Trump admin's book purge at the Naval Academy goes beyond petty authoritarianism
The Trump administration's rush to enact authoritarian policies has touched all parts of American life, but we didn't expect it to affect our family the way it did.
We are a mother-daughter writing team. In mid-April, one of us, Cathy Johnson, found out that the U.S. Naval Academy had removed her book in a Trump administration-led purge of its library. To her, and to the rest of our family, this decision came as a surprise. Cathy and her co-authors published the book, 'Creating Gender: The Sexual Politics of Welfare Policy,' in 2007. It's an academic book that received positive reviews from leading political science journals.
But without offering an explanation to Cathy or her publisher, the academy removed it from circulation. A spokesperson for the Navy told us that the removals were 'in order to comply with directives outlined in Executive Orders issued by the President.'
Neither of us are strangers to pushback from the right. One of Cathy's courses at Williams College on feminism and political activism was targeted by campus conservative groups in the early 2000s. Hannah, her daughter, has been reporting on and researching the radical right, including its ties to the first and second Trump administrations, for nearly a decade. While we're not shocked by these brazen attempts to quash intellectual inquiry from an administration whose prior term ended with an armed insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, we find these developments particularly disturbing.
Co-authored with professors Georgia Duerst-Lahti and Noelle Norton, 'Creating Gender' argues that ideas about gender are a flashpoint in American politics, one that intersects with the familiar left-right spectrum. By drawing on gender theory, social welfare policy and the study of legislative behavior, the book examines the ways in which political actors use policy to shape 'the way men and women should live their lives.' Policy praises and condemns; it rewards and punishes.
'Creating Gender' investigates how ideas about gender influenced the design and implementation of social welfare policy as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) — a program that helps states fund services for low-income families with children — was adopted and then implemented by the states.
The administration and its allies have railed against 'gender ideology extremism,' which it has used to enact anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. To the extent that 'gender ideology' refers to the notion that ideas about gender can, and do, inform policymaking, it's clearly a bedrock principle of the administration. President Donald Trump has referred to himself as 'the fertilization president' and floated pro-natalist policies that would direct cash bonuses to mothers after the births of each child.
The administration has made clear that not all families are equal. Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation's 900-plus-page guidebook for the administration's speedrun into authoritarianism — encouraged all levels of government to manipulate their services to prioritize married heterosexual, cisgendered couples.
'Married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them,' Project 2025 declared. Elsewhere, it implores the Department of Health and Human Services to 'prioritize married father engagement in its messaging, health, and welfare policies.' It attacks TANF on the grounds that it has supposedly failed to prioritize '[m]arriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy.'
Today, 'Creating Gender' and the 380 other books the Naval Academy removed from Nimitz Library are now inaccessible to patrons. The full list represents a bizarre collection of books that appear to be identified based on keywords.
Reporting in The New York Times and elsewhere has described the book purge as tied to a Jan. 29 executive order that seeks to end 'radical indoctrination' in kindergarten through 12th grade classrooms. The Naval Academy, a college, thought it was exempt from the order, but the Times reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's office told the Naval Academy that the secretary 'expected compliance' from the military academies, too.
That same executive order also called for the revival of Trump's 1776 Commission, a committee that he formed during his first term to support 'patriotic education.' (Curiously, the list of removed titles even includes a book from one of the commission's former members, Carol Swain, author of the 2004 book 'The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration.')
'We've said goodbye to the harmful effects of woke culture and so-called diversity, equity and inclusion programs. We're removing DEI content,' Secretary Hegseth said during a visit to the Army War College in April.
It isn't clear why the Naval Academy was the first to conduct these removals, but other institutions of higher education within the Defense Department appear prepared to implement similar processes.
The head of the Naval War College recently announced to community members in an email that there were plans to form a committee consisting of faculty and Defense Department officials to assess how to conduct similar removals, according to two sources who received the email and who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity, over concerns of professional retaliation. The sources said that it was unclear who specifically would be on the committee, and officials have not announced when this process would begin. A spokesperson for the Naval War College did not respond to our request for comment regarding whether such removals were going to be implemented at the school.
'I think the bans are appalling,' Lynne Rienner, whose eponymous publishing house released 'Creating Gender' in 2007, told us. The book was one of four titles that Lynne Rienner Publishers released from academics that the academy purged.
'It will not have a chilling effect on what we're willing to publish. I'm concerned that it will have a chilling effect on academic research to the extent that people are dependent on federal funding for their research. And we're already seeing that,' Rienner added.
We reached out to the Defense Department and the Naval Academy for comment regarding the purges and 'Creating Gender's' removal, specifically. A spokesperson from Hegseth's office referred us to the Navy. When we followed up with a quote from Hegseth's recent appearance at the Army War College, as well as a link to a Times article, which previously reported that the decision to remove the books arose from an order from the defense secretary's office, the spokesperson said, 'We don't have anything additional to provide at this time.' The spokesperson again referred us to Navy officials.
Naval Academy media relations did not respond to a list of several questions related to the purges.
These book removals might seem in line with the Trump movement's obsession with 'trolling' liberals or punishing institutions of higher education for being insufficiently deferential to conservatives. He and his supporters have spoken openly about their attacks on colleges, universities, museums and cultural landmarks as being rooted in the misguided belief that they are victims.
But to us, these authoritarian outbursts have much deeper roots. For all the fawning pieces outlining the right's 'intellectual vitalism' in the second Trump era, the movement's full-throttled embrace of censorship and hostility to its perceived enemies is indicative of a deep lack of curiosity about the world.
While graduates like Adm. James Stockdale might have read Karl Marx at the Naval Academy in the 1960s to understand an ideology the U.S. government saw as enemy No. 1, they at least read his books. Today's petty authoritarians see no such need.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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