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Comment by darkwater | Hacker News Reader

> while revisiting history to avoid dangerous words such as a 'women'...

What happened? I missed that (I'm not ironic, I would really like to know what else they did).

I suspect this refers to the list of words that are used to filter out and likely cancel or block various grants. Those words are about what the current US government considers DEI, but they are ridiculously broad and include words like "woman".

I know people who have had to defend their grant-funded research using terms like “inclusion” (geology) or “diversity” (of samples).

Growing up at the end of the Cold War with basically every major political figure decrying the USSR’s political apparatchiks monitoring everything, I never expected that to happen here but having watched the right’s embrace of Orban it wasn’t a surprise by the time it happened. The guys who brought us “freedom fries” crowded everyone else out of the party.

Projects are being killed across the government for exactly this reason. If anything it's even dumber than it sounds. If any word in a project or department title string matches a list of common terms it can get killed with zero investigation or recourse. Billions of dollars worth of research and work have already been destroyed in this way and it's only getting worse.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-fede...

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