As President Donald Trump’s second term hurtles towards the 100-day mark, he has announced plans to purge the federal government of ‘woke’ initiatives. Agencies have subsequently flagged and compiled hundreds of words to limit or avoid.

They include, but are not limited to, ‘activism’, ‘bias’, ‘discrimination’, ‘disability’, ‘equality’, ‘female’, ‘gender’, ‘immigrants’, ‘LGBTQ’, ‘minority’, ‘pollution’, ‘pregnant people’, ‘race’, ‘sex’, ‘trauma’, ‘victim’, and ‘women’.

In documents obtained by The New York Times, official and unofficial agency guidance has ordered the removal of these words from public-facing websites or ordered the elimination of other materials (including school curricula) in which they might be included.

In other words, excuse the pun, we’re all f*cked. The gravitas of this ‘purge’ cannot be overstated. It is a blatant attempt to drag language into so-called ‘culture wars’ instead of admitting what it is: censorship with unimaginable consequences for huge swathes of the population.

It’s worth pointing out that Trump is a self-proclaimed champion of free speech. On his first day back in the Oval Office, he made a point of suggesting the Biden administration stifled First Amendment rights ‘in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate’. His executive order also added, ‘Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.’

To put the list into perspective, in some cases, if one of the words appeared on a grant proposal or contract that conflicts with Trump’s executive orders, it would immediately be flagged for review. Elsewhere, his rhetorical strategy is already in motion. Trump’s plans to do away with diversity, equality and inclusion in his administration are underway. He claims these initiatives are at odds with ‘merit’ and have resulted in the career progression of unqualified or undeserving people – most of whom happen to be people of colour, women, disabled people and those from minority groups.

Not only that, but the removal of some of these words has already taken place on hundreds of federal government websites. According to NYT analysis of pages on federal agency websites before and after Trump took office, more than 250 contained evidence of deletions or amendments.

For example, in the federal aviation administration’s job page, the word ‘diverse’ is removed from ‘you’ll be part of a diverse workforce utilising the latest technology’. In the National Park Service’s Stonewall National Monument web page, ‘LGBTQ+’ has been changed to ‘LGB’. A Head Start memo – the federally funded programme that promotes school readiness for children from birth to age five, particularly from low-income families – has seen the removal of all references to race. While the key topics page of State Department’s Office of Global Change no longer contains any mention of the climate crisis or the Paris Agreement.

The data was obtained from searching through more than 5,000 government pages, but it is by no means conclusive or exhaustive – this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Under the weaponised umbrella term ‘woke’, the president is effectively rewriting his own reality on a global scale. In Trump’s world, women and children do not seem important, mental health is a ‘woke’ buzzword, sexuality is not subjective, the phrase ‘most at risk’ is something to avoid at all costs and there is no such thing as racism. His purge list marks such an unfathomable, dystopian leap backwards that it is difficult to process as real. Instead, it reads as satire.

Trump has thrown his weight around more times than we can count since his return to office in January. He’s escalated a trade war by imposing a 25% tariff on all steel and aluminium products coming from outside the US. He has made known his plans to make Canada ‘the 51st state’. Following tumbling stocks, he refused to rule out that the US was headed for recession, instead saying ‘what we’re doing is very big’.

He has scrapped funding for $20bn (£15.4 bn) worth of Biden-era climate and environmental grants and ended the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funding for more than 400 diversity, equality and inclusion and environmental justice grants. The administration has detained the green card-holding US resident, Mahmoud Khalil, for his involvement in the Columbia University protests against the war in Gaza and said Khalil was one of ‘many to come’.

The Department of Education announced its plans to cut 1,300 workers, slashing its workforce in half. And the staff at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) were reportedly told to ‘shred as many documents’ as possible. An order that comes with the news that the Secretary of State is terminating 83% of their long-term aid programmes.

If it sounds like The End of Days, we can’t promise that it’s not. The scope of the banned list of words is difficult to decipher, as is what it means in practice, but Trump’s message is perfectly clear.