Times New Roman was the silent workhorse behind Rachel Carson's " Silent Spring, which kicked off the environmental movement, Betty Friedan's " The Feminine Mystique, which fuelled second-wave feminism and Malcolm X’s autobiography, which reshaped US civil rights debates. Toni Morrison’s Beloved marched through banned book lists in the same tidy type. At the same time, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States introduced generations to a left-leaning retelling of American history set neatly in those familiar serifs.
Rubio nevertheless issued a cable insisting that Calibri lacked professionalism and was some DEIA indulgence. He claimed restoring Times New Roman would revive decorum and align with the One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations directive. However, accessibility advocates pointed out that the shift makes documents harder for some people to read.
Blinken’s State Department switched to Calibri in January 2023 because sans-serif fonts are clearer for people with visual impairments and are the default in Microsoft software. Rubio argued that this was wasteful, despite several studies showing that serif fonts blur at smaller sizes and undermine legibility for some readers.
The decision unfolded as Donald Trump’s administration escalated its purge of federal DEI programmes and urged the private sector to follow. The cable set the tone for a fresh round of point scoring as the department refused to say whether staff were thrilled about another front in the typography wars.
UN officials and accessibility experts warned that ramming through serif fonts in the name of order risks driving users towards less regulated spaces because documents may become harder to parse. Rubio’s allies insisted the move defended merit while detractors said the fight over fonts was a distraction from policy failures.
Times New Roman has spent nearly a century doing its job while quietly delivering many of the texts that now haunt conservative talking points. Rubio may believe he has restored tradition, although the typeface he crowned as a bulwark against wokeness has a history soaked in the very ideas he says he wants to crush under his jackboot.