Ryan Holiday is an author and owner of a bookstore near Austin, Texas who was invited to the United States Naval Academy to give a talk to cadets regarding philosophy, stoicism and the value of reading literature and history. His invite was sent around early April 2025 at the time news came out about officials at the Academy removing 381 books from its libraries as a result of new Trump Administration policies trickling down through the Department of Defense. Holiday incorporated recent news about book banning throughout the country including the Academy into his talk and, twenty minutes before it was scheduled to begin, his talk was cancelled. Presumably, he was offered the chance to omit any book banning references deemed offensive to the powers that be at the Academy but he refused and the talk was not presented.
After returning to his home in Texas and pondering the cancellation, Holiday decided to record the talk he had already prepared and publish it on YouTube for a far wider audience to see.
The video is forty eight minutes long but WELL WORTH your time. No attempt to summarize it will be made here. Nearly every minute of the talk contains a sentence or idea that is vital to understand when pondering the value of encountering challenging ideas, reading history and applying what can be learned to leading a moral life.
After listening to Holiday's talk, it takes zero imagination to understand why some in Trump's chain of command would feel threatened by cadets being exposed to such, ahem, controversial agitating propaganda. </SARCASM>
WTH
