Ryan Holiday did the right thing

Writing in the New York Times, Ryan Holiday has gone public about the cancellation of his recent lecture at the United States Naval Academy.

Writing in the New York Times, Ryan Holiday has gone public about the cancellation of his planned lecture at the United States Naval Academy:

Roughly an hour before my talk was to begin, I received a call: Would I refrain from any mention in my remarks of the recent removal of 381 supposedly controversial books from the Nimitz library on campus? My slides had been sent up the chain of command at the school, which was now, as it was explained to me, extremely worried about reprisals if my talk appeared to flout Executive Order 14151 (Ending Radical and Wasteful Government D.E.I. Programs and Preferencing).

When I declined, my lecture — as well as a planned speech before the Navy football team, with which my books on Stoicism are popular — was canceled. (The academy “made a schedule change that aligns with its mission of preparing midshipmen for careers of service,” a Navy spokesperson told Times Opinion. “The Naval Academy is an apolitical institution.”)

The story Ryan was planning to tell involved James Stockdale, a man who would go on to be a vice admiral in the Navy. Ryan was going to focus on how Stockdale had studied Marxist theory at Stanford (with the Navy’s approval). Here’s roughly what he was going to say:

It might seem unusual that the Navy would send Mr. Stockdale, then a 36-year-old fighter pilot, to get a master’s degree in the social sciences, but he knew why he was there. Writing home to his parents that year, he reminded them of a lesson they had instilled in him, “You really can’t do well competing against something you don’t understand as well as something you can.”

What’s striking about this is that it is far from a pro-communist message! It is, in fact, about the strategic value of reading Marxists for anti-communist reasons.

A further part of Ryan’s talk was going to focus on the value of reading widely, including reading books you seriously disagree with. This was seemingly in conflict with the recent executive order as it could imply criticism the Academy’s removal of certain books from their library (one of those books was by Maya Angelou!).

Because Ryan refused to censor his talk, he was disinvited.

Ryan did the right thing. No writer or speaker should comply with a request for censorship, especially when it comes from the government and especially when it deals with something as fundamental as freedom of expression.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) seems to already be on the case. Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with FIRE, has filed a FOIA request; this is perhaps fact-finding for a future case or public advocacy. I’ll be following this closely.