This Is What Criticism of the President Cost Me

 

Opinion

Guest Essay

This Is What Criticism of the President Cost Me

Sept. 9, 2025

By Paisley Rekdal

Ms. Rekdal is the author of nonfiction books and poetry collections.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/opinion/poet-air-force-academy-cancellation.html

 

Well before my lecture scheduled for this Wednesday at the United States Air Force Academy, I suspected it would be canceled.

 

My planned lecture, on how the United States memorializes — or forgets — the costs of war, couldn’t have come at a more fraught time. As a former Utah poet laureate and PEN America’s Utah chapter leader, I’ve watched with distress as book bans proliferate, often targeting titles that focus on race and history. I’ve seen firsthand the evaporation of grants to support initiatives the government deems woke — including the study of the Great Basin Indigenous nations I work with as director of the University of Utah’s American West Center.

 

I worried that, as a civilian humanist, my presence at the Air Force Academy might — for some attendees — invalidate my arguments; I wouldn’t be heard because of what I represent to the right.

 

I had planned to talk before the cadets about my book “The Broken Country,” which explores the complex, often traumatic intergenerational legacies of the Vietnam War. In the book, I write about the histories of American veterans and post-1975 Vietnamese refugees. I’d been invited to present the book for the academy’s annual Jannetta Lecture, which features writers and artists who, through their words, “have contributed to our understanding of war.”

 

Imagine my shock when I learned that the talk was canceled not because of my book’s subject matter but because the academy, under its superintendent, Lt. Gen. Tony D. Bauernfeind, had discovered that some of my comments on social media “were disparaging of the commander in chief,” and so having me speak would violate the academy’s “nonpartisan obligation,” it said in a statement.

 

You could call the decision economically punitive, since I lost income from the vanished book sales. You could also call it an attempt to suppress free speech, though that’s not exactly accurate. I had the right to say what I liked on social media; the academy had the right to determine whether I spoke on its campus.

 

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Censorship like this is slippery: While my own speech hasn’t been suppressed so much as sidelined, professional writers reading this will take my cancellation as a warning to watch what they say on Facebook or X, and may fall silent accordingly.

 

But while my cancellation may be chilling to writers, it’s not nearly as scary as the message it sends to the academy’s cadets and all Americans. When speakers are disinvited because they criticize politicians, we give these politicians pre-emptive carte blanche. Implicitly, we suggest that certain people should be outside the realm of political and moral judgment. Perhaps they should be above public opinion itself.

 

The academy’s actions also imply to me a lack of trust in its faculty members’ and donors’ opinions, as well as the presumption that institutions should surveil their speakers, sniffing them out as possible traitors. Maybe it would have done the same if Joe Biden were still president; maybe the academy was defending the honor of the office of the president, not the man holding the office. But I doubt it.

 

After Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pledged to rid service academies of civilian faculty members who might promote “divisive policies” that could be critical of American politics, an article in Politico noted that General Bauernfeind considered plans to fire as many as 100 civilians from the academy’s faculty, and he removed the word “educate” from the school’s mission statement.

 

If one of Mr. Trump’s great gifts is his ability to sow discord across institutions, his greatest appears to be an ability to inspire slavish devotion among his supporters. Devotion, of course, is based on not fully comprehending the object of one’s awe; it is the abdication of knowledge and agency in favor of adoration.

 

Devotion is not, I hope, what a military organization instills in its cadets. In “The Broken Country,” I write about how, in the context of post-Vietnam America, a reverential posture toward the military has become common. Too often, the American public understands men and women in uniform as heroic fetish objects and refugees as pathetic children who should be grateful for being welcomed on our shores.

 

It is this kind of cartoonish simplicity that any serious study of war seeks to counteract and that I attempt to reject in my own work. I’d hoped to present a more expansive history to the cadets. I wanted them to see that the humanities offer a way for them to understand their own place in the military and the world, to give them a broader framework for the responsibilities they’ll take on, to help them better evaluate the good works they are taught to do.

 

Without this expanded view of history, we risk descending into unreflecting glorification, turning the story of war simply into a conflict of good guys versus bad guys, erasing the more painful generational realities that both veterans and victims of war experience.

 

What’s worse is that the people we unthinkingly label good guys can start to think they are above the law. That might lead officers to treat their troops like cannon fodder, or rogue soldiers to commit crimes. This is true even as civilians (especially without a draft) hesitate to critique the military, in both gratitude and recompense for the tremendous risks soldiers voluntarily take.

 

But no institution or civil servant should be treated so worshipfully. It’s how politicians come to act like petty tyrants and political parties function like cults.

 

My talk’s cancellation is also a dangerous message to send when the president has turned the National Guard into de facto police units in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., while threatening to do the same in Chicago. Not only is he misusing the military’s power by weaponizing the moral authority we’ve granted the military, but in doing so he is eroding the trust Americans have in the military itself.

 

The Air Force Academy’s decision is bolstering a signal many Americans fear has already been sent: that the military is a wing of presidential and not constitutional defense, its loyalty particular to Mr. Trump — even to the point of treating Americans themselves as the enemy.

 

True loyalty asks us what and why we believe. It can be earned, bent, changed; it can also be broken. When we encounter people with dissenting opinions and politics, we test the boundaries of loyalty, turning unthinking devotion into critical self-reflection, which ideally makes what we believe stronger, our connection to others clearer.

 

As I would have said at my talk, when we see what stories veterans share with refugees, it expands our understanding of how past wars continue to shape America. This is what writing “The Broken Country” taught me: Trauma, historical memory, cultural assimilation and identity are issues that refugees and veterans alike face. To understand our own place in the history of war is fundamentally to learn about others. This kind of critical reflection isn’t just necessary for us as citizens; it’s crucial for our military if it wants to produce better soldiers, ones who aren’t just mindless cogs in war’s machinery.

 

The president may be the Air Force Academy’s commander in chief, but it is the Constitution — and our freedom of speech, which it protects — to which he should ultimately be loyal.