Trump Gets a Lesson in History-and the First Amendment

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in matters of politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

The words, among the most luminous in the history of American constitutional law, come from Justice Robert Jackson in his 1943 opinion in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, which struck down a state requirement that schoolchildren salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

Tuesday, a federal judge in White Plains had occasion to apply its logic to West Point, issuing a comprehensive rebuke of one of the Trump administration’s most heavy-handed assaults on academic freedom.

Tim Bakken, the plaintiff in Bakken v. United States Military Academy, is a civilian law professor who has taught at West Point since 2000. In January 2025, within days of taking office, President Trump signed Executive Order 14185, directing the nation’s military academies to stop “promoting, advancing, or otherwise inculcating” theories deemed “un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist, and irrational”—a list of adjectives so elastic it could mean whatever the administration needed it to mean on any given day.

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https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/trump-gets-a-lesson-in-historyand