The Heritage people get to decide who hears what.

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.

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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.”

I thought the Heritage Foundation aspired to a certain intellectual gravitas, but I guess not if it slaps a meaningless “Marxist” on any content it doesn’t like or even predicts it won’t like if it ever gets around to reading or hearing it.

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.

And that it’s somehow “Marxist” to discuss Arlington Cemetery and the military codes and ethics that govern behavior there.

“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.”

No doubt that’s because the Naval Academy is run by Marxists.