American Authors Have Lost The Plot

The U.S. publishing industry is largely owned by foreign corporations with different values and no vested interest in the First Amendment.

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash

The problem, we’re told, is “book banning.”

It’s not that America sold its iconic publishing houses to foreign entities that have different values and no vested interest in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

It’s us.

For years, a handful of mostly foreign-based publishing houses have blatantly censored conservative authors in the U.S., while stoking the ire of American parents.

It seems particularly difficult for them to accept that U.S. parents don’t want their young children to be exposed to books about a rainbow of imaginary genders and graphic descriptions of same sex activities. So they say we are dupes of U.S. conservative politicians who are cynically engaged in “book banning.”

This year, PEN America bestowed upon Macmillan Publishers CEO Jon Yaged its Free Expression 2025 Business Visionary Award, recognizing “transformative contributions to the world of literature and storytelling.”

Jon Yaged became CEO of Macmillan in 2022.

Macmillan published what is said to be the "most banned” book in the U.S. - “All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto” by “Black queer” LGBTQ+ activist George M. Johnson.

The book was published in 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which is owned by Macmillan, which is a subsidiary of the German company, Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. So it is more correct to say that a German company, Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, published the book.

In reality, virtually no American gives a hoot about what a publisher publishes, so long as it isn’t force-fed to children in public schools. Of course, some of these books actually feature child pornography, which is illegal under federal and state statutes that were simply ignored during the Democratic Biden administration.

Parents are saying it is inappropriate for librarians to choose to stock library shelves in elementary schools with graphic sex books rather than more mainstream books. This is a values call.

Trump’s Fault?

In his recent acceptance speech at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, Yaged blamed GOP President Donald Trump for censoring free expression.