After Elon Musk spoke to the cadets at West Point in August, Brig. Gen. Shane Reeves thanked him for an illuminating conversation.

“Thank you to Mr. Elon Musk for helping us kick off this year’s theme: ‘The Human and the Machine: Leadership on the Emerging Battlefield,’” Reeves, academic dean at the Military Academy, wrote Aug. 16.

He even quoted the tech billionaire on Musk’s social media channel, X.

Nowhere did West Point mention that Musk is backing former President Donald Trump, who is seeking to return to the White House. Musk is donating millions through his private political action committee.

Maybe the guy behind Tesla and SpaceX didn’t bring up plans for the weird jumping-jack dance he’s doing at the Republican nominee’s rallies in October, or the sexist things he’s written or shared about Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. He’s rich and successful, so he has lots of interesting things to discuss.

Cadets — like Naval Academy midshipmen in Annapolis — don’t live in a vacuum. They know who Musk is, that he’s turned Twitter into the conservative trumpet, X. They know Trump promised to put him in charge of making government more “efficient” if he wins.

Ironically, hundreds of people on Musk’s own platform saw the contrast between his welcome at West Point and the Naval Academy’s decision to cancel historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s planned lecture on authoritarian governments and the military because she has been critical of Trump.

She didn’t plan to speak about the former president, convicted of fraud in New York and indicted in three other cases, at the Bancroft Memorial Lecture. That wasn’t good enough for Heritage Foundation critics and their Republican followers in Congress. They wrote Vice Adm. Yvette Davids, the Naval Academy’s superintendent, to complain.

Whether it was Davids or Academic Dean Samara Firebaugh, someone decided the appearance of a conflict with laws that keep the military out of politics was too great a risk. They bowed to the pressure and told Ben-Ghiat she wasn’t welcome.

There was a lot of reaction to my Oct. 22 column on Ben-Ghiat, a New York University history professor who studies authoritarian figures and frequently compares Trump to dictators as an MSNBC commentator.

Some readers noted that conservative speakers have been disinvited to college speaking engagements after a public outcry. This seemed different because of the organizations involved and the contrast with Musk’s speech just two months earlier.

The first to paint Ben-Ghiat’s lecture as partisan “indoctrination” were four Heritage Foundation employees writing for its media outlet, The Daily Signal. U.S. Rep. Keith Self, a West Point graduate who represents suburban Dallas, wrote to Davids the next day demanding that the lecture be canceled.

The foundation’s ideas for the service academies in Project 2025, a 900-page policy recommendation for the next Republican president linked to Trump, worried a lot of readers.

“Audit the course offerings at military academies to remove Marxist indoctrination,” the report’s authors wrote in the section on the U.S. military, “eliminate tenure for academic professionals, and apply the same rules to instructors that are applied to other DOD [Department of Defense] contracting personnel.”

The academy has invited critics of Trump to speak in the past, long before politics reached their current boiling point.

In 2018, midshipmen organized the Foreign Affairs Conference and invited several lecturers, including Timothy Snyder. A historian on Central and Eastern European dictatorships at Yale University, he’s been sounding alarms on Trump since the publication of “On Tyranny” and “The Road to Unfreedom” in 2017.

He talked about how people should make their own decisions in “abnormal situations,” according to a summary, how one conversation is never enough to change opinions and how the mindless repetition of political catchphrases can be a tool of authoritarian governments.

Make America Great Again — sound familiar?

Snyder is out with a new book, “On Freedom.” If he were invited back today, you have to wonder if the reaction would sound like the one that sank Ben-Ghiat’s appearance.

Ben-Ghiat doesn’t expect to be asked to speak in Annapolis after the election. Even so, the argument that her lecture was poorly timed seems weak. Musk spoke in August, true, but was the campaign any less heated then?

The New York historian, unabashed, continues to be critical of Trump.

Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee who wrote a second critical letter to Davids included two Naval Academy graduates, U.S. Reps. Mike Garcia of California and Nick LaLota of New York. Both are in competitive reelection campaigns in swing districts.

A former Navy pilot who graduated from Annapolis in 1998, Garcia faces former NASA Chief of Staff George Whitesides. LaLota, who graduated two years later and served as a surface warfare officer, is a first-term congressman from New York. He faces former CNN anchor John Avlon.

Neither responded to a request for comment, but unlike U.S. Rep. Jen Kiggans of Virginia, who initiated the letter, they don’t tout their effort on their websites.

It seems unlikely that this will be a campaign issue for them. Yet readers called them out for specific criticism.

So did academy alumni.

Ben-Ghiat’s story resonated with readers because of widespread fear about what a second Trump presidency portends.

There’s also fear that billionaire power figures like Musk — as well as L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos — will tip this close election to Trump. Both owners stopped plans by their papers’ editorial boards to endorse Harris, and Musk, well, he’s still dancing.

If Trump wins, Davids will have to answer Republicans’ questions about this when she appears before the House Armed Services Committee next year. It might be the least of her worries.

Davids could face questions in December from the Board of Visitors, a far friendlier oversight panel. The board member most likely to ask could be retired Marine Corps Lt. Col. Amy McGrath, a Democratic activist from Kentucky and 1997 academy grad.

She was on X last week defending her former boss, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly Sr.

The same day my column ran, the New York Times reported Kelly’s assessment that Trump would govern as a fascist. He based his judgment on what he observed of the former president while serving as his chief of staff.

The next day, though, McGrath retweeted a post by Ben-Ghiat and began following me on the platform.