The Dictatorship
The 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 lifebut 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.”
Without offering an explanation to Cathy or her publisher, the academy removed it from circulation.
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.
These authoritarian outbursts have much deeper roots.
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 membersCarol 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.
Hannah Gais
Hannah Gais is a journalist and researcher focused on the radical right. She is a frequent contributor to The Baffler.
Cathy Johnson
Cathy Johnson is a James Phinney Baxter III Professor of Political Science, Emerita, at Williams College.
The Dictatorship
What Tom Emmer said about Somalis was racist. What’s worse is he doesn’t believe it.
ByMichael Tisserand
There was a time when President Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans didn’t think House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., had a sufficient understanding of who his enemies ought to be. But in remarks he made Wednesday at a Capitol Hill event sponsored by Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition, Emmer did his best to signal that Trump’s enemies are his enemies, too.
Emmer’s 11-minute talk, during which he expressed racism and transphobia and railed against abortion, also served as yet another contrast to the memory of what Republicans in Minnesota used to be. The name of the state party used to be Independent-Republicansand the late U.S. Sen. Dave Durenberger used to describe the state party’s worldview, without irony, as progressive Republicanism.
Emmer’s talk served as yet another contrast to the memory of what Republicans in Minnesota used to be.
That party is long gone. At Wednesday’s event, Emmer theatrically dismissed a few sheets of paper he said were his talking points and proclaimed, Trump-like, that he was going rogue. He took aim at transgender youth (“there’s a reason why Sodom and Gomorrah was destroyed”), at “elite radical lefties,” at “evil Marxists,” at the media, called his state’s abortion laws “as bad as North Korea” and called the state itself the “People’s Republic of Minnesota.”
But Emmer earned some of the most enthusiastic applause in his racist rant against the state’s large Somali American population. “Sometimes Minnesotans are so afraid that you’re going to call us a racist, you’re going to call us an Islamophobe,” he said, before saying, “But I’m done being careful. Even the least bit careful.”
He said, “I don’t really care where you come from. But if come to this great country, you have to understand, you’re coming here to be an American.” Somalis “don’t assimilate,” he said, “And if they don’t assimilate, then they should go the hell back to where they came from.”
Among the people who responded angrily to Emmer’s slander of Somalis was Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who was born in Somalia. “I assimilated all the way to Congress and this idiot still tells me to go back to where I came from,” she wrote on X.
In the debacle that followed Kevin McCarthy being voted out of the House speakership in 2023, Emmer was not elected to replace him because, by MAGA standards, he was too moderate. Trump called him a “Globalist RINO” and was still fuming that after Joe Biden won the race for president in 2020, Emmer voted to certify that election.
Emmer has worked harder to be seen as MAGA since then. In December, he appeared on “Varney & Co.” on Fox Business to support an Immigration and Customs Enforcement surge that made Somalis among its primary targets and became known as Operation Metro Surge. He offered up conspiracy theories and lies about Somali Americans committing 80% of the crime in the Twin Cities. He said money was being stolen from Minnesota state and federal programs to fund the Somali-based terrorist group al-Shabab.
When he signed up with the so-called Sharia Free America Caucus in February, he railed against letting “anti-American ideologies take root in our communities” and said he had been fighting against the nonexistent threat of Sharia law since he was a state legislator. I was unable to find stories of Emmer as a state legislator fearmongering about Sharia law. However, in 2015, when one of Emmer’s fellow Republicans was being rightly rebuked for attending an anti-Muslim event in St. Cloud, Emmer was a voice of reason and tolerance. He wanted his constituents to know that Somali Americans were contributing to the Minnesota communities they had made home and that they were “some of the fastest-assimilating populations.”
That same year, Emmer joined then-Rep. Keith Ellison, the Democrat who’s now the state’s attorney general, to found the Congressional Somalia Caucus: to help Somali Americans here and to promote peace and stability in Somalia.
Now Ellison is taking the lead in legal challenges against the ICE assaults Emmer champions.
This is the ticket into MAGA world: an embrace of abdication of decency and a necessary rejection of the spirit of welcome and tolerance one once held.
This is the ticket into MAGA world.
In April, a west central Minnesota event called “Understanding Immigration: A Community Conversation,” included Ayan Omar, a Somali American from St. Cloud, as a speaker. She works as equity director for the public schools and has been active in interfaith dialogues in the city.
Omar spoke of coming to the U.S. as a child, learning English by watching “The Simpsons” and learning self-value by watching “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The message from Mr. Rogers, she said, was especially important because “I just wanted to cower and hide away because I stood out. Not only because I was a Somali-American refugee, but I was also poor.” It was learning about Frederick Douglass that inspired her to become a teacher.
What she was describing was the process of her becoming more and more American. Countless other Somali Americans have had similar experiences. OEmmer knows that.
And not so long ago, he wasn’t afraid to say it.
Michael Tisserand
Michael Tisserand is a Minnesota-based writer whose works include “Krazy,” a biography of cartoonist George Herriman, and Sugarcane Academy, a memoir of his family’s experiences of Hurricane Katrina. With support from a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is currently writing a book about Charlie Chaplin and “The Great Dictator,” for Oxford University Press.
An appeals court on Friday upheld Harvey Weinstein’s2022 rape and sexual assault conviction in California, but ordered the trial judge who gave him 16 years in prison to resentence him.
A three-judge panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal unanimously issued the decision, saying his trial judge did not violate the former movie magnate’s constitutional rights.
“We reject his attempts to disturb the jury’s guilty verdicts,” the judges wrote in their opinion.
Weinstein spokesperson Juda Engelmayer said in an email that “We are disappointed by today’s decision and respectfully disagree with the Court of Appeal’s conclusions regarding the fairness of Mr. Weinstein’s trial. At the same time, the court correctly recognized that his sentence cannot stand.”
The decision came a day after prosecutors in New York decided Weinstein would not face a fourth trial there, dropping the #MeToo-era case after the accuser said she could not bear to testify again.
The California panel said that resentencing was necessary because the judge that sentenced him considered New York convictions that were later thrown out as an aggravating factor. California’s attorney general agreed.
Weinstein, 74, still stands convicted of another sexual felony in New York, and he remains behind bars awaiting a September sentencing there. Prosecutors there are seeking a 20-year prison term.
In California, Weinstein was convicted in December 2022 of one count of rape and two counts of sexual assault against an Italian model and actor known during the trial as Jane Doe 1. He would serve his new sentence there only after his New York term is complete.
After the trial, Jane Doe 1 came forward under her name, Evgeniya Chernyshova, when she sued Weinstein in civil court.
The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly as Chernyshova did. Her attorney also said she consented to being named.
Chernyshova testified that Weinstein arrived uninvited to her hotel room during the 2013 LA Italia Film Festival and assaulted her.
Weinstein’s defense argued that Weinstein deserved a new trial because Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lisa B. Lench wrongly prevented his trial lawyers from asking about Facebook messages between Chernyshova and festival head Pascal Vicedomini that would have shown they had a sexual relationship.
The questioning would have demonstrated that she perjured herself when she said she and Vicedomini were just friends and colleagues, the defense said. And the lawyers argued it would have bolstered their assertion that she was not even in her room on the night of the alleged assault.
“The lower court all but gutted Mr. Weinstein’s defense,” attorney Jennifer Bonjean told the appeals judges at April 23 oral arguments.
But the appeals court said in its ruling that Weinstein did make the arguments he wanted during the trial based on other evidence, including another set of Facebook messages that Lench allowed.
“Thus, there was no denial of Weinstein’s constitutional right to present a defense,” the panel wrote in its opinion.
The three judges also found that Weinstein’s lawyers failed to adhere to California’s rape shield law prohibiting evidence of an accuser’s sexual history when they tried to introduce the messages. Weinstein’s lawyers had argued that the shield law was not pertinent because they wanted to use the messages only to impeach the witness’s credibility.
And the appeals judges said testimony from accusers describing sexual assaults Weinstein was not charged with was appropriate, and allowed under state law.
Before his sentencing, Weinstein told the judge that this was a “made-up story” from a woman he had never met.
The Los Angeles jury acquitted Weinstein of the sexual battery of a massage therapist and failed to reach verdicts on counts involving two other women.
“This is not the end of the appellate process,” Engelmayer said in his email Friday. “We intend to seek review in the California Supreme Court because we continue to believe significant legal errors affected the proceedings and warrant further review.”
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said it would not have comment on the decision until the office reviewed it.
An email seeking comment from Chernyshova’s attorney was not immediately answered.
ByGarry Pierre-Pierre
One of the first people, and the very first doctor, to publicly receive a Covid-19 vaccine in the United States was Dr. Yves Duroseauthe chair of emergency medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan.
At a time when fear had emptied city streets and refrigerated trucks were lined up near hospital loading docksthat son of Haiti was a face of hope.
For Haitians, that image carried a deeper resonance. Ours is a community that America has often noticed only in moments of crisis. For once, the country was looking at a Haitian because he represented hope.
Ours is a community that America often noticed only in moments of crisis.
That memory from five and a half years ago is one reason the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday allowing the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians hit me so hard. Not with anger, but with deep sadness.
When I took the oath of citizenship decades ago, I believed America rewarded commitment with belonging. I still want to believe that. Thursday’s ruling suggests that, for some immigrants, the word “temporary” didn’t just describe their legal status but the nature of America’s welcome.
The first TPS recipients from Haiti arrived after the magnitude 7 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince and killed hundreds of thousands of people in 2010. Today, Haiti faces a different catastrophe. Armed gangs control much of the capitalthousands have been killed or displaced and the State Department continues to warn Americans not to travel there.
For many TPS holders, the country they fled has not recovered. In many ways, it has become even more dangerous.
They believed something basic: that the United States would not send them back to a country engulfed by political violence, armed gangs and institutional collapse. TPS was created for those for whom returning home is unsafe. That humanitarian commitment should matter just as much as the lives those TPS holders have built since arriving.
They waited for Congress to do what some members had pushed for for years: create a pathway from temporary protection to permanent belonging. Instead, the years passed. Children became adults. Mortgages were paid. Careers were built. Entire lives unfolded while Washington postponed action. Temporary Protected Status became less a bridge than a waiting room. The finish line kept moving. Now, for many, it has disappeared altogether.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Haitian nurses, home health aides and other essential workers were hailed as heroes. Their work was indispensable then, and healthcare leaders say it remains indispensable today.
This dependence is not sentimental. It is measurable. The Boston Globe, citing data from the National Domestic Workers Alliancereported that roughly 13,000 Haitian TPS holders work as nursing assistants each day, caring for an estimated 65,000 patients.
According to a report by Massachusetts lawmakers Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, ending TPS for Haitians “threatens to seriously disrupt the health care, senior care and disability care workforces amid a nationwide health care crisis and persistent staffing shortages.”
Roughly 13,000 Haitian TPS holders work as nursing assistants each day, caring for an estimated 65,000 patients.
There is nothing temporary about the lives these TPS holders have built. There is nothing temporary about paying taxes for decades, buying a home, planting a garden or knowing your neighbors by name. There is nothing temporary about raising children who begin each school day by pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. There is nothing temporary about risking your life to care for strangers during a once-in-a-century pandemic.
I never imagined that, decades after taking my own oath of citizenship, I would be writing about a generation of immigrants who walked that same path with the same faith only to discover that the road ended before they reached their destination.
As the nation celebrates its 250th birthday, it must also confront a question that has shadowed much of its history: Who gets to belong?
Too often, America has answered that question by welcoming people when their labor is needed most, only to question their place later.
Perhaps that is the greatest irony of all. The people we continue to call temporary have spent years proving their commitment to this country. This ruling is bigger than Haitians or Syrians. It speaks to the covenant a nation makes with the people who answer its call during moments of need.
Though that process has never been smooth, America has always been at its best when it expanded the circle of belonging. Italians, Jews, Asians and even Black Americans born here were all told at one time that they could never fully be American. The country was not diminished by widening the definition of who belongs — it was strengthened by it.
The question is no longer whether Haitians who have their built lives here belong. They have answered that question through years of work, sacrifice and service.
The question is whether America still remembers what it means to be a country that welcomes immigrants.
The U.S. has every right to enforce its immigration laws. But laws do not exist in a vacuum.
The U.S. has every right to enforce its immigration laws. But laws do not exist in a vacuum. They also reflect the promises a nation makes about who belongs. After more than 16 years, the Haitians affected by Thursday’s ruling are no longer strangers passing through. They are co-workers, parishioners, homeowners and taxpayers woven into the fabric of neighborhoods from New York to Florida to Massachusetts.
Pull one thread and you do more than remove one person. You weaken the fabric itself.
Garry Pierre-Pierre
Garry Pierre-Pierre is a Pulitzer-prize winning, multimedia and entrepreneurial journalist. In 1999, he left The New York Times to launch the Haitian Times, a New York-based English-language publication serving the Haitian diaspora. He is also the co-founder of the City University Graduate School of Journalism‘s Center for Community and Ethnic Media and a senior producer at CUNY TV
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