A once greatly respected leading American literary organization founded in 1922 has become 100% controlled by radical activists. Americans may be onto it by now, but it is still vitally important to track the successful cultural Marxist “march through the institutions” infiltration of credentialed America. Still accorded status and influence within dominant media, Big Academia, corporate, and other circles today, PEN America has declared war against the Trump administration.
On April 29, PEN released a hysteria-riddled document covering the first 100 days of the Trump administration, “which it views as a five-alarm fire for free speech, free expression, K-12 and higher education, the right to protest, and other basic rights, along with a war against ideas and language,” a lurid press release stated. The 26-page report is filled with the stale language of the Obama-Biden years, with countless references to attacks on “democracy.”
“No federal administration has moved as swiftly to exert broad new controls over what people can say, read, learn, research, and think,” the introduction states. “The heavy-handed imposition of government ideology and efforts to instill a culture of fear echo the tactics of repressive regimes, and they are having the intended effect. Across not just government agencies, but schools and universities, corporations, libraries, museums, and the media, there is already a pervasive sense that one must watch what one says in order to avoid government retaliation.”
Read that last sentence again, for it gives the game away. These people have a lot to lose, and they know it. Their decades-long unchecked cultural rot joyride across America’s social landscape is coming to an end.
The PEN report is as shrill as the most over-the-top social media posting by Star Wars alum Mark Hamill or Hollywood chum Rob Reiner, yet it is being made by a credentialed entity active in libraries, universities and government-funded media endeavors (PBS and NPR), where it wields genuine pull.
The report attacks the Trump administration across the line, including even its deportation policies, all in the name of protecting “free speech.” But given that this is a literary organization, we’ll focus on its opposition to “book bans” and other efforts to rein in leftist propaganda aimed at schoolchildren and other captive audiences.
Anti-White Drag Queen Warriors at Annapolis
PEN is especially outraged that “nearly 400 books were banned at the US Naval Academy – the first known college-level book banning since PEN America started tracking this campaign of censorship in 2021,” the report exclaims.
The group links to an extensive New York Times list of the books involved that does not help its case at all. Do America’s future commissioned Navy officers, being educated on the taxpayer’s dime, really need to have access to opuses such as Whiteness and Racialized Ethnic Groups in the United States: The Politics of Remembering?
Written by Sherrow O. Pinder, Professor of Political Science and Multicultural and Gender Studies at California State University, Chico, the tired tome is another angry treatise ladling out the racial obsessiveness that dominates the hardline political left. The book aims to “account for the never-ending discrimination toward racialized ethnic groups,” an Amazon.com listing explains. Perpetual white racism – this is a sitting US university professor’s main thesis.
When does such tripe cross over from being mere PC nonsense to abject racial hatred against white people? “[I]n order to construct a post-white identity, whiteness would have to be denormalized and freed of it of its presumptive hegemony,” the Amazon blurb continues.
A college professor author is promoting the eradication of “whiteness” in America. This is a book the banning of which, PEN America declares, is the hallmark of an “administration [that] is using the tools of the government to terrorize educators, students, and educational institutions.”
Other essential literary offerings PEN states are being cruelly denied to Annapolis midshipmen include The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism, Feminism Is Queer: The Intimate Connection Between Queer and Feminist Theory and The Machinery of Whiteness: Studies in the Structure of Racialization.
You get the idea. A full-page thank you ad from concerned Americans opposed to the radical takeover of America’s institutions would be less effective than a close examination of the actual list of books removed from the US Naval Academy posted by The New York Times.
Credentialed to Indoctrinate Young Minds
But this is the world inhabited by committed social revolutionaries. We have repeatedly emphasized and we will not stop stressing that these cultural radicals have seized control of credentialed America in all its forms.
Jonathan Friedman is the “Sy Syms managing director of US free expression programs at PEN America,” his bio reads. He is a co-author of the Trump First 100 Days PEN report. In 2022 Liberty Nation News documented Friedman’s shockingly blunt declaration that is a duty of the modern American teacher to mold the thoughts of the youngsters in their charge.
“The [school] district has an obligation to open students’ minds to the difficult issues these books reckon with, not close them off to diverse lived experiences. After all, how can we expect young people to learn about diversity, if we do not expose them to diverse perspectives in literature?” he asserted while opposing efforts in Texas in 2021 to put a stop to leftist propaganda in the classroom.
Friedman explicitly stated that this “obligation” is more important than parental wishes or rights.
“Parent and community engagement matters in education, but it must not be the only principle that guides schools through our culture war controversies,” Friedman continued. “School leaders need to have a strong commitment to pedagogical principles, and to students’ rights to access literature and learn honest history. In states like Texas, where racial and ethnic diversity is accelerating, considerations of diversity and inclusion must also be part of the equation.”
This is the toxic worldview that the Trump administration is up against, and this is why the reaction against its efforts to cleanse the halls of education is so over-heated. Nobody is freely signing up for focus sessions on cleansing themselves of their hetero-dominant whiteness. Credentialed radical agitators desperately need to be able to tap into captive audiences in their revolutionary bid to “reach the masses.”
In taking that captive audience away from them, President Trump is dealing these pampered and credentialed leftists the cruelest blow possible.
