'Doing something right': MAGA-targeted author reveals plot to thwart Trump

The Trump administration has been aggressively censoring books from libraries under federal control to limit the flow of disfavored ideas, even red-flagging terms like "female" or "woman" from papers receiving federal grants. But in one case, a banned author and his supporters fought back — and won.

Speaking to Salon's Chauncey DeVega in an interview published on Tuesday, Robert P. Jones, the president of the Public Religion Research Institute and the author of "White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity," detailed the story.

"The Nazis burned books to destroy knowledge," said Jones, a frequent analyst of the intersection between religion and politics, and Trump's grip over white evangelicals. "It was an analog world then. Now we are in a digital world, and the Trump administration can destroy and suppress knowledge and the truth with the push of a button.

"In addition to so much digital destruction, which materially would be the biggest book burning in history, the Trump administration is resorting to old-fashioned book bans. My book ... was one of 381 books, including seven books on Christianity, banned from the US Naval Academy."

The common through-line with all the banned books on Christianity, Jones continued, was that they "were about Christianity's complicity with racism and white supremacy." As it so happened, however, "Hitler's book 'Mein Kampf' was not banned. Apparently, books about Christianity's complicity with racism and white supremacy are too dangerous for midshipmen to read, but 'Mein Kampf' is not."

Despite all this, Jones added, people organized and fought, and the Trump book bans at the Naval Academy were effectively neutered.

"There has been important pushback," said Jones. For instance, "The New York Times published two different articles on the books being banned at the Naval Academy per Donald Trump and the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s directives. The American Academy of Religion organized a webinar featuring me and the other banned religious studies authors to denounce the bans and support academic freedom. A retired Navy commander organized an effort to make the banned books available to midshipmen. As a result, most of the banned books are now being put back on the shelves at the U.S. Naval Academy."

"Personally, for the Trump administration to ban one of my books makes me feel like I must be doing something right," he said.