Air Force Academy Canceled Lecturer for Critical Trump Posts

On Tuesday, the Colorado Springs Gazette broke the news that officials at the United States Air Force Academy cancelled an upcoming lecture by a Utah author and poet due to critical social media posts about President Donald Trump.

Paisley Rekdal is the bi-racial author of The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam, a book-length essay that explores the cultural legacies and intergenerational trauma of American veterans and Southeast Asian refugees of the Vietnam War. Her talk at the Air Force Academy was to be an installment of the annual Jannetta Lecture Series, funded by Academy alumnus David Jannetta.

According to the Academy's own website, "the Jannetta Lecture brings to the school respected writers and artists who have contributed to our understanding of war." Jannetta began funding the lecture series in 2008 and has done so annually since then. He was unavailable for an immediate comment, but expressed his displeasure to the Gazette, apologizing to Rekdal, and stating he plans to discuss any further contributions with the Academy's Association of Graduates.

Rekdal says she was invited to be the Jannetta lecturer this September, but last Friday got an email from the chair of the AFA's English department saying they needed to speak. Rekdal says she thought they may want to vet the talk she intended to give to cadets, perhaps to make sure it didn't conflict with Trump's executive order banning DEI initiatives. The Broken Country centers on people of color, and she herself is biracial, so she also thought they might cancel the speech entirely due to its subject matter.

But it wasn't the content of Rekdal's work or her upcoming lecture that got her canceled from the AFA's stage.

"When I spoke to them on the phone, they said that a supervisor had done some research on me and found some things he didn't like," Rekdal tells Westword. "They never told me exactly what it was." But she says Jannetta and the Gazette both told her the cancellation was specifically due to posts that were critical of President Donald Trump.

On her Facebook page, Rekdal advocates for First Amendment freedoms as head of the Utah chapter of PEN, a nonprofit institute devoted to freedom of expression. She fights book banning in Utah (the state has banned eighteen so far, she says), and one of her posts asks potential attendees of an event, "Do you hate fascism?"



Rekdal has also expressed opposition to what she calls the "Big Beautiful Bullshit Bill," but you have to scroll back all the way to February to find her kinda-sorta targeting Trump specifically.

"If you care about free speech at all, Trump’s newest EO targeting student protests and—effectively—all international and/or undocumented students is not just unconstitutional but one more move towards authoritarianism," she published in a February 6 post. "If you don’t support the ACLU now, I strongly suggest you start. Also, yes, call your reps and pressure your university administrators to fight back."

In a statement to Westword, a spokesperson for the Air Force Academy confirms that Rekdal's past comments were what got her kicked out of the speaking engagement.

"Upon further review of this year's invited speaker, the Academy determined some of her public comments were disparaging of the Commander-in-Chief. While we welcome and will continue to invite speakers who encourage vigorous debate on a variety of subjects, we have chosen not to move forward with this speaking engagement, consistent with the U.S. Air Force Academy's non-partisan obligation," the statement reads.

According to Rekdal, the academy's reasoning is "a partisan statement." She asks if she would have been cancelled if she'd been critical of former President Joe Biden, or whether her cancellation by the Air Force would have happened under his administration.

"My suspicion is this is about protecting Donald Trump, and not the presidency," she adds.

Rekdal also believes her speech's cancellation sets a further negative precedent for other writers whose social media accounts could be weaponized against them. If writers believe they can't get good-paying gigs because they expressed their thoughts on social media accounts, they may stifle what they have to say to preserve their livelihood.

Rekdal believes the general public should take notice, too. If Trump or any other public figure considers themselves beyond any critique or disagreement, "you don't have an open and free society," she says.

"I've lived in countries, like Vietnam, where there's government control completely over the media and completely over what can be published, and thus what can and can't be said over social media. And that is not a society that people want to live in," she says. "I don't think Americans appreciate enough the rights that we have been given, and they don't defend them hard enough."