The defense secretary, along with the wider Trump administration, has spent its months in office purging the Pentagon, military and federal government of anything it deems diversity related, which has been widely interpreted by the military services and many others to mean anything that recognizes women and people with minority backgrounds.
Hegseth issued a vague order for the Defense Department to remove all “news articles, photos, and videos promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), including content related to critical race theory, gender ideology, and identity-based programs.”
Display case at the U.S. Naval Academy which housed removed items that commemorated female Jewish graduates. (Photo courtesy of Military Religious Freedom Foundation)
The U.S. Naval Academy has confirmed that officials there removed items commemorating female Jewish graduates from a historic display ahead of a visit to the school by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, or MRFF, a nonprofit group that advocates for religious freedom, first reported on the move after its members noticed the removal of the items on display at the Commodore Uriah P. Levy Center and Jewish Chapel.
Cmdr. Ashley Hockycko confirmed late Tuesday that the historical items honoring the Jewish graduates had been removed but said that it was done so “mistakenly.” “U.S. Naval Academy leadership is immediately taking steps to review and correct the unauthorized removal,” she added.
The removal appears to be the latest example of military and defense officials removing displays, websites and other materials honoring the achievements of women and minorities within the military, often with the presumption of acting on Hegseth’s orders or reacting to his preferences and beliefs.
The defense secretary, along with the wider Trump administration, has spent its months in office purging the Pentagon, military and federal government of anything it deems diversity related, which has been widely interpreted by the military services and many others to mean anything that recognizes women and people with minority backgrounds.
Hegseth issued a vague order for the Defense Department to remove all “news articles, photos, and videos promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), including content related to critical race theory, gender ideology, and identity-based programs.”
Some of that content has been restored after the removals became public. However, Hegseth’s office has not offered a full accounting of what has been removed to date.
MRFF founder and President Mikey Weinstein told Military.com in an interview Wednesday that his organization heard from 31 Naval Academy faculty, Midshipmen and staff, who were “outraged” by the removal of the items.
According to the MRFF, the displays containing items from male Jewish graduates and service members were left untouched.
However, the items were removed for only a short time, and officials told Military.com that they had been restored by Tuesday evening, having been gone less than a day.
The military academy also purged nearly 400 books from its library around the time of Hegseth’s visit as well, an official confirmed to Military.com. The books were banned under the Trump administration push to purge materials related to diversity, and were culled from library shelves before the defense secretary’s visit to the academy, according to The Associated Press.
The move comes about a week after the Capital Gazette, an Annapolis newspaper, reported that leaders at the Naval Academy didn’t think they needed to remove any books since President Donald Trump’s January executive order banning materials on diversity applied to kindergarten through 12th-grade schools that receive federal funding — not colleges.
The Navy would not offer a list of the books removed when asked.
The orders and policies claiming to target “diversity, equity and inclusion” — a term that has taken on a difficult-to-define and amorphous meaning under the Trump administration — are leaving officials in the Pentagon and the military branches frustrated. They feel that many of the policies being released by Hegseth demand urgency but lack specifics and are open to interpretation.
One official who remained anonymous to speak freely without fear of retaliation frustratedly noted to Military.com that this dynamic sets up a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.”
If the military services and their various offices overreact and remove content that becomes a scandal, they are slammed by Hegseth and his staff for “malicious compliance.”
That dynamic played out several weeks ago when the Pentagon was forced to walk back the removal of a website honoring trailblazing baseball player and Army veteran Jackie Robinson.
In a March 21 video, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell admitted that “some important content was inadvertently pulled offline” and attributed that to “the realities of AI tools and other software.” He said content was being both “mistakenly removed” and “maliciously removed.”
Meanwhile, the official went on to note, if the services take directives at their literal meaning, which was seemingly what the Naval Academy did when it decided it didn’t need to purge its library since it was not a K-12 school, that leads to the perception of noncompliance with orders and directives.
The result, according to the official, is a very uneven and ad hoc application of policy that leaves employees and officials paralyzed, frustrated and uncertain, with little more to go on than what they see in public statements like Parnell’s videos or Hegseth’s appearances on television.
“History is not DEI,” Parnell declared in his video.
“What does that mean? What am I supposed to do with that?” the official said.
More fun with book covers-everybody welcome! No April Fools, simply foolery in April.
(P.S.: I have an ad blocker. If there is an orange box when you read this, just click on “I’ll fix it later.” My ad blocker won’t make that box show on your computer when you open the SBTB page to see all the covers and read all the snark, but your ad blocker might. Go ahead! Enjoy.)
When wind bent dandelions in puffy winglets, & wisdom did raise her voice & not say weed&
when the toad did raise its spikes at the same time as federal codes & the try-to-be-perfect raised its voice?
Did the clang of copper collectors & the too-many lawns begin in Arizona
while peel-paint steeples rose over dirt for the prism of progress,
minerals torn from mines with no mouths but you had a mouth & sang early?
When nuclear testing began north of love & the Remington computer was placed in office use,
when there was just as much beauty & sex as later, while some lay down at drive-ins in Chevies on seats the color of crushed berries & phone calls went up to a dime?
When Congress loaned money to countries because their grains had ancient fungus claviceps purpuria that caused visions & swelling under the silent claw of the predator?
Was shame in you born before beauty? Was beauty was shame was beauty?
As white gravel spread under the white churches as silver sequins on danceless dresses tacked on each “hanging by a thread”
like drops of sweat on horses at the city’s edge
while downcast daisies were mimicked on sisterly aprons catching sugars from women making pudding from boxes under swamp coolers
with slightly mildewy pads in a breeze created for doing housework by yourself?
Was it odd to be born when two types of purslane in the west were called weed, even agave used to make soap, though it was home to the yucca moth, central & sweet, its
terminal clusters piercing thunderheads over red pick-up trucks,
& lowly dogbane hiding from developers with sibling roots of fungi with “no downsides to pesticides” & florets like diamond periods on certain fonts also were called weed?
Was it odd to be born near hillsides with radars like baby ears of question marks
under the silent claw of the predator, when mountains shook toward sabino canyons
& there was Jello salad at picnics?
Here from this century can you say was it wild to be born?
Was there anything else like this, anything at all?
will crawl out of the drain and try to kill you like some 80s horror flick. The picture of us at the Santa Fe Railyard, foreheads glistening. The black widow creeping from the mound of linens still warm from our bodies. Mechanical hum of crickets when you push into me in the middle of the night, when I can’t sleep and the years replay like a foreign movie, a terrible one where the voices sound underwater. Failed poems will steal your breath when you wake parched, hungover, emptied in a room full of the steady buzz of the refrigerator. When all that excites you is momentary, an earthquake in which all the books shake in place, and nothing falls. No one ever reads failed poems, but they follow you home in the dark and tuck in beside you. Failed poems are cute grim reapers that live in cartoon snowcaps. They’re midnight döner kebabs that give you heartburn. Once, in Zurich, we were served rabbit paella at a party celebrating an exhibition of an artist from Venice Beach who used to be homeless but drinks $25 Erewhon smoothies and paints hundreds maybe thousands of happy faces with his feet. His canvasses go for $25,000. Toe paintings are better or at least significantly more profitable than failed poems. Failed poems won’t help you earn a living. You will probably have to do freelance marketing to sustain the creation of failed poems. Failed poems accrue interest. They seep into dreams where all your friends line up to blow your husband. They cost a monthly cloud subscription to maintain. Failed poems are injected into your father’s veins when he ODs for the second time this year. They’re shared to infinity when you’re canceled for fringe political views. When you’re six feet under, a failed poem is written on your head. It’s a prayer in the form of a failed poem, the last words you hear on earth
We’re approaching the third Trans Rights Readathon! It’s an annual call to action that coincides with Trans Day of Visibility on March 31st, and it aims to uplift, amplify, and support trans, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, and Two-Spirit authors. It takes place from March 21st through the 31st, and this year, there are five core prompts to complete, as well as a list of bonus prompts.
The five core prompts for the 2025 Trans Rights Readathon are Transmasc and Trans Man Rep; Transfemme and Trans Woman Rep; Nonbinary, Agender, Genderqueer, and Other Gender Expansive Rep; Intersectional Trans+ Rep Outside Your Own Experience; and 2Spirit, Indigiqueer and Indigenous Gender Expansive Rep.
If you’d like some recommendations for these prompts, as well as the many bonus prompts, you can find the reading challenge on Storygraph, where users have added suggestions for each. Just be sure to vet these, since anyone can add a title.
The Storygraph description also adds more context to the reading challenge, including making sure not to out authors or interrogate authors about their gender identity: “If information isn’t available in an author’s bio, social media, or on their website, they don’t owe it to you. In an era when people’s identities are being used to target them, please be mindful that we want to CELEBRATE these stories and support authors while keeping each other safe.”
Each prompt also has more information, including that books in the 2Spirit, Indigiqueer, and Indigenous Gender Expansive Rep category may not be trans, so to be mindful about language when discussing these books: “2Spirit, Indigiqueer, and other non-Western Third Genders exist outside of Western concepts of gender and sexuality, and an author who identifies as 2S may not identify as trans.”
Another great resource for the challenge is the Trans Rights Readathon Instagram. They have posts about the readathon itself, including how to participate: by reading trans books, reviewing and discussing them online (using the tags TransRightsReadathon and #TRR2025), and monetarily supporting the trans community (including donating to mutual aid funds).
They also have posts recommending books for each of the prompts. These are vetted by the organizers, so they’re more reliable than the Storygraph suggestions.
Leading up to and during the readathon, I’ll be sharing trans book recommendations. Let me know in the comments if there’s anything in particular you’d like suggestions for!
As a bonus for All Access members, below is a list of 27 new LGBTQ books out this week.
Exclusive content for All Access members continues below. Become a member for $6 a month or $60 a year to get community features and access to exclusive content across all 20+ Book Riot newsletters.
Calm was the even, and clear was the sky,/ And the new budding flowers did spring,/ When all alone went Amyntas and I/ To hear the sweet nightingale sing; by Worriedman Read on Substack
“Song: Calm was the even, and clear was the sky”. By John Dryden
Scottie's Playtime 