No surprise here.
While Donald Trump and his band of MAGA apostates are busy going after schools that promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies, revising websites to take out contributions from non white influencers of American History (including attempts to erase Jackie Robinson and Harriet Tubman before public backlash caused a retreat) and taking away funds from public libraries and museums, they have also, according to media outlets like the New York Times, purged the reading selections at the Naval Academy Library.
According to the Times, works like Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Birds Sing and Janet Jacob’s Memorializing the Holocaust and its themes of racial injustice and state-sponsored genocide are out.
Even a children’s book by Julianne Moore about a girl accepting her freckles was taken off the shelves. Wonder how this work could have offended anyone.
Hitler’s Mein Kampf (Germanys Project 2025) and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, books that promote theories of white supremacy, are still available.
Another book, the anti-immigrant The Camp of the Saints, a favorite of Trump zealot and Kapo Stephen Miller, is also available.
It is again apparent that in MAGA World, banning books is in fashion and indoctrination volumes catering to sentiments favoring white male nationalist power (they are removing all the senior women military leaders and fired the Black Joint Chiefs Chairperson for no good reason) and supremacy are on Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s Summer Reading List.
In the Times article, retired Admiral and former Commander of United States Forces in Europe, Admiral James Stavridis, protested the purge of books, commenting:
“What are we afraid of keeping from them in the library?… Book banning can be a canary in a coal mine and could predict a stifling of free speech and thought. Books that challenge us make us stronger. We need officers who are educated, not indoctrinated.”
Admiral Stavridis is right.
The country needs citizens and public servants who are educated and exposed to all perspectives and not indoctrinated with vile racist dogma.
Like former Joint Chiefs Chairmen Mark Milley, the leader Trump had his portrait removed after coming back to office, once said to at a hearing where Matt Gaetz went after Critical Race Theory:
I do think it’s important actually, for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read, and the United States Military Academy is a university, and it is important that we train and we understand. And I want to understand white rage, and I’m white, and I want to understand it. So what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out. I want to maintain an open mind here, and I do want to analyze it. It’s important that we understand that because our soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and guardsmen. They come from the American people. So it is important that the leaders now and in the future do understand it. I’ve read Mao Tse Tung. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So, what is wrong with understanding? Having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend. And I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military, our general officers, our commission and non-commissioned officers of being quote ‘woke’ or something else because we’re studying some theories that are out there that was started Harvard Law School years ago, and a proposed that there were laws in the United States, Anti-Bellum laws, prior to, the Civil War that led to a power differential with African-Americans, that they were three quarters of a human being. When this country was formed and then we had a Civil War, an Emancipation Proclamation to change it, and we brought it up to the Civil Rights Act in 1964 took another 100 years to change that. So look at it. I do want to know… and it matters to our military and the discipline and cohesion of this military.”
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