The Terror Being Felt by Government Employees; Chuckwalla May Soon Be Open for Drilling, Mining–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: April 24, 2025

Indy Digest: April 24, 2025

Story-takedown requests are part of running a news publication in the digital age.

Several times per year, at least, we get a request from someone to remove or change a story in our archives, usually because someone mentioned, covered or quoted in a piece doesn’t want other people to find that story in search results. I’ve had people ask us to remove a story about a crime in which they were involved, because they’re looking for a job, and they don’t want prospective employers finding a story about their past wrongdoing. One time, I had someone—who I am pretty sure was dealing with mental illness—ask us to remove an innocuous 20-plus-year-old band profile from our sister newspaper’s website, because he didn’t want a story from his “past life” out there.

But lately, newspaper publishers have been receiving a spate of takedown requests for a reason that shows how terrifyingly messed-up our federal government has become.

Here’s a recent post from a publishers’ listserv; I am sharing this here with the publisher’s permission (although I won’t mention the publication).

Back in (the ’00s, we), ran a story of a man who became the new head of a pro LGBTQ organization here. These days, he (works for) the Justice Department. He contacted me today and wanted us to remove the story about him from our Web archive. I told him we didn’t “unpublish” stories, which led to him making an angry Easter call to me demanding that it be taken down.  

I calmly explained that even if we removed a story—which we weren’t in the business of doing—the story wouldn’t be removed from paper copies in libraries or digital copies in the Internet Archive.  

He … is worried that he will be targeted for his past and will lose his job. He worries about some 20-year-old MAGA true believer doing a Google search on him and reporting it to the HR people to get rid of him. 

Let’s step back and look at what’s happening here, in the United States, in 2025: We have presumably competent federal employees worried about their job, simply because they, two decades ago, worked for a pro-LGBTQ+ organization. Given all we know about Trump’s efforts to purge the government of anyone he suspects may be “disloyal,” this employee probably has a good reason to be worried.

Like the publisher quoted above, we almost never take down stories. In rare cases, we may make edits to a piece in our archives if we believe there’s a legitimate chance of harm to someone mentioned in a story. That’s what my fellow publisher decided to do here: “I’ve decided to amend the story by changing his name and removing the photo,” the publisher told me. “I’m also going to add an editor’s note saying that the story has been changed and the reason why.”

This goes against everything America, the Constitution and basic morality stand for—but here we are.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• We recently reported that the Chuckwalla National Monument designation was in danger of being rolled back or cancelled completely by the Trump administration. Today, The Washington Post broke a story that includes a rather discouraging update: “Trump officials are analyzing whether to remove federal protections for national monuments spanning millions of acres in the West, according to two people familiar with the matter and an internal Interior Department document, in order to spur energy development on public lands. Interior Department aides are looking at whether to scale back at least six national monuments, these individuals said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because no final decisions had been made. The list, they added, includes Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon, Ironwood Forest, Chuckwalla, Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante—national monuments spread across Arizona, California, New Mexico and Utah. Interior Department officials are poring over geological maps to analyze the monuments’ potential for mining and oil production and assess whether to revise their boundaries, one individual said.”

• The New York Times and The Desert Sun teamed up to look at the fact that, as the sub-headline puts it, “The jails of Riverside County are plagued with unusually high murder rates and recurring security failures by an inexperienced staff.” Some details: “Killings are relatively rare in American jails, but those in Riverside County experienced a surge in them. They had the highest homicide rate among large jails in California from 2020 through 2023, according to state data. The murders and other deaths made the county’s five jails the second-deadliest in the nation during that period. In 2022, the jail system’s worst year, 19 detainees would die from homicides, suicides, overdoses and natural causes. There were clear patterns of security lapses, negligence and policy violations that contributed to the six homicides in the county jails from 2020 through last year, The New York Times and The Desert Sun found. Similar issues were factors in the other deaths from this time period, previous reporting shows.” Wow.

• Our partners at Calmatters examined the effects Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs are having on industries in the state. Spoiler alert: The affects ain’t great, using the wine industry as an example: “A wine merchant in Walnut Creek who sells mostly European wines—on which the president has threatened 200% tariffs—said he’s going to have to make adjustments, like carrying more California wines, or consider closing up shop. … On the other hand, increased tariffs on European wine could help boost California wine. Natalie Collins, president of the California Association of Winegrape Growers, said tariffs on competing wines could help local wine growers. … Even if the wine produced in this country stays here, tariffs mean winemakers face higher costs on everything from bottles—glass mostly imported from China—to labels and corks, to metal posts and wooden stakes for the vines. As for U.S. wine exports, 95% of those come from California, says Gino DiCaro, spokesperson for the Wine Institute. And 35% of exports go to Canada, which now has a serious don’t-buy-American, don’t-go-to-America campaign in effect because of the president’s threats about tariffs and annexing Canada.”

• The Los Angeles Times looks at the state’s FAIR Plan, the state-run last-resort option for homeowners’ insurance—and how the Los Angeles wildfires are taking a huge toll on the plan: “The FAIR Plan was established by the Legislature in 1968 to offer basic insurance in urban and fire-prone neighborhoods where it was not available. It was not meant to be a large participant in the state’s home insurance market, but a string of disastrous wildfires over the last decade has spooked private insurers. That left the FAIR Plan with about 556,000 homeowner policies as of March, up from about 235,000 in September 2021, according to its website, making it one of the state’s biggest home insurers and exposing it to large losses. It also had nearly 18,000 commercial policies. The FAIR Plan said it has received about 5,280 claims for damage caused by the Palisades and Eaton fires, and has paid more than $2.5 billion to policyholders. The plan expects that the Jan. 7 fires will cost it an estimated $4 billion. That has prompted it to seek a $1-billion bailout from its member carriers. Half of that sum might be paid by surcharges on home policies statewide under a policy adopted last year by (Insurance Commissioner Ricardo) Lara to stabilize the plan’s finances. He has been sued by a consumer group over the matter.”

• ProPublica examines the Trump administration’s “War on Children”: “The clear-cutting across the federal government under President Donald Trump has been dramatic, with mass terminations, the suspension of decades-old programs and the neutering of entire agencies. But this spectacle has obscured a series of moves by the administration that could profoundly harm some of the most vulnerable people in the U.S.: children. Consider: The staff of a program that helps millions of poor families keep the electricity on, in part so that babies don’t die from extreme heat or cold, have all been fired. The federal office that oversees the enforcement of child support payments has been hollowed out. Head Start preschools, which teach toddlers their ABCs and feed them healthy meals, will likely be forced to shut down en masse, some as soon as May 1. And funding for investigating child sexual abuse and internet crimes against children; responding to reports of missing children; and preventing youth violence has been withdrawn indefinitely. The administration has laid off thousands of workers from coast to coast who had supervised education, child care, child support and child protective services systems, and it has blocked or delayed billions of dollars in funding for things like school meals and school safety.”

• And finally … we present this story, from CBS News, which illustrates how completely out of whack our federal government’s priorities are, in a way that would be funny if it weren’t so depressing and pathetic: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently ordered modifications to a room next to the Pentagon press briefing room to retrofit it with a makeup studio that can be used to prepare for television appearances, multiple sources told CBS News. The price tag for the project was several thousand dollars, according to two of the sources, at a time when the administration is searching for cost-cutting measures. ‘Changes and upgrades to the Pentagon Briefing Room are nothing new and routinely happen during changes in an administration,’ a Defense Department spokesperson said in a statement to CBS News. The renovation that was initially planned was estimated to cost more than $40,000, but the ideas were scaled back, sources said. After CBS News published its report, the defense secretary responded in a post on X, ‘Totally fake story. No “orders” and no “makeup.”’”

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