Dear Friend,
In George Orwell’s frequently banned book 1984, the Ministry of Truth is responsible for lies. It decides what “truth” is and rewrites history with its own government-approved version of events. Real history is dropped into “memory holes” and incinerated.
It’s no exaggeration to call President Donald Trump’s actions in his first week in office Orwellian. In just the first few days of the Trump administration, the White House issued a torrent of executive orders that engaged in doublespeak--paying lip service to free speech but in fact enacting a full frontal assault against it. An executive order on “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship” was less about restoring free speech than about giving free rein to disinformation on social media.
Other administration actions ban words including “gender” and “inclusion” in federal documents and declare the very real book-banning crisis a “hoax.” They have frozen funding for foreign assistance that supports independent media, writers, and activists around the world – a brutal assault on global civil society and a gift to autocrats the world over. And they have tried to subject virtually all federal funding to an ideological review. While dealing with the devastating effects of this order, the organizations most impacted will likely feel unable to speak out against it, out of fear that this much needed aid would be cut off permanently.
These orders and the political movement behind them are having a broad chilling effect. We’ve already seen universities cancel discussions of the future of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for fear of losing funding. To comply with the order declaring DEI programs “radical,” the Air Force scrapped (and then restored, after public outcry) a course that used videos of Tuskegee Airmen and female pilots during World War II.
Universities are closing women’s centers; private businesses are rolling back efforts to recruit a diverse workforce. Media organizations are settling lawsuits meant to intimidate and silence them. Facebook eliminated fact-checking, falsely equating it to censorship.
In a time like this, defending free speech means standing up for the very concept of truth, and finding the courage to speak out, even when the risks are high. PEN America will fight fiercely against the erasure of words and ideas from our public discourse. We will speak out against attempts to use the power of government to enforce ideological conformity and chill expression. Without the freedom to speak, we can’t even debate the policies in question. Like Orwell, we know language has power. When it’s distorted and censored, it disrupts the possibility of true dialogue, and puts democracy at risk.
We are fighting for a world where freedom of expression is enjoyed equitably, and where we are free to share ideas, literature, and culture across all manner of frontiers and borders. We will keep up that fight, and we will not be silenced.
Warmly,
