You could hear the spittle fly as the Heritage Foundation shouted out its latest intellectual assault on the Naval Academy.

All over Ruth Ben-Ghiat and a lecture the midshipmen likely will never hear.

She’s a New York University historian with a book on what happens to the military when authoritarians take power. She shows up as a commentator on MSNBC, connecting former President Donald Trump to some of the dictators she’s studied.

The academy’s history department invited her to speak about her work at the annual Bancroft Memorial Lecture. Then she was disinvited. Her politics were the problem, not her lecture.

As controversies go, it was easy to miss this one. It all took place within the conservative media ecosystem. But it could foreshadow what might happen to the U.S. service academies if Trump is elected next month.

Deep within Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 925-page roadmap for the next Republican president, its authors say they want the service academies scrubbed of anything and anyone deemed insufficiently pure of thought — exactly what they did to Ben-Ghiat.

“Audit the course offerings at military academies to remove Marxist indoctrination,” they 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 contracting personnel.”

That’s a threat: Teach what we want or there’s no place for you at Annapolis, the Military Academy at West Point and the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. The plan calls for moving the Coast Guard and Merchant Marine, along with their academies, back under the Department of Defense and within the sights of the conservative thought police.

“The lecture had nothing to do with contemporary America and I was not going to mention Mr. Trump at all in this strictly nonpartisan event at an institution, the U.S. Naval Academy, which I greatly admire,” Ben-Ghiat wrote in an email.

In September, Ben-Ghiat announced in her Substack newsletter, Lucid, that she would speak at the Naval Academy on Oct. 10.

“I will be speaking about what happens to militaries under authoritarian rule, touching on Fascist Italy, Pinochet’s Chile and the Russian military during the war on Ukraine,” she wrote.

It was a misstep. Ben-Ghiat uses her newsletter to connect Trump’s actions to the autocrats she studies. The day she announced the lecture, her essay was, “The Real Reason Donald Trump Insults the U.S. Military.”

She explored the Trump campaign’s confrontation at Arlington National Cemetery, where a campaign staffer shoved a cemetery employee who tried to stop a political video shoot, and put his history of derogatory comments about the military in context.

“This allowed the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist, Rep. [Keith] Self and others to extrapolate, incorrectly, that the Bancroft Lecture would be an occasion to attack Mr. Trump,” the historian wrote.

Outrage started on Oct. 2 on the conservative think tank’s propaganda organ, The Daily Signal. It spread to other conservative opinion outlets, and wording from it was echoed in letters from Republican members of Congress.

“Families whose sons and daughters are attending this august military institution should be outraged by the academy’s partisan indoctrination of future officers of the U.S. Navy,” Heritage Foundation mouthpieces Hans von Spakovsky and Cully Stimson wrote.

Foundation “researchers” Matthew Lee and Wilson Beaver made the connection a month after Ben-Ghiat’s announcement and simply made up the rest, assuming she planned to attack Trump.

“One can debate the hallucinations that apparently inhabit the mind of this so-called historian from New York University,” Spakovsky and Stimson wrote, “but the more important point is that her venomous, partisan attack on a political candidate involves the Naval Academy, which is sponsoring her lecture in direct violation of Defense Department rules.”

One day later, U.S. Rep. Keith Self — a West Point graduate who represents a district north and northeast of Dallas — wrote Vice Adm. Yvette M. Davids, the academy superintendent, and demanded that she cancel the lecture.

“It is evident that the invitation to invite Professor Ben-Ghiat to speak at this prestigious lecture was a serious lapse in judgment and leadership on your part,” the Republican wrote.

Cmdr. Ashley Hockycko, an academy spokesperson, said the academy put Ben-Ghiat’s lecture on hold to avoid the appearance of violating federal law separating the U.S. military from politics.

“Our focus is on how to think, not what to think,” Hockycko’s office wrote in an email.

Not good enough, Daily Signal managing editor Tyler O’Neil wrote on Oct. 8. He quoted Brent Sadler, a 1994 Naval Academy graduate and a senior research fellow at the foundation, in calling for an apology:

“The Naval Academy’s superintendent, provost, and history department leadership must publicly explain the rationale for inviting Dr. Ben-Ghiat to speak on a politically charged subject weeks away from elections,” Sadler said.

One day later, Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee wrote Davids and called for an explanation. Signers included two Naval Academy graduates, U.S. Rep. Mike Garcia of California (Class of 1998) and U.S. Rep. Nick LaLota of New York (Class of 2000), plus U.S. Rep. Jen Kiggans of Virginia, a former Navy helicopter pilot whose son attended Annapolis.

“What steps will the USNA take to ensure that future speakers at the Bancroft Lecture series reflect the Academy’s commitment to impartiality and intellectual rigor, particularly on politically sensitive topics?” they wrote.

Oh, they added, how does the academy define “academic freedom?”

Davids will undoubtedly have to answer questions about this when she speaks to the committee in the superintendent’s annual appearance. But the outrage machine already has moved on. Stimson’s latest frothing is focused on two English professors at the academy for reportedly asking mids to choose their pronouns at the start of class.

“A rot growing like kudzu across this bucolic campus is undermining the Naval Academy’s core mission: to prepare young officers to take command at sea,” he wrote Oct. 15.

To paint the Naval Academy as a wellspring of progressive thought is ludicrous.

It’s a conservative institution with alumni who reflect diverse political views. Of the eight current members of Congress who graduated from Annapolis, five are Republican and three are Democrats.

Questions about pronouns are something young officers are likely to confront today in a fleet drawn from the American people, where transgender representation in society is a fact of life despite conservative palpitations.

The harrumph over Ben-Ghirat smacks of hamfisted stagecraft. It’s not about protecting young minds from learning what tools authoritarians use, it’s about preparing the case for an intellectual bloodletting.