I somehow missed this at the time, but Trump got very busy erasing women from all the things too. I knew about the big picture “get rid of all DEI blah blah blah” but I’m not sure I knew women were included in the purge.

As President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI agenda comes to bear on NASA, we’re getting a revealing look at what his administration considers to be too woke: women.

In a directive sent out just days after Trump’s inauguration, NASA personnel were commanded to excise all mentions of anything “specifically targeting” women on the space agency’s public websites, 404 Media reports.

And by “targeting” they don’t mean harassing or mocking, they mean mentioning.

“Per NASA HQ direction, we are required to scrub mentions of the following terms from our public sites by 5pm ET today,” the directive reads. “This is a drop everything and reprioritize your day request.”

The list of verboten terms includes “DEIA,” “accessibility,” “indigenous people,” “environmental justice,” and finally: “anything specifically targeting women,” such as “women in leadership, etc.”

Yeah that’s a very eccentric use of the word “targeting” – a more normal way of saying it would be “specifically mentioning/singling out/promoting” and the like.

To lead the agency down this path, Trump hand picked Janet Petro as the space agency’s acting head — a nomination that’s reportedly surprised even NASA officials — which makes her the first woman to serve as the agency’s adminstrator.

“These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination,” Petro wrote in a memo about the agency’s termination of diversity programs.

Huh. So Trump “targeted” Petro by making her the head of NASA, but it’s not ok for NASA to “target” women by mentioning their leadership roles. Totally makes sense.

That’s funny, because when Petro was the director of the Kennedy Space Center, she said this in a 2021 interview: “At NASA and Kennedy Space Center, our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility has been paramount to mission success. The entire NASA leadership team stands behind this commitment,” Petro said.  “KSC has embraced the link between diverse teams and innovation,” she added.

You could argue that Petro’s hand was forced, but the fact that she accepted the job knowing full well what Trump’s agenda was, not to mention her about-face on the issue, suggests she’s doing it all with mercenary intent.

Or at least promotionary intent.

H/t iknklast