Trump’s Military Academies Are Becoming Laboratories for Unconstitutional Censorship, Not Leadership
Adults 18 and over attend these schools, not children.
At the nation’s elite military academies, the library stacks are being emptied by executive order.
Adults 18 and over attend these schools, not children.
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In recent weeks, nearly 400 books, including works by Maya Angelou, Ibram X. Kendi, and authors documenting the Holocaust and American lynching, were removed from the Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library under orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Similar directives are sweeping through West Point, the Air Force Academy, and the Coast Guard Academy, all under the guise of complying with President Trump’s executive orders banning “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) content and concepts.
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These military academies are accredited four-year institutions of higher education. These are the institutions where America’s future admirals and generals are taught to think, to lead, to decide. And yet, under Trump’s administration, the very foundations of academic freedom, scientific integrity, and moral inquiry are being systematically dismantled. When military academies are ordered to strip away books about race, gender, sexuality, and even the Holocaust, it is not just censorship. It is a crisis.
What makes this unconstitutional censorship even more chilling is that cadets and midshipmen at these institutions are not ordinary college students. From the moment they enter, they are considered active-duty military personnel under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Under the UCMJ, they do not have free speech protections or the right to dissent. The orders they are under are not subject to campus debate; they are matters of command and control. If unconstitutional censorship is now baked into the UCMJ itself, then we have not merely rolled back academic norms. We are regressing prior to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” under President Clinton and even the 1948 Truman-initiated desegregation of the military.
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Every member of Congress who nominated students to these academies should take a hard look at what their nominees are now learning. State-sponsored censorship is not independent, though,it is a form of ideological compliance. This is not about keeping the academies “apolitical.” This is about political obedience. Ryan Holiday, a frequent guest lecturer at the Naval Academy, was recently disinvited from speaking after refusing to remove a slide criticizing the book purge. His message to students was that real leadership requires intellectual courage and critical thinking. It was apparently too dangerous for midshipmen to hear.
And it doesn’t stop at DEI. At the Coast Guard Academy, “climate change” has been scrubbed from the curriculum, despite the Coast Guard’s central role in responding to climate-driven disasters and its operations in rapidly melting Arctic waters. Science has become taboo. Meteorology without “climate” is factually hollow and operationally dangerous.
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If this level of censorship and politicization can happen in the libraries of our service academies, it’s only a matter of time before it spreads to civilian colleges and universities. The Trump administration has laid the blueprint to redefine academic freedom as “left-wing indoctrination,” replace inquiry with ideology, and call censorship “patriotism.”
This must not be allowed to stand in the academies. It cannot become a normal part of how we educate our youth. The American public must understand that what’s happening in the libraries of the military academies today will be the reality on campuses everywhere if this administration’s playbook takes hold.