Book and brains, begone by Lucas Durand

Once upon a less chaotic time, say five years ago, if you told an American painter, librarian, or playwright that they'd soon be applying for cultural asylum in France or Norway, they might’ve laughed and offered you a copy of The New Yorker. Today, they’re queuing up for Schengen visas and Googling “affordable artist studios in Lisbon.” Not out of wanderlust, but necessity.

Welcome to Donald Trump's second cultural purge, an ideological wildfire torching through school libraries, public broadcasting, museums, and grant institutions with the same reckless abandon one might expect from a bulldozer in the Louvre. What began with book bans and curriculum “audits” has metastasized into full-blown intellectual censorship and the casualties are not just books, but the entire infrastructure of American creative life.

First, let’s talk about the silent victims: libraries. Once the sacred quiet spaces of democracy and free access to knowledge, they’ve become political battlegrounds where titles are judged not by literary merit, but by ideological purity. Whole collections have vanished overnight because someone somewhere thought Beloved by Toni Morrison might "disturb" young readers. Of course it disturbs, it’s meant to. That’s literature. That’s growth. But no, in Trump's America 2.0, growth is dangerous, and discomfort is criminal.

We’re witnessing the transformation of librarians from friendly book sherpas into frontline warriors in a cold civil war. Some are resigning. Others are fired. Their only crime? Refusing to become censors.

Then there's the National Endowment for the Arts, less a budget line now, more a ghost. Federal funding for arts programs has been slashed with the kind of brutality you usually reserve for horror film edits. Children in underserved communities lose access to theater programs. Independent filmmakers kiss their scripts goodbye. And museum curators? They’re left courting billionaires to keep the lights on, trading integrity for survival.

Culture in Trump’s America has become suspect, especially if it’s critical, diverse, or heaven forbid, experimental. Art is now expected to be decorative, patriotic, and preferably white. Or else.

And so, we have the exodus. Not just a brain drain but a soul spill. Artists, thinkers, and educators are fleeing a country that no longer sees them as vital, but as liabilities. They’re taking their manuscripts, paintbrushes, and musical scores to places that still believe in nuance, complexity, and what’s that ancient concept again? ...truth.

Europe, with its generous artist residency programs, suddenly looks like a beacon of freedom. Canada, ever the polite cousin, opens its arms to embattled creatives. The irony is as sharp as a Greek tragedy: the land that once exported jazz, modernism, and the Harlem Renaissance is now outsourcing its talent.

There’s something profoundly un-American about all of this. We are a nation whose Constitution guarantees free expression, whose universities birthed cultural revolutions, whose libraries were once sanctuaries of pluralism. But under this administration, culture is reduced to a threat, a Trojan horse of liberal ideas sneaking into the vulnerable minds of the youth. And so the bonfire grows.

Let’s be honest. This isn’t about protecting children. It’s not about national pride. It’s about control. If you can shape what people read, watch, and say, you can shape what they believe. Control the stories, and you control the soul of a nation.

Yet amid the darkness, there is resilience. Underground theater groups adapt. Writers publish abroad. Artists livestream performances from undisclosed basements. Resistance, it seems, is the mother of invention. But should artists have to live like insurgents in their own country?

Even in exile, physical or emotional, American creatives remain stubbornly loud. They carry a legacy of protest art, beat poetry, Harlem jazz, punk rock, and indie rebellion in their DNA. And while Trump may try to exile them, erase them, or defund them, they will keep creating. Because that's what art does. It survives tyrants.

In the end, this isn’t just about artists or librarians or museums. It’s about who we are when the music stops and the shelves are bare. What kind of nation are we when we silence our most thoughtful voices, reduce culture to kitsch, and turn education into indoctrination?

If you hollow out the arts, you hollow out the nation. The rest is just scaffolding and slogans.

So here we are, with books banned, grants gone, and creative minds on the run. Trump might not have set out to kill culture, but he's certainly unplugged its life support.

And as the creative lights dim in America, they flicker on in places that still remember the value of a good story, a brave painting, or a haunting melody.

It’s not just Books, Brains, Begone, it’s democracy's echo fading into the distance.