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Republicans are refocusing U.S. military service academies away from developing combat leaders who can think on their feet and toward creating ideologically pure cancel-culture crybabies who will consult Republican reading lists and never be subject to any form of communication from a person who has criticized Republicans, Trump, MAGA, Nazis, Mussolini, or the supremacy of ivermectin for treating all diseases. They want believers, not thinkers. If you have any doubt that Donald Trump can change scientific facts via executive order, then Republicans don’t think you are fit to lead. Forget the best and the brightest. They’re looking for the pliant and the whitest.
Back in September, Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat [ [link removed] ], a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and a leading expert on fascism, authoritarianism, and propaganda, announced [ [link removed] ] in her Substack newsletter, Lucid [ [link removed] ], that she had been invited to deliver a lecture at my alma mater, the United States Naval Academy:
“I am pleased to announce that I will be giving the Bancroft Lecture at the U.S. Naval Academy on Oct. 10. This lecture is not open to the public. I will be speaking about what happens to militaries under authoritarian rule, touching on Fascist Italy, Pinochet's Chile and the Russian military during the war on Ukraine.” — Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, 04 Sep 2024
The George Bancroft Memorial Lecture is an annual event hosted by the Academy’s history department and funded through the U.S. Naval Academy Foundation. Ben-Ghiat is exactly the kind of credentialed and published historian traditionally invited to deliver the Bancroft lecture, and her topic was pertinent. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has given us one example of things that happen to a military under authoritarian rule: Loyalty takes primacy over competence, and your fight with a much smaller force drags on for years instead of the days it should have taken. Morale suffers. Unit cohesion falls apart even though the unit is made up entirely of white Russian men.
Professor Ben-Ghiat was cancelled by Congressional Republicans not for the content of her lecture but because she has been critical of Donald Trump. After jumping up and down and pointing and threatening—what they call “being productive”—to get Ben-Ghiat removed as the lecturer, House cancel-culture crybabies Ronnie Jackson (R-TX) and Jen Kiggans (R-VA), among others, sent a petulant letter [ [link removed] ] to Naval Academy Superintendent Vice Admiral Yvette M. Davids. The letter is best read while fanning oneself near a fainting couch, especially at the part where they describe Ruth Ben-Ghiat as a “partisan historian at New York University.” The Republicans who signed the letter, like current National Security Adviser (and guy in charge of making official conversations disappear on the Signal app) Mike Waltz, were simply aghast at the idea of Ben-Ghiat talking to future military leaders about “what happens to militaries under authoritarian rule.” They left out “touching on Fascist Italy, Pinochet's Chile and the Russian military during the war on Ukraine.” You could say that was an oversight, but this crew has proven to have no interest in oversight. They were just spinning, shading, lying.
The real stretch was saying that Ben-Ghiat’s lecture would violate DoD Directive 1344.10 [ [link removed] ], which prohibits active-duty military personnel from engaging in partisan political activity while in uniform or as part of an official function. For these representatives, because Ruth Ben-Ghiat has opinions about Donald Trump that don’t match theirs, she cannot be capable of giving a nonpartisan talk about her area of expertise. By that logic, Kid Rock or Lee Greenwood songs should never be played at military events.
I have seen my share of service academy commencement addresses and other speeches delivered by presidents, vice presidents, and secretaries of defense of both parties. They were never partisan. I will be speaking at a Memorial Day event again this year. Like my speeches at previous Memorial Day and other military-related events, my address will be nonpartisan. Unlike the representatives who signed that letter, Ruth Ben-Ghiat and I understand the assignment and don’t feel compelled to turn every event into a mean-spirited campaign rally.
Those Republican representatives cannot be blind to the authoritarian nature of their actions. They used political power to remove an expert in authoritarianism from the podium because that expert didn’t share their political views. It was also an insult to Naval Academy midshipmen, who are not yet the unquestioning automatons Republicans wish them to be and who are quite capable of debating a lecturer’s opinions whether or not those opinions are politically partisan.
Of course, things have only become more authoritarian since Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s speech was canceled. In February, Donald Trump dismissed [ [link removed] ] the boards of visitors who oversee morale and academics at the service academies, and he made no effort to hide the fact that it was a purely ideological move. It would be a stretch to think any of the new board members will be hired for professional or academic merit.
Then, on April Fools’ Day, librarians at the Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library pulled [ [link removed] ] 381 books from the shelves, including Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Memorializing the Holocaust, by Janet Jacobs. Speaking of fools, the books were pulled because Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was visiting the next day, and he had informed the Academy that Trump’s executive order banning “DEI materials” from K-12 schools also applied to the Naval Academy—another slap in the face for the Brigade of Midshipmen. Pete Hegseth’s intellect may still be at a K-12 level, but Naval Academy midshipmen are smarter and more thoughtful than that.
In a 1963 interview [ [link removed] ] in Life magazine, James Baldwin said,
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”
The capacity for empathy and connection Baldwin describes are antithetical to Hegseth’s whiny-warrior ethos. For the Republicans who cancelled Ruth Ben-Ghiat and for Hegseth, Maya Angelou’s story is not an American story, and neither is mine.

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