The New York Times reported this week about the ongoing challenges at West Point, as the U.S. Military Academy struggles to comply with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s culture war agenda. Classes have been scrapped midsemester; works from well-known Black authors have been purged from the English department; a history professor was told not to mention atrocities committed against Native Americans; and another professor was told not to mention specific novelists whose work is out of step with Team Trump’s sensibilities.
Just as notably, the university’s senior librarian, who was told to identify books that might be at odds with Hegseth’s directives, quit after 14 years on the job. His counterpart at the U.S. Naval Academy had already been told to remove 381 books from the campus library.
These were not isolated incidents, as a new report from The Associated Press makes clear.
The Pentagon has ordered all military leaders and commands to pull and review all of their library books that address diversity, anti-racism or gender issues by May 21, according to a memo issued to the force on Friday. It is the broadest and most detailed directive so far on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s campaign to rid the military of diversity and equity programs, policies and instructional materials. And it follows similar efforts to remove hundreds of books from the libraries at the military academies.
Last month, Amid personnel turmoil at the Pentagon, multiple and intensifying controversies and fresh calls for his resignation, Hegseth spoke to U.S. troops at the Army War College, where he delivered an “expletive-laden address” about how pleased he is with recent efforts. The beleaguered Pentagon chief concluded, “We are laser-focused on our mission of warfighting.”
Except, that’s clearly not the case. Hegseth is certainly “laser-focused” on several priorities, but combat doesn’t appear to make the list.
On the contrary, the former Fox News personality appears preoccupied with some cartoonishly absurd priorities such as scrubbing Defense Department websites of articles and images about Jackie Robinson and the Navajo Code Talkers. As Politico reported, Colin Carroll, the former chief of staff to the deputy defense secretary who was fired last month, recently said that Hegseth was obsessed with the spread of leaks and spent half his time investigating them to the detriment of defense priorities. And the Cabinet secretary appears increasingly fixated on banning books. For all of Hegseth’s reported interest in “lethality” and championing a hypermasculine “warrior ethos,” in recent months he and the Pentagon have invested a ridiculous amount of time in pursuing petty culture war goals that don’t advance the nation’s national security goals in any way.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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