The Naval Academy banned over 300 books from its library.
April 10, 2025, 1:46pm
The U.S. Naval Academy recently removed 381 books from its Nimitz Library in Annapolis, Maryland, in another sick and sad blow to freedom of expression. The titles are what you might expect, the result of a ctrl+F search for any words that the right has decided to be furious about — these people have convinced themselves they can’t even be around certain concepts. It’s like if Pavlov’s dog trained itself to get mad when a bell rang and was a bigot.
The order to pull these books apparently came down from TV personality, Defense Secretary, and Long Island Iced Tea With An Expensive Haircut Pete Hegseth, who has been behind many other initiatives to remake the military into something that can get better coverage in right-wing media.
The full list of books they’re canceling has few surprises. You can call these books easy targets, but only in the sense that the administration doesn’t seem to have put much thought into any of these bannings. It’s just another battle in their war on freedom of thought and expression.
So what’s on the list? The Naval Academy’s library pulled books on body image, military history, and the Holocaust, alongside anything that addresses race or gender or sexuality.
The dragnet is pulling up some odd titles though, like a book on manliness in nineteenth century British culture and one about women in comedy. Some business books got banned, including ones about managing employees from different generations. A biography of the boxer Jack Johnson was banned, so was a memoir about the South on film, and so was a book on P.T. Barnum and race — Barnum’s first “exhibit” was Joice Heth, an enslaved woman who P.T. claimed had nursed George Washington and when she died, Barnum sold tickets to her autopsy. But that’s exactly the kind of story about America the right wants to suppress, especially when their entire governance strategy seems indebted to Barnum’s vision.
Most of the banned history books fall in this category of stories the right would prefer to ignore. Some seem like they’re probably hitting too close to home: Rich Thanks To Racism: How The Ultra-Wealthy Profit From Racial Injustice by Jim Freeman, or American Swastika: Inside The White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate by Pete Simi and Robert Futrell, or Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartlandby Jonathan M. Metzl. I know it can be hard to look at yourself in the mirror sometimes.
Two books that I love were pulled from the shelves: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, which is often cited as the most banned book in America, and Half American, by Matthew F. Delmont, a 2022 history of the Black experience of WWII. Any mention of Jim Crow was enough to make this ban list, and Delmont’s book is very critical of American policy, especially racial segregation. But it’s also extremely patriotic, and not in a hollow, ra-ra, chanting “U.S.A.” way. Delmont and the people he highlights have a more subtle and inspiring national pride. Half American is a book about struggling for what’s right, about people fighting for America, and about people sacrificing for a better America. But it’s too critical and too nuanced, I suppose, to be allowed to remain on the shelves.
The further I got into this list, the more apparent it became that whatever person or software behind these picks was just searching for a series of words, and banning everything that came up. For example, Juan Williams’ book Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—And What We Can Do About It, seems pretty aligned with boilerplate conservative values, at least based on the marketing copy. This is a book that “raises the banner of proud black traditional values—self-help, strong families, and belief in God,” which are all things that I used to associate with Republicans. But their newly outward embrace of racial resentment and segregation means this book and its ideas are getting tossed out with the bathwater.
The vast majority of these 381 books are academic texts exploring gender or race or sex in different times and texts — pretty standard fair for university publishing and, with respect to academics, not the sort of thing that is flying off the shelves. These are the books that really expose how sad and vindictive this whole project is.
Is someone really, seriously going to make the case that the mere availability of a book on gender expression in Chaucer is going to make our aircraft carriers less lethal? Who cares? What are we doing here?
It’s not worth analyzing this list to death, and I’m positive I’ve already given these books more thought than Trump and Musk’s team did. This administration is staffed by cold and cruel neo-segregationists, with narrow and hateful visions of the world. They seem to lack the most basic, neighborly empathy, and can’t see other people as more than objects. Their fellow Americans are simply boxes in a mail truck — acting ICE director Todd Lyons recently articulated a horrifying goal for his agency: “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” he said, adding that deportation should be “like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings.”
There is no limit to my contempt for this vision of the world. How can we expect these people to tolerate books or the ideas in them, when they are utterly incapable of caring about other people?
