t have been named the National League’s MVP, or played in six World Series, or been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

So, newsflash for the Pentagon: those things don’t happen automatically even if someone is a DEI hire.

Jackie Robinson earned it all. Breaking into the Majors in the mid-1940s, he had racism hurled at him from the pitcher’s mound and everywhere else. Even in his own clubhouse, some Dodgers warned that they wouldn’t play with a black man on the team. The solution to that was manager Leo Durocher telling the players, "I do not care if the guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a fuckin' zebra. I'm the manager of this team, and I say he plays.”

Through it all, Robinson kept his cool. That’s the kind of guy I’d want on my side.

After he died, President Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded Robinson the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Reagan said at the ceremony, “He bravely demonstrated to all that skill and sportsmanship, not race or ethnic background, are the qualities by which athletes should be judged.”

It’s a lesson the Pentagon’s new leadership— and the nation’s new leadership— evidently never learned. Because until public pressure forced a retreat, the Pentagon a few days ago scrubbed Jackie Robinson from its website.

He was there because he’d had been drafted into a segregated Army cavalry unit in 1942 where, by the following year, he earned his stripes as a second lieutenant. You’d think they’d be proud to look back in history and call him one of their own. But instead, in effect they called Robinson a DEI hire and a few days ago wiped his profile, part of a “Sports Heroes Who Served" series, from the website.

A spokesman for Secretary of Defense Hegseth said, “I think the president and the secretary have been very clear on this: that anybody that says in the Department of Defense that diversity is our strength is, is frankly, incorrect.”

They also wiped clean the profile of another black man, not a sports hero but a war hero.

His name was Charles Calvin Rogers, major general Charles Calvin Rogers. He was a fighter pilot in the Vietnam War who was wounded three times while defending a base and for that, President Richard Nixon awarded him the Medal of Honor, the military’s highest decoration.

But for the new Pentagon, that’s not good enough. The man, after all, was black. As if any soldier, black or white, would have had the courage to do what Rogers did to deserve that medal. So, like Jackie Robinson’s profile, General Rogers’s was wiped out too. If you went to the website and looked for the story about Rogers, you’d have found a “404” error message and even more egregious, you’d have found that the word “medal” had been altered to “DEI medal.”

Like Jackie Robinson’s page, Rogers’s was only restored after public pressure forced the issue.

Then there’s Private First Class Ira Hayes. If the name rings a bell, it’s because he’s one of the six marines during World War Two who raised the famous flag on Iwo Jima. In the celebrated photo, he’s the one on the far left.

But in this administration’s mind, there’s a problem: Hayes was an Indian, a member of the Pima tribe from Arizona. Although his profile on the Pentagon’s website previously said he represented “contributions and sacrifices Native Americans have made to the United States, not just in the military, but in all walks of life,” it was taken down too. Here’s the URL for what’s left.

As were stories about the Native American code-talkers, who devised a code based on their indigenous Navajo language that the enemy couldn’t break. They helped win the war because they were Native Americans. But those stories have disappeared too. As did the profile of a Civil War officer named Eli Parker who actually drafted the terms of surrender for the Confederacy at Appomattox.

Trouble is, he came from an Indian tribe too.

DEI purges have carried the day. Hegseth’s press secretary’s explanation? “DEI is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military. It Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services' core warfighting mission.” Cute, how he twice incorporated the letters DEI into his nasty excuse.

But none of this is a surprise. Not since Donald Trump’s tenth day back in the White House. That’s when a passenger plane and an Army helicopter collided over the Potomac River and 67 people died. Trump’s first words on the subject? After briefly calling it “a tragedy of terrible proportions,” he started the blame game, pointing his finger at minority air traffic controllers. “A group within the FAA determined that the workforce was too white, then they had concerted efforts to get the administration to change that and to change it immediately. This was in the Obama administration.”

Challenged to back up his claim that the controllers were incompetent, he told reporters, “I have common sense, okay, and unfortunately a lot of people don’t. We want brilliant people to do this. For some jobs— and not only this but air traffic controllers— they have to be at the highest level of genius.” As if that could not possibly include black controllers, or female controllers, or gay controllers, or anyone but straight white men.

Trump set the tone, and his administration has followed. A month ago Defense Secretary Hegseth sacked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General CQ Brown, who is black. He sacked the head of the navy, four star admiral Lisa Franchetti, who is female. Back when he was still at FoxNews, Hegseth wrote a book and said about Brown’s promotion to chair the Joint Chiefs, “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt.”

The nerve! Whether they were DEI hires or not, all these people purged from the proud history of the Pentagon did their jobs and did them with integrity and did them with valor. But this administration doesn’t care. All told, articles about minority members have been deleted from more than a thousand websites hosted by the Department of Defense.

The complaint you’ll hear from Trump and Hegseth and others is that DEI has been used as a form of racism against white men. Who do they think they’re kidding? It’s the other way around. It doesn’t really matter that a few profiles and stories were restored to the Pentagon’s website. What matters is that this administration is engaging in such an all-embracing, indiscriminate, and ill-informed sweep. What matters is that deserving icons who honorably served were ever taken down.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 38-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net