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.