In 2023, Ryan Holiday stood in front of a crowd of students at the U.S. Naval Academy and spoke about courage. In 2024, he lectured about doing the right thing.

So when the Annapolis-based military academy asked him not to mention the recent banning of nearly 400 books from its library during his planned talk this month, Holiday knew he couldn’t do it.

“That’s not just a betrayal of what I believe, but also completely undermines everything that I’ve said to these young men and women,” the author and podcaster said in an interview on Monday. Holiday is known for speaking and writing about stoicism, a philosophy that involves achieving happiness and peace through self-control and virtue.

Holiday said his talk, on the importance of knowledge and wisdom, was canceled an hour before it was set to take place earlier this month.

The mishap comes on the heels of other changes at the Naval Academy, including ending affirmative action and forbidding faculty from teaching about systematic racism and sexism. The Trump administration has pushed to end diversity efforts at the nation’s military academies.

Holiday knew his two slides about the book banning were critical, he said, but figured that debate and disagreement were fair game on a university campus.

“I can’t stare at these students in the face and not address the fact that 200 yards away, they were deleting books about American history that they believe are too ‘woke,’” he said. “It would’ve been a huge elephant in the room.”

Naval Academy leadership disagreed.

Commander Tim Hawkins, a Navy spokesperson, wrote in an emailed statement that the Academy “made a schedule change” in its cancellation of Holiday’s talk.

“The Naval Academy is an apolitical institution,” Hawkins said. “It is focused on developing midshipmen morally, mentally and physically in order to cultivate honorable leaders, create a culture of excellence, and prepare future officers for military service.”

Holiday’s speaking engagement would have been the annual Stutt lecture, coordinated by the Naval Academy’s Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership. Every spring, the academy invites a distinguished speaker to address students who are enrolled in a core ethics course.

Holiday said that administrators told him they were “extremely worried about reprisals” if his talk appeared to flout a Trump executive order that mandates the termination of DEI programs and activities in the federal government. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth later directed the Naval Academy to remove books that promote diversity, equity and inclusion from its library.

Holiday said he was planning to discuss the political pressure in the 1950s over what books were carried in the libraries of federal and military buildings. In an op-ed published in The New York Times on Saturday, Holiday invoked the works of President Dwight Eisenhower when he was asked whether he would ban communist books from American embassies.

“Generally speaking, my idea is that censorship and hiding solves nothing,” Eisenhower said. “Let’s educate ourselves if we are going to run a free government.”

Eisenhower added that he wished more Americans had read the words of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin at the time, because it might have helped anticipate the oncoming threats.

The majority of Holiday’s canceled lecture focused on James Stockdale, a Naval Academy graduate and Medal of Honor recipient. In the fall of 1961, the Navy sent Stockdale to Stanford University to learn as much as he could about Marxist theory.

Holiday said he wanted to speak about Stockdale, and the lessons he learned, to reinforce the idea that “we should study ideas that we disagree with and perhaps dislike.”

Holiday, who owns the Painted Porch Book Shop in Bastrop, Texas, said it was impossible for him not to connect Stockdale’s story and quest for knowledge with the recent book bans at the Academy.

“One does not need to love the books that have been removed to know intellectually and morally it’s wrong to remove them for political reasons,” he said. “We are heading down a very dangerous road if we don’t trust these people we rely on to make decisions in combat and policy negotiations to read a Stacey Abrams book.”

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