A scene in an FBI building: the walls that were covered with words reflecting virtuous concepts were painted gray.
What I find depressing is picturing the thought that went on behind this action. Someone somewhere in the hierarchy thought it was a good idea to pass down an order to erase words like “fairness,” “leadership,” “compassion,” “integrity,” etc., all in order to wipe out the word “diversity.” No one stood up and said that this was silly and pointless and a waste of time and offensive.
Maybe no one at the FBI has a spine.
Perhaps it was appropriate that they erased the words “leadership” and “integrity.”
It’s honest, though.
No government led by Donald J. Unworthy can claim any of the virtues formerly listed…
Wow, that picture says it all. Erased out of existence.
Snopes seems undecided on this: https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/02/07/fbi-core-values-mural/ It would be good to have more info.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this is an authentic photo taken at Quantico, but there are things that give me pause. I’ve done my share of wall painting, but have never had a need to paint a large W that way before proceeding. The drop cloth should be covering more of that marble floor because paint always gets loose. Why isn’t he wearing painter’s coveralls or an apron over his street clothes? As I said, paint always gets loose. Why hasn’t he taped the edges to prevent slips of the roller? The bottom and top edges look perfectly straight, no smears or smudges. My guess is this is either AI or photoshopped.
I’m more worried about information being erased from the CDC and NIH, thanks to Bobby Brainworm’s grifter beliefs.
However photoshopped this is (and the failure to cover the message/directory board is a pretty good hint; so it the one-coat covering of red and yellow lettering), at least it isn’t Creech Brown. Instead, it’s the right color for any law-enforcement organization: Grey.
gijoel@5 We have a smorgasbord of things to be terrified about, so it’s time to get a tray and load up. I agree that painting over a wall is the least of it. This is, however, a great visual for the actual erasure they’re perpetrating.
John Watts@4 Yeah, it could be fake or out of context, but it would be interesting to have that conversation with one of the many people who are literally working hard to remove this language. Would they even insist that it’s fake? If they said “Oh no, we’d never do anything like that.” they be lying first off, and second would alienate the huge part of their base that wants to see this shit.
Appropriate for any and everything Trump and republicans, in general. It wouldn’t shock me to hear they are pressing Random House, Macmillan, and American Heritage to ban those words from their dictionaries.
Looks real enough to me, and even if the photo has been faked in some way, we know the exact same thing is already happening to government content all over the public facing web, so why would it be any different in the more private places too?
I was about to say this should be the defining image for the Trump administration, but given how much worse is to come yet, that would be letting them off way to easy.
Language does matter. Vichy France replaced “liberté, égalité, fraternité ” with “travail, famille, patrie” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travail,_famille,_patrie The Trump administration’s renunciation of diversity, equity, and inclusion as core values seems very similar to me.
Actually, pretty much everything they are doing seems to be echoing the rise of Hitler, e.g. replacing career officials with loyalists, applying political litmus tests to scientific and academic posts, the compact they have made with industrialists like Musk. I mean, it’s part of a more general totalitarian playbook, but the people comparing Trump to Hitler have faced so much ridicule and dismissal, and Trump just goes merrily along acting like Hitler. This time around he doesn’t even pretend.
I would be terrified except that I am too exhausted to be terrified 100% of the time.
Oh whoops. I was going to say, I am not sure there has ever been a successful coup of this scope that did not literally end up rounding up “domestic enemies” and killing them. Maybe someone else has the historical context. Inasmuch as the resistance so far has not been enough to slow things significantly, it’s doubtful they’ll leap to those measures immediately, but it seems to me that either they fail, or else they wind up killing a lot of people (and not only as a side effect, like the people that are going to die with the elimination of USAID). Any counterargument?
Like Kevin Roberts said, Project 2025 will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.” While I am not expecting a heroic rise of Antifa fighters, though I would welcome one, I do think that Americans aren’t used to shutting up about things. This administration is going to find the need to make some examples, not only by cutting funds and killing by denying medical care.
@4 The W is to spread the paint evenly when the roller is fully loaded with paint. With you on everything else though. Also, why is the baseboard not taped to insure an even border? The whole thing looks fake AF, Photoshopped or AI generated.
Welcome to the Cinemax Theory of Racism
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/11/10/the-cinemax-theory-of-racism/
And you voted for it anyway.
So did you vote for racism?
You sure did.
Edit to fix attribution
From the same link
Re: gray paint: The hierarchy somewhat further down than the originating point may not have had any choice in painting over the wall or otherwise removing anything remotely connected to DEI. They may also have bigger fish to fry and the gray wall was far down on the list of priorities.
https://www.404media.co/declassified-cia-guide-to-sabotaging-fascism-is-suddenly-viral/
Looks like (bottom left) the word “WORSHIP” also got painted over.
Baby Jesus will SMITE!
Idk if it is photoshopped, but pro/skilled painters don’t use tape.
Vichy France replaced “liberté, égalité, fraternité ” with “travail, famille, patrie”
Sounds like that’s where Reagan got his campaign slogan from: “Family, Neighborhood, Work, Peace, Freedom.”
This featured on Colbert last week – and apparently a plaque saying “Be Kind to everyone” was removed as well See Animals Pick The Super Bowl Winner | Elon Musk Vs. The Weather | Google’s Killer AI from the 2 min 17 secs mark onwards esp 4 10 mins mark onwards
[I did wait]
I don’t get the ‘cowardice’ claim.
And yes, I get the claim: some presumed but unnamed executive made this decision allegedly because they were cowardly rather than because it was warranted.
It’s the inference chain and warrant that I doubt.
“Someone somewhere in the hierarchy thought it was a good idea to pass down an order [etc]”.
Well, yes. That’s what a hierarchy is✱. Orders from above are implemented.
It’s not a thing that functionaries in a hierarchy can decide for themselves whether or not to obey orders from above; I suppose they can get away with it once, and then their replacement(s) will still do it and they will no longer be in a position to ignore orders.
Like, you know… the Army.
—
✱ Well, not literally.
Literally it’s ‘sacred ruler’, analogic to ‘heavenly system’ (interesting Chinese links there), much like hieroglyphics is originally sacred writings.
But yes, top-down rule.
(Also, it’s just words on a wall. Not actually anything real. Symbolism)
Whether ’tis better to be brave but useless in a futile gesture and then gone, or to remain at one’s post and be somehow subversive… well, that is a question.
(Indefinite, not definite article, of course)
I gather MuskRumpster gave a speech recently about “returning America to religion”. Dan McClellan has a good take on on it: Part 1 responding to the President and here’s Part 2. Much of these two videos are pointing at findings from studies about the effects of religion. I particularly like the way he ends Part 2.
Hearing a wealthy, greedy, self-centered rapist extoll the virtues of and the need for religion is disgusting and laughable.
robro@21
…and yet entirely unsurprising and precedented.
@15: Pretty sure that was “LEADERSHIP”. You can faintly see the second E left of the R where the second coat hasn’t been applied yet.
The gray paint reminds me of the Ursula Le Guin’s book “The Lathe of Heaven.” The protagonist dreams of racism not existing. When he wakes up everyone has turned to the same color of gray. Plus the history has been erased of any diversity and strife about diversity.
Total conformity. I cannot imagine how that would affect the delightful variety of food, clothing, art, etc. I read it a long time ago, and that is all I remember from it.
robro: “Hearing a wealthy, greedy, self-centered rapist extoll the virtues of and the need for religion is disgusting and laughable.”
Especially when they go after actual churches: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/what-its-like-when-the-trump-outrage-machine-comes-for-a-nw-mainstay/
Apparently Lutheran churches that help people. From the article: ‘Michael Flynn, once President Donald Trump’s national security adviser before getting fired, had been compiling lists of federal grants that he considered to be “VERY ROTTEN.” In one, Flynn listed some grants awarded to about 15 Lutheran nonprofits, including Duea’s group, describing it as akin to a “money-laundering operation.”
Musk responded approvingly: “The @DOGE team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments.”’
@chris, I just reread the audiobook for “The Lathe of Heaven” last year. It is truly a wonderful but unsettling book. Whatever the sleeping protagonist dreams becomes true the next morning, including even altering the past. It is indeed a little about trying to produce comity and conformity but to me it’s more about the fragile nature of reality.
“Apparently Lutheran churches that help people.”
Some people, some times. Under some circumstances.
Thanks to the Government.
cf. https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/02/03/worse-than-the-new-atheists/
“I just reread the audiobook for “The Lathe of Heaven” last year. It is truly a wonderful but unsettling book.”
Huh. I’d call it boring and silly, but then, experiences vary.
“It is indeed a little about trying to produce comity and conformity but to me it’s more about the fragile nature of reality.”
Reality is the ultimate NON-Fragile thing. Inevitable.
(Reality ain’t fragile, it’s brutish)
[Also, one re-hears an audiobook. Hearing ain’t reading]
It looks like they might also be painting over “constitution” in red letters to the lower right. If so, the symbolism is quite appropriate.
On second thoughts, I think this is a clever photoshop. And I fell for it the first time (and second, and third…)
If you look at the reflected words in the marble floor, it’s possible to make out some of them, but not possible to see any stripes that partially obscure them, like some of the bottom of the W should.
With the (carefully added?) JPEG compression noise, it’s hard to be sure.
I don’t see any alien script language, as seen in so many generative AI images, so I think this is a well done photoshop.
Hats off to the artist.
Wherein I open myself to a pissing match:
John Morales@28
Those are among the words I’d use to describe The Moon is Harsh Mistress which I seem to recall that you liked. It has one interesting idea about using moon’s gravitational potential as a weapon, and a great deal of very silly and boring libertarianism written in a poorly thought out and unreadable creole. Sheesh, when are we gonna get to the moon rocks?
Sure, but that was not Le Guin’s point. It’s an exploration of what happens if the most well-intentioned person has that kind of power. It’s an old sort of fable, not a new idea at all, but it’s written with empathy and strong characterizations. I agree that experiences vary. It’s my favorite Philip K Dick story that he never wrote, and it has a great Beatles reference “What do you see when you turn out the lights? I can’t tell you but I know that it’s mine.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_gustibus_non_est_disputandum
“Sure, but that was not Le Guin’s point. It’s an exploration of what happens if the most well-intentioned person has that kind of power.”
Yes, I know.
But that’s not our reality, which is in no way actually fragile.
The ultimate brute fact.
John @33:
In a deterministic universe, the slightest change in initial conditions can result in radically different futures in a remarkably short time. Indeed, in a quantum universe, no change in initial conditions can result in radically different futures. I’d say that qualifies as fragile.
Why, Rob?
Lorenz and his ‘butterfly effect’ is about systems within reality, not about reality itself.
Far as our reality goes, well, the Big Bang was the initial condition, right?
(The claim is about reality itself)
John; I flip a coin. If its heads, I blow up a bridge. If its tails, I don’t. It’s not complicated. Don’t need to invoke Lorenz or the Big Bang. That’s “reality itself”. Did the bridge get blown up, in reality?
No, reality is the framework within which these things happen, not the things that happen in reality.
No, reality is what actually happens. And I’ve hit my ‘respond to Morales no more than three times on a topic’ limit.
So what actually happens is fragile. Deepity!
In this reality, wishing for fishies does not make them materialise in front of you;
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=dr+johnson+kicking+stone
(In this reality, water expands when it freezes; just as well, eh?)
—
That’s a nice way of putting it, it surely salves your ego.
@ chris – 9 February 2025 at 10:31 pm :
Long time since I read it (back in High School!) but I thought it was the threat of hostile aliens that “solved” the racism issue in that one? Or maybe I’m confusing it with another story perhaps? Another take on the genies/ cursedmonkey paw wishes that always go wrong trope.
It’s basically what Ozymandias did in Watchmen.
(And, well, Dr. Manhattan had that sort of power, but with utter power comes utter disinterest, apparently ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey%27s_Paw is quite different.
(And none of those show reality as fragile, which was the original claim I disputed)
[fisherman and the genie is yet again different; all are fables, but all have different morals to the story]