Bea Arthur – Photo: John Mathew Smith via Wikicommons
A page touting Golden Girls actress Bea Arthur’s military service during World War II was reportedly scrubbed from the U.S. Department of Defense website as part of the Trump administration’s overzealous efforts to purge anything related to diversity or LGBTQ identity.
Last week, X user @swiftillery noted that the article on Arthur — first published in October 2021 — had been removed from the Defense Department website.
According to The Advocate, the Internet Archive documented a “404 — Page Not Found” message at the URL where the article had been housed.
Bonus chapter of Women’s History Month in honor of the program scrubbing DOD web articles. Meet Bea Arthur, iconic Golden girl actress and one of the first women to join the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve.
— tortured marketing department (@swiftillery) March 20, 2025
Although the webpage was later restored to the DOD website by March 24, @swiftillery noted that the letters “DEI” had been added to the Bea Arthur page’s URL, as if someone had tagged it.
Those letters have since been removed.
The original article details how Arthur enlisted in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve on February 18, 1943, just five days after the military began recruiting women in the middle of World War II. Between 1944 and 1945, Arthur served by driving a truck and dispatching at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in North Carolina, rising to the rank of staff sergeant before being honorably discharged in September 1945, after the war had ended.
The article noted that Arthur later became a celebrated actress, earning praise for her roles in the Broadway musical Mame — for which she won a Tony Award — and in the TV sitcoms Maude and Golden Girls, for which she earned two Emmys.
It also detailed how Arthur “embraced the gay community” and was passionate about combating homelessness among LGBTQ youth, even leaving $300,000 to New York City’s Ali Forney Center following her death in 2009.
It’s unclear for what reason the page was removed before being restored. It could be because the article highlighted her female identity, which may have conflicted with a Trump executive order to purge pro-diversity references, such as race, sex, religion, or ethnic origin, which the administration considers divisive.
Alternatively, the article could also have been flagged because it mentioned her ties to the LGBTQ community or because the “LGBTQ” moniker runs afoul of a separate Trump executive order refusing to recognize the validity of transgender identity.
Arthur’s biography was not the only one to be removed from the DOD website.
According to CNN, various pages removed or flagged included articles mentioning the Holocaust; the 2001 terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; sexual assault; cancer awareness; suicide prevention; and biographies of women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals who have served in the military. The letters “DEI” were reportedly added to the URLs of many pages.
In one case, the biography of Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play major league baseball in the modern era, who served in the U.S. Army during World War II, rising to the rank of second lieutenant, was removed and replaced with a 404 error page, with the letters “DEI” automatically added to the URL, according to the Associated Press. That webpage has also since been restored.
As part of this ongoing purge, the DOD embarrassingly became the butt of jokes from late-night comics after it flagged a historical photo of the Enola Gay, the U.S. Air Force plane that dropped the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan during WWII. The photo was reportedly marked for removal because the word “gay” appeared in the description.
CNN reports that the content was scrubbed by an automated script run by DOD public web administrators in response to a January 29 directive from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “abolish” DEI offices and remove “any vestiges of such offices that subvert meritocracy, perpetuate unconstitutional discrimination, and promote radical ideologies related to systemic racism and gender fluidity.”
That directive was followed by a February 26 memo from Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Sean Parnell, ordering the department to remove all news releases, feature articles, photos, or videos that allegedly “promote” diversity or DEI by March 5.
A defense official who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity told the news outlet that the automated scrubbing process has led to “a high level of irresponsible collateral damage,” adding: “People don’t understand the scope and the carelessness of ‘unpublishing’ that’s happened.”
But DOD Press Secretary John Ullyot defended the removal of DEI-related content, which he accused of being a “form of woke cultural Marxism” that allegedly leads to the erosion of unit cohesion. However, he acknowledged that some webpages were removed erroneously.
“We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms,” Ullyot told the Associated Press in a statement. “In the rare cases that content is removed — either deliberately or by mistake — that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content so it recognizes our heroes for their dedicated service alongside their fellow Americans, period.”
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