'DEI is dead': Jackie Robinson briefly becomes casualty of Trump crackdown

ESPN reporter Jeff Passan posted on X that the Pentagon removed a story about Major League Baseball player Jackie Robinson from its site due to the ban on diversity initiatives.

Robinson became the "first African-American player in the 20th century to take the field in the American or National league," says the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Robinson also served in the U.S. Army as a 2nd lieutenant, and trained as an officer, said NBC News.

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Passan asked the Pentagon why the article on Robinson was removed, uncovering it was related to President Donald Trump's ban on promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.

"As Secretary [Pete] Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke (sic) cultural Marxism that has no place in our military," Pentagon press secretary John Ullyot said in the statement

"It Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services' core warfighting mission. We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms. 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 accordingly," the statement included.

The Pentagon later restored Robinson's story.

An accompanying statement read, "Everyone at the Defense Department loves Jackie Robinson, as well as the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee airmen, the Marines at Iwo Jima and so many others — we salute them for their strong and in many cases heroic service to our country, full stop. We do not view or highlight them through the prism of immutable characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, or sex. We do so only by recognizing their patriotism and dedication to the warfighting mission like [every] other American who has worn the uniform."

Among the things removed from the site so far has been a photo of the B-29 Superfortress bomber plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. The name of the plane was "The Enola Gay."