If Trump wins, the right-wing thought police will come for the Naval Academy

You could hear the spittle fly as the Heritage Foundation shouted out its latest intellectual assault on the Naval Academy.

All over Ruth Ben-Ghiat and a lecture the midshipmen likely will never hear.

She’s a New York University historian with a book on what happens to the military when authoritarians take power. She shows up as a commentator on MSNBC, connecting former President Donald Trump to some of the dictators she’s studied.

The academy’s history department invited her to speak about her work at the annual Bancroft Memorial Lecture. Then she was disinvited. Her politics were the problem, not her lecture.

As controversies go, it was easy to miss this one. It all took place within the conservative media ecosystem. But it could foreshadow what might happen to the U.S. service academies if Trump is elected next month.

Deep within Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 925-page roadmap for the next Republican president, its authors say they want the service academies scrubbed of anything and anyone deemed insufficiently pure of thought — exactly what they did to Ben-Ghiat.

“Audit the course offerings at military academies to remove Marxist indoctrination,” they wrote in the section on the U.S. military, “eliminate tenure for academic professionals, and apply the same rules to instructors that are applied to other DOD contracting personnel.”

That’s a threat: Teach what we want or there’s no place for you at Annapolis, the Military Academy at West Point and the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. The plan calls for moving the Coast Guard and Merchant Marine, along with their academies, back under the Department of Defense and within the sights of the conservative thought police.

“The lecture had nothing to do with contemporary America and I was not going to mention Mr. Trump at all in this strictly nonpartisan event at an institution, the U.S. Naval Academy, which I greatly admire,” Ben-Ghiat wrote in an email.

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Outrage started on Oct. 2 on the conservative think tank’s propaganda organ, The Daily Signal. It spread to other conservative opinion outlets, and wording from it was echoed in letters from Republican members of Congress.

“Families whose sons and daughters are attending this august military institution should be outraged by the academy’s partisan indoctrination of future officers of the U.S. Navy,” Heritage Foundation mouthpieces Hans von Spakovsky and Cully Stimson wrote.

Not good enough, Daily Signal managing editor Tyler O’Neil wrote on Oct. 8. He quoted Brent Sadler, a 1994 Naval Academy graduate and a senior research fellow at the foundation, in calling for an apology:

“The Naval Academy’s superintendent, provost, and history department leadership must publicly explain the rationale for inviting Dr. Ben-Ghiat to speak on a politically charged subject weeks away from elections,” Sadler said.