IT'S TIME to FIGHT the WAR ON FREE SPEECH and the ARTS in AMERICA
- Cully Perlman
- Apr 9
- 8 min read
America needs to fight back against the annihilation of the arts. It needs to do that now.
On Thursday, April 3rd, according to an article in NPR, it was reported that “DOGE told the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) staff that it would lay off a substantial number of employees and cut its grant programs.” This news was first reported by The New York Times. NPR went on to state that “Acting NEH Chair Michael McDonald told senior staff that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a team within the executive branch supposedly dedicated to reducing government spending, "wants to claw back $175 million" in grant money that has not yet been disbursed. It is not clear if that is the true amount of undisbursed funds, or an estimation by DOGE staff.”
If you know anything about how the grants are funded and disbursed, you know that the funding was already promised to the states. Now the grants are being withdrawn, because, apparently, anything to do with anything other than providing the rich with more money and assets while taking that money away from everyone not associated in a positive way with this administration, is how our government now works. Trump (he does not deserve the title of “President”) also fired the Kennedy Center’s president and board chair and appointed himself as chairman, and nearly twenty of his sycophants to the board after relieving the folks that had been there. If ever there was a human being against everything America stands for, Trump is it. I almost would like to say, “everything art stands for,” but this is just not the case. America is collapsing financially, ethically, morally, artistically and culturally, politically, and in every form and fashion imaginable due to what is looking to be more and more Trump’s desire to turn the country into a dictatorship.
A report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences back in 2013 said this: “the humanities – including the study of languages, literature, history, jurisprudence, philosophy, comparative religion, and ethics – are disciplines of memoir and imagination, telling us where we have been and helping us envision where we are going.
“They provide the knowledge, skills, and understanding we need to thrive in a twenty-first-century democracy. They equip us for leadership in an interconnected world and help foster a society that is innovative, competitive, and strong.” These are words I believe in strongly, and more so today, as, at least in my lifetime, these things have never been more under attack by a presidential administration than the current one we have today.
As writers, we write to make sense of the world. We write to entertain, yes, but also to inform, to pose questions to our readers, to provide context to the events of our times. We write to give voice to those whose voices are silenced, to tell stories for those (and there are millions of them) who cannot tell their stories because of war or poverty, mental illness or personal and familial tragedies, political strife, oppression, love and love denied, attacks on the first amendment, book banning for ideological or religious reasons, and so on. Much, if not all, of this holds true for other mediums, including music, painting, drawing, drama, satire, whether it be in the theater or at the movies or television, on a comedy stage or anywhere else an artist with a vision decides to share that vision with the public.
"Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move." I don’t know the source of this quote, but it is accurate. Art is power. It has impact. It can affect change. It moves us. It makes us move. This is why, over the centuries, artists have been silenced, either by censorship, by prison, or by death. This is what’s happening now. As the Guardian once quoted, “Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.” Banning books, censoring writers or the artists who create art, politicians and reporters or anyone else, cannot happen. Not now or ever.
This administration is fomenting the hate and legal maneuvering to make the first two happen. The third is something that happens currently in other countries, and has happened since time immemorial. I fear it has made its way to America. Oklahoma’s Senator Markwayne Mullin made comments suggesting politicians could “handle our differences” with journalists by shooting and killing them.” He later said he was joking. I’m not so sure either he or Trump’s followers think it was a joke. Jamal Ahmad Hamza Khashoggi, was Saudi journalist, an author, a dissident, a columnist for the Washington Post, a general manager and editor-in-chief of Al-Arab News Channel. He was murdered at the behest of Mohammed bin Salman in the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.
According to Deutsche Welle, a German organization that is committed to “combating disinformation and advancing media literacy,” and which you can find at DW.com. Burhan Sönmez, president of the writers’ association PEN International, says that the number of writers being persecuted and driven into exile has been increasing worldwide for years. A Turkish Kurd, he was also imprisoned under various Turkish regimes — and continues to receive death threats to this day.” Another target, this time of Putin and Russia, is Dmitry Glukhovsky, “a bestselling author of dystopian novels. [He’s] been living in exile from Russia since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. He was accused of being a “foreign agent” and was sentenced to eight years in prison. For condemning the war, he’s been accused of being an “enemy of the state.”
Similar censorship, imprisonments, and assassinations have target writers and artists such as Salman Rushdie, author Gioconda Belli, Federico García Lorca, the artist Danilo Maldonado in Cuba, Chilean singer and theater artist Victor Jara, and others. Dictators do not want independent artists, journalists, or anyone to express their thoughts, in particular regarding them, the dictators. Trump is following in the footsteps of Augusto Pinochet, Vladimir Putin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Benito Mussolini, and others. Dictators desire control over the arts, over writing, over public discourse. Trump is no different. His sycophants are proving that they are no different as well. America must say no. At the top of its lungs, at the end of a pen, in music, in plays, in art, and in every other way possible that we can ensure that we do not become a stepping stone for yet another dictator in history on his way to destroying what took us so long to build
Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move.
--anonymous
The hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center and the NEH and the vital grants it provides to artists is an attack on free speech. It’s an attack on our culture. It’s an attack on anything that questions or highlights the ugly things on this planet that hoard the power and wealth of societies and peoples who express themselves and the wrongs perpetuated on civilizations by those whose only goal on earth is to pull in profit for themselves, to control the narrative(s) of society, to oppress and make bow down the people they are intended to protect. As writers, Trump and his administration’s destruction of all we hold close to our hearts, is a call to action. We must document and fictionalize and create art that captures exactly what these heathens are doing to our country, to our society, to the documented history of our country, and to the world at large. Trump is doing his best to erase from memory the history of our ancestors, the good and the bad, that has made this country (and all countries) not just imperfect institutions, but perfectly imperfect ones. And it is absolutely, one hundred percent, wrong.
. . . politicians could “handle our differences” with journalists by shooting and killing them.
Senator Markwayne Mullin, a Trump supporter
As artists, as writers, now is the time when we must stand up and deliver. This is the time when we must put ourselves at risk, whatever that means to you, however you can do so without devastating the lives of the ones we love, for it is us—you, me, all of us—who must say, NO, we will not let this pass. We will not be silenced by the privileged few. We will fight for our country, in the best way we know how, which is through our art. There is talk, currently, of this president and his administration of invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807. This law “empowers the president of the United States to deploy the U.S. military and federalized National Guard troops within the United States in particular circumstances, such as to suppress civil disorder, insurrection, or rebellion.” This is something Trump most certainly is considering implementing.
“The act provides a "statutory exception" to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which limits the use of military personnel under federal command for law enforcement purposes within the United States.” – Wikipedia.
While there are limits, created and documented by our forefathers, to Trump’s power, it has become abundantly clear that he neither respects those limits; indeed, he despises and demolishes them, and he is assisted by the judges and lawmakers he helped put into power. We’ve watched this happen since 2015. We warned our fellow Americans and the world, and yet, somehow, the train was allowed to run off the tracks, the damage continuing to be done as that train continues to carry momentum. Again, this must be stopped.
My job, as I see it, is to chronicle in fiction, as best I can, what’s happening. The same goal, but with a different and more objective medium, is what reporters and journalists around the world are doing now, albeit with the pressure and actions of Trump and his minions doing their best to put a halt to their work, which is reporting, objectively, what this administration is perpetuating against not only its people, but the lives and livelihoods of our brothers and sisters around the world. Trump is taking away the ability of artists to live, to produce anything not in praise of his ego, to create the art we need to understand and appreciate and highlight the events of our day. We must not allow this to happen. We must fight. We must fight now. And we must never give up.
Dictators have come and gone. They have burned books in the streets and murdered poets, throwing their bodies into ditches on the sides of mountains. If what’s happening continues, some of us will become martyrs, perhaps in our art, perhaps by our deaths. I hope it does not come to that. But one thing is clear: We must use our voices and the art we produce to ensure the world knows loud and clear that we will not stand idly by. That we will not allow this to happen to us without fighting back with our art, but with everything else we must in order to ensure we maintain a world, however imperfect it may be, for the generations that come after us. If we don’t, who will?
If there's ever been a time in our history to speak up, now is the time. We may not like it. We may be scared. But it's time to fight the war on free speech and the arts in America right now, before it's too late.
Cully Perlman is a writer. A father. A proud American. And a patriot not just to this country but to all the countries around the world that help their people rather than hurt them. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com
Well done, Cully.