The U.S. Naval Academy announced that it would postpone a lecture featuring a politically charged speaker who suggested she would use the event to attack former President Donald Trump, less than a month before the 2024 presidential election. While the academy postponed the speech, critics demanded answers as to why it selected the speaker in the first place and whether the selection violated Defense Department protocol.
Last week, four researchers at The Heritage Foundation wrote pieces in The Daily Signal, highlighting the past remarks of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University whom the Naval Academy invited to deliver its annual Bancroft Lecture on Oct. 10. On Monday, the academy told The Federalist that the lecture had been suspended. The academy confirmed the same in a statement to The Daily Signal Tuesday.
Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at Heritage’s legal center, and Cully Stimson, the center’s deputy director, cited a Substack article in which Ben-Ghiat suggests she planned to use the Bancroft Lecture to attack Trump as authoritarian. They also cited Defense Department Directive 1344.10, which bans active members of the military—including the naval officers who administer and teach at the academy—from engaging in “partisan........