Leaked Memo Shows Trump Canceling Juneteenth, MLK’s Birthday, Which Is Probably Illegal

This is getting depraved and fast. The Pentagon is under orders to suspend celebrations that honor women and racial and ethnic minorities. That is pretty horrific. And it doesn’t stop there. Earlier today there was a story about Trump rewriting the story of a female astronomer, one of the first who broke into a then-male dominated field. The federal webpage for an observatory named for the late astronomer Vera Rubin was edited to omit any recognition of the fact that science remains a male-dominated field or that the observatory was working to be more inclusive. That’s DEI and woke, you see, and Trump is hell bent on eliminating any of those concepts.

Earlier this week, I reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency ordered staff to suspend all activities and events at work relating to Holocaust remembrance, MLK’s birthday, Juneteenth, and several other “special observances.”

The directive, I can now report, extends to the entire military, as another leaked Army operations order I obtained and the Pentagon now confirms in a public statement late Friday.

The Pentagon’s public statement, obviously cognizant of the political minefield, dropped the prohibitions on national holidays recognized by law (MLK day and Juneteenth), as well as Pride and the Holocaust. Instead, it’s focusing on celebrations of ethnic and racial minorities like Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, National African American/Black History Month, and Women’s History Month, literally declaring them “dead,” directing that no “official resources, to include man-hours, to host celebrations or events” can be used.

I don’t pretend to know how Juneteenth and MLK’s Birthday can be eliminated when those are bona fide federal holidays. I guess we’re going to find that out. Maybe we should just declare the United States a White Supremacist country and be done with it, since it’s obvious that’s the end game here and why Trump was elected.

We’re going backwards and fast.

This story began with a tip I received earlier this week from a government worker who said they’d heard the military would no longer allow activities related to Black History Month at work. This is one of hundreds of tips I’ve gotten since the inauguration and while I looked for confirmation, I obtained the Defense Intelligence Agency document corroborating the tip and much more. I had the goods.

I posted the DIA document to social media, to get it out, talking with my editor Bill Arkin that maybe we’d do a full-length story later. I winced a bit, knowing that my Substack readership pays the bills, but there was so much else to cover. And, we decided, our task is to get leaks and documents out to the public as quickly as possible.

My Twitter post promptly went viral and the Associated Press soon did a story. It didn’t credit me. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in going independent, it is that there is a strict divide between the mainstream and social media. First, there’s just a view that social media doesn’t count as journalism. Second, there is a presumption that when something is on social media, it is just a retweet, a post from a post from a post, with no beginning and no end. But this was my scoop and I told the AP reporter, who updated her story to say the document was first published by me.

Actual journalism, the convention goes, is when you tack 900 unnecessary words onto a scoop that often can just be told in a single tweet. Time that could be spent getting more information out to the public is instead spent on following dinosaur practices and keeping up appearances of “confirmation.”

That issue of “confirmation,” of course, feeds much of the disinformation and fact-checking industry. I was reminded of this when I got an email from Snopes, the “fact-checking” website. They said they were trying to authenticate the document I had posted. “I’m attempting to independently verify the memo’s authenticity,” the email explained. At first I was puzzled: the document is right there and the military isn’t denying it. How could this be in dispute?

Next came an ask so audacious I had to laugh: “If you do know the identity of the person who sent you the memo, would you be willing to ask if they’d feel comfortable sharing their information with me?” The thought that I would out my source — a member of the secretive intelligence community with which the Trump administration is openly at war — to someone I didn’t even know was beyond belief. I ignored it, and now my punishment is a Snopes headline declaring the document merely “Alleged” (even though the Pentagon has now officially put out its own confirmation).

I put in these last four paragraphs for a purpose, to show what real journalists go through, whereas the right-wing propaganda silo just dreams up lies and prints them as truths. And then they interview each other about the lies and then it passes into the collective consciousness as fact.

Tomorrow this will hit the fan. This is getting outrageous. All of the people who are being eliminated from remembrances are important characters in American history, or there wouldn’t be remembrances in the first place. Our culture itself is being memory holed. This has to stop. And I do suspect that injunctive relief will be forthcoming, because this, like the funding freeze, shows every sign of being illegal as hell.

But what else would you expect from a *president* who is a convicted felon?

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