THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S LATEST ATTEMPT TO RADICALIZE AMERICA

I saw this meme recently and decided to fact-check it. What I found out was that the news is even worse than it indicates. Under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s supervision, more than three hundred eighty titles have been removed from the Nimitz Library at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. The titles all have to do with issues regarding race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, social injustice, and related topics.

While this move to suppress all progress made in the past century regarding diversity, equity and inclusion—in other words, civil rights—is one of the most detestable policies imposed by the pro-authoritarian Trump regime to date, what is as equally shocking as what the government has removed from the Nimitz Library is what it hasn’t. The cherry-picking nature of the administration’s raid on a broad cultural approach to forming future naval officers seems bent on stripping the academy’s library of an honest look at race and gender in America, while conserving works that promote fascist ideals and white supremacy.

That is not to say that those titles should be suppressed either. A place like the Nimitz Library, the idea of which is to help form the leaders of the future, should be an oasis of free expression. It is condescending to think that higher-education scholars should be directed to read only specific ideologies or authors. Reading broadly is how intellectuals develop critical thinking. You can't know what is behind Nazism, Marxism, fascism or any other political ideology without reading the original dogma. Otherwise you are only left with what you've been told by others who, more often than not, pretend to know because they too are working from second hand. 

Similarly, you can't know about the struggle for civil and human rights, the price of freedom and the cost of maintaining and extending democracy and ethnic equality without reading the works of those who have made those sacrifices. Nor can you understand why, in the face of such injustices, there is no such thing as reverse racism when compared to the overwhelmingly evil force of white supremacy. Unfortunately, that's the whole idea behind this regime's library purges.  

According to the Legal Defense Fund and LAMBDA Legal, an organization founded by Federal Judge and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in 1940, which sent a letter of protest and concern to Hegseth and to Vice-Admiral Yvette M. Davids, Superintendent of the Annapolis academy, “the US Naval Academy evaluated its book collection in Nimitz Library following the verbal order” (apparently by Hegseth) “demanding compliance with President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14190.” LAMBDA Legal reported that, “the Naval Academy reviewed nine hundred titles to screen for what it claims are ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ topics. The list of three hundred eighty-one titles removed from circulation almost exclusively touch upon topics pertaining to the experiences of people of color, especially Black people, and/or LGBTQ people, including:  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Stone Fruit by Lee Lai,  The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen, Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, and Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.

LAMBDA Legal and the LDF point out that, “At the same time, the collection retained other books with messages and themes that privilege certain races and religions over others, including The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan by Thomas Dixon Jr., Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad” (a novella considered a literary classic in which Conrad sharply criticizes the devastating nature of European colonialism, but in which his nineteenth-century view of Africans as inferior savages has been called into question by modern-day scholars as decidedly racist).

In their letter to Hegseth and Davids, Lambda Legal and the LDF make clear their objection to any sort of censorship imposed by the government as a whole or by any specific administration. They underscore that the fact that it is “the constitutional responsibility of the US Naval Academy to protect cadets’ right to receive information and the danger of censoring materials based on viewpoints disfavored by the current Administration.” They also emphasize the importance in intellectual development of reading and engaging with varying viewpoints from diverse authors, “particularly writers from historically marginalized communities,” as a key to developing critical thinking, empathy and intellectual agility. They point out that this is the only way to properly prepare future officers “to engage thoughtfully and responsibly with topics that reflect the rich diversity of our nation.”

In their letter,  LAMBDA Chief Legal Officer Jennifer C. Pizer and LDF Director of Strategic Initiatives Jin Hee Lee, warn that  “the decision of the Naval Academy to strip the Nimitz Library of diverse voices and viewpoints, especially those written by and/or about Black and LGBTQ people, constitutes unconstitutional censorship of politically disfavored ideas in direct conflict with a functioning democracy.” They add that, “such censorship is especially dangerous in an educational setting, where critical inquiry, intellectual diversity, and exposure to a wide array of perspectives are necessary to educate future citizen-leaders.” LAMBDA Legal and the LDF point out that the US Naval Academy “is tasked with educating and cultivating cadets to be leaders of a pluralistic nation,” and conclude that, as such, “it has done a disservice to cadets by preventing access to critical information.”

The complaint formulated by these two respected American legal organizations sheds light on the culture war the Trump administration is waging, mostly unspecified and behind the scenes. It serves to demonstrate that the warnings being issued since 2016 by journalists and liberal academics regarding a sharp turn toward extreme-right, pro-fascist ideals in the Era of Trump is not “fake news fabricated by the liberal mainstream media” or “lies made up by Democrats” to discredit what is clearly a white-supremacist cult of personality surrounding Donald Trump. Rather, it is hard evidence—in addition to such actions as the gutting of American public schools, bullying premier civilian institutions of higher learning, and the shuttering of the Department of Education—of an intentional policy by the administration to censor any but the most extreme far-right ideals within the nation’s education system.

As I’ve mentioned here a number of times, the Era of Trump is guided by a blueprint that, in the president’s previous term as, to a far more extreme degree, in this one would almost seem to take its cue from some of the most chilling dystopian novels ever written: notably, George Orwell’s 1984 (in which every aspect of society is dominated by an all-powerful dictator known as Big Brother), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (in which women are stripped of all rights and become the submissive wives, loyal jailers and brood mares of a patriarchal society), and now, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (in which “firemen” start rather than put out fires, and what they burn are books, and the homes and buildings where clandestine libraries are stored).

Considered a sub-section of “sci-fi”, this type of dystopian literature has proven prescient, escaping the bounds of the realm of frightening irreality, and coming home to roost as the new reality of the Era of Trump 2.0 in America. Only time will tell if Americans will rise up and rebel against the trend or, if like the beleaguered citizens of the grim dystopian worlds of fiction, they will submissively “wait and see” until it is too late to halt the organized destruction of a two-and-a-half century-old once-great democracy.