Elon Musk’s Disconcerting Definition of ‘Traitor’; the Defense Department’s Image Purge in the Name of DEI–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: March 10, 2025

Indy Digest: March 10, 2025

U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly is a retired Navy captain who flew missions during the Gulf War. He later became a NASA astronaut, serving on four space shuttle missions—two as a pilot, and two as a commander. His wife is Gabrielle Giffords, a former congresswoman from Tucson, Ariz,, who survived after being shot in the head during a “Congress on Your Corner” event in 2011. Since retiring from the Navy and NASA, Kelly has twice been elected to the U.S. Senate by Arizonans, first during a special election in 2020, and to a full term in 2022.

Elon Musk was born to a wealthy family in South Africa. He emigrated to Canada before moving to the U.S. for college. He’s co-founded several tech companies, and has had prominent roles in several others—including Space X and Tesla—making him the wealthiest person in the world. In recent years, his politics have taken a turn to the far right, and he’s become known for spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories. He’s expressed support for the anti-immigrant, xenophobic far-right Alternative for Germany party, and has been embraced domestically by right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis due to his remarks and questionable (to put it kindly) gestures. He’s currently the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency, which is ripping through the federal government and making a series of haphazard and often damaging cuts and firings. He has the ear of the president and, in several different ways, is undeniably one of the most powerful people in the country.

I mention all of this to bring up something that took place on X, the social media platform owned by Musk, earlier today. Here’s a screenshot:

I recommend clicking on the above link, and making your way to Kelly’s thread following his trip to Ukraine, but here’s a summary: He says American aid is vital to helping Ukraine’s fight against Russia and Vladimir Putin, a “war criminal” who has been, among other things, targeting hospitals. He says “we are owed an explanation” from Donald Trump for his actions, and compliments Ukraine’s military.

Kelly concludes:

The world will become a very cold and lonely place if we continue this ridiculous “screw you, go it alone” foreign policy. It’s dumb and it won’t age well and puts you and your kids and your grandkids at risk. America is the strongest, richest country in the world. We didn’t get there by being bullies like Putin, we got there by leading from the front and bringing our allies. That’s why I’ll continue to share with everyone who will listen why we must keep supporting Ukraine.

There are, I suppose, reasonable arguments one could make in disagreement with Mark Kelly.

But to call him a “traitor”? Really?

I fear for this country—and this is a prime example why.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• Social Security Administration employees have been banned from accessing … news. Wired magazine reports: “Employees at the Social Security Administration (SSA) were informed on Thursday morning that new rules forbid them from accessing ‘general news’ websites, including those that have been at the forefront of the reporting on Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) effort. In an email reviewed by WIRED and addressed to ‘all SSA employees’ from a mailing list called ‘internal communications,’ the agency informed employees that it was ‘implementing additional restrictions to the categories of websites prohibited from government-furnished equipment. Effective today, March 6, 2025, the categories include: Online shopping; General News; and Sports.’ The headline read ‘Internet Browsing from Government Equipment.’ The email did not specify which websites in particular were to be blocked. However, WIRED has confirmed with two sources inside the SSA that Wired.com is no longer accessible today, though it was accessible previously.” This is not normal, folks.

• And this is certainly not normal. The Associated Press says: “References to a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan and the first women to pass Marine infantry training are among the tens of thousands of photos and online posts marked for deletion as the Defense Department works to purge diversity, equity and inclusion content, according to a database obtained by The Associated Press. The database, which was confirmed by U.S. officials and published by AP, includes more than 26,000 images that have been flagged for removal across every military branch. But the eventual total could be much higher. One official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details that have not been made public, said the purge could delete as many as 100,000 images or posts in total, when considering social media pages and other websites that are also being culled for DEI content. The official said it’s not clear if the database has been finalized.”

• Nor is this normal: National Cancer Institute employees are being forbidden from communications on certain topics unless they get the go-ahead from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his crew. ProPublica says: “Employees at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, received internal guidance last week to flag manuscripts, presentations or other communications for scrutiny if they addressed ‘controversial, high profile, or sensitive’ topics. Among the 23 hot-button issues, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica: vaccines, fluoride, peanut allergies, autism. … Staffers and experts worried that the directive would delay or halt the publication of research. ‘This is micromanagement at the highest level,’ said Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. The list touches on the personal priorities of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist who has repeatedly promoted medical conspiracy theories and false claims. He has advanced the idea that rising rates of autism are linked to vaccines, a claim that has been debunked by hundreds of scientific studies. He has also suggested that aluminum in vaccines is responsible for childhood allergies (his son reportedly is severely allergic to peanuts). And he has claimed that water fluoridation—which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called ‘one of the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20th century’—is an ‘industrial waste.’

• The Washington Post looks at the damage proposed Medicaid cuts would cause for rural hospitals and maternity care: “Rural hospitals across the United States fear that massive Medicaid cuts Republicans would have to consider under the current House budget proposal could decimate maternity services or shutter already struggling medical facilities in communities that overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump. Nearly half of all rural hospitals nationwide operate at a deficit, with Medicaid barely keeping them afloat. Already, almost 200 rural hospitals have closed in the past two decades, according to the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, part of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Rural hospital leaders in Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri and Texas who spoke to The Washington Post warned that the enormous cuts congressional Republicans are weighing could further destroy limited health-care access in rural America.”

• Our partners at Calmatters examine something rather rare in the California Legislature—truly bipartisan pieces of legislation: “Of the 2,278 bills lawmakers submitted by the deadline last week, only 11 had Republicans and Democrats as joint lead authors, according to a CalMatters analysis of the Digital Democracy database. Another 41 bills had bipartisan ‘co-authors’ and ‘principal co-authors,’ designations that are more symbolic since a bill’s lead authors and their staffs are expected to marshal the legislation through to the governor’s desk. Authors and co-authors can still be added to bills later in the year. But taken together, these early bipartisan bills represent less than 1% of all the legislation filed so far this session. … One was Senate Bill 458 by Sacramento County Republican Sen. Roger Niello and Democratic Sen. Tom Umberg of Santa Ana that would require the Legislative Analyst’s Office to write ballot initiative titles and summaries instead of the partisan Attorney General’s Office. Various efforts over the years to make the change have fizzled out.”

• The country’s butterflies are disappearing—a deeply disconcerting sign regarding the state of the environment. The Associated Press reports via CNN: “America’s butterflies are disappearing because of insecticides, climate change and habitat loss, with the number of the winged beauties down 22% since 2000, a new study finds. The first countrywide systematic analysis of butterfly abundance found that the number of butterflies in the Lower 48 states has been falling on average 1.3% a year since the turn of the century, with 114 species showing significant declines and only nine increasing, according to a study in Thursday’s journal Science. A team of scientists combined 76,957 surveys from 35 monitoring programs and blended them for an apples-to-apples comparison and ended up counting 12.6 million butterflies over the decades. Last month an annual survey that looked just at monarch butterflies, which federal officials plan to put on the threatened species list, counted a nearly all-time low of fewer than 10,000, down from 1.2 million in 1997. Many of the species in decline fell by 40% or more.”

• And finally … The New York Times takes a fascinating look, via a series of charts, at how much the arrival of SARS-CoV-2 five years ago changed the country and the world. Some of those changes were drastic but temporary; others had a lasting effect. One example: “One thing the revolution in remote and hybrid work enabled: Mothers of the youngest children flooded into the work force, adding to a record number of American women with paying jobs.”

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