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When President Trump reconfigured the board of the Kennedy Center and made himself chairman, Democrats complained insisting the Center and the board had never had a partisan slant before Trump’s interference.
USA Today blathered: “From the outset, the Kennedy Center had bipartisan backing, with its board membership consisting of both Republican and Democratic appointees. Until Trump’s recent intervention.”
News alert: Any arts organization or theater group that opens every production with a land acknowledgement statement is a shadow puppet of left-wing Democrats.
Before the Trump takeover, the Kennedy Center website used to remind visitors that they are “standing on the traditional land” of the Nacotchtank and Piscataway tribes.”
This statement is as partisan (Democrat) as blue hair, nose rings, and fifty social activist buttons pinned on a knapsack.
The land acknowledgment phenomenon hit Philadelphia and other big cities over ten years ago when several small avant garde theaters opened every production with the mantra. The practice quickly spread to larger commercial theaters and then hit the big museums, like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Barnes Foundation and the Museum of the American Revolution. It is now standard fare at the American Philosophical Society – a land acknowledgment holdout – founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743.
While the practice hasn’t yet hit the athletic world, you can bet if Kamala Harris had won the presidential election we’d be hearing land acknowledgements before the opening of the World Series.
Trump attacked the programs at the Kennedy Center as being “too woke.” He had a special animus towards the Center’s fixation on drag queens. Why drag queens have become a major ‘cultural’ industry is anybody’s guess. Most drag queens are men of mediocre talent who hide behind outrageous costumes and makeup.
When Kennedy Center “celebrity” drag queens like Tara Hoot say the ban on drag queens at the Center “will hide our history and our stories,” he’s only saying that America will not get to hear the stories of how different drag queens came to put on their first dress or walk in their Mom’s high heels and then brought it all together in their heads to finally appear on stage.
Isn’t that just the same story being told over and over?
A female impersonator in Vegas doing Judy Garland is one thing; a drag queen with vampire-inspired eye shadow reading to children is really a cultural imposition on the level of those (forced) land acknowledgments.
The Kennedy Canter’s woke productions were a prime example of how the left has radicalized the world of arts and culture. The theater world – easily the mother lode of woke culture – came down hard on Trump’s reconfiguration of the Kennedy Center board.
This is how recent Playbill covered a Kennedy Center protest by leftists in D.C.:
The event began at Washington Circle, where one of the organizers, drag king Lord Henry spoke to the crowd: “We demand that the Kennedy Center Board reinstate queer programming, including but not limited to drag-oriented workshops and shows and any other equity and DEI initiatives at the Kennedy Center,” Lord Henry said. “We want to force Congress to drop the multiple attempts at criminalizing gender non-conformity, including Trump’s executive order conflating sex and gender and the attack on drag artists through budget amendments, denying funds to organizations supporting and protecting this queer art form.”
The arrogance of phrases like “We demand” is typical of the left. The mention of “queer programming” (mainstream gays never refer to themselves as “queer”), “conflating sex and gender” (an academic invention: there are only two biological sexes) points to a political polemic as stern as Das Kapital.
The harshness of the Playbill report indicates how complacent and spoiled the cultural left has become. They see their agenda as the new normal.
The Biden administration certainly did everything it could to encourage woke cultural madness. The Kennedy Center board members dismissed by Trump were all appointed by Biden. All of them were more or less in sync with Playbill’s anti-Trump motto: “Less Fascism! More Fashion!”
The Cultural Revolution begun by the left will be harder to eradicate or tame than the damage it has done to the nation politically, especially regarding immigration. The left has worked diligently to reshape the world of arts and culture over the years to reflect their values and beliefs, but Trump’s reshaping the Kennedy Center board with conservatives is a small, good start.
Even so, it may be too late too late to reverse the damage the left has done to the arts.
It is quite normal now to attend a play at any big urban theater and find that Hamlet is played by a black handicapped lesbian, or that Romeo and Juliet are two non-binary androgynous actors of indeterminate sex, or that in the restaging of such classics as Oklahoma – as happened at Philadelphia’s Forrest Theater several years ago – the cowboys on the range are overweight people of color while the hero, a white skinny Clint Eastwood type, falls for a 300 pound mulatto woman who knows how to throw a lasso and beat him up.
Leftist casting of this sort is cartoonish and stretches credibility; it also takes shock value to extremes despite the fact that over time shows like this become predictable and boring, especially when other theater companies in the city then try to “out avant garde” the competition. At a certain point there’s nowhere else to go, except perhaps “backwards” to traditional theater which then appears as revolutionary.
While the Kennedy Center never got this ultra woke – it always managed to have enough oatmeal offerings like Hamilton to please season ticket holders – its concessions to the world of woke were enough to sound alarm bells.
Vox.com, a progressive online outlet, declared that Trump’s censoring of drag performances at the center is “indicative of the right-wing desire to treat all queer art as pornography and queer people themselves as obscenities.”
But queer art in this case is a specific kind of gay art; it would not include plays by Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde, Edward Albee, Noel Coward, or an opera set to the poems of Walt Whitman or Gertrude Stein. What it would include would be woke plays where drag queens call for the murder of Republicans or that relish in the slaughter of Christians or Jews (in the name of Palestine, of course).
This is queer art.
The progressive outlet also bemoaned the National Endowment for the Arts’ announcement that under Trump, “it will be eliminating grants for underserved communities and prioritizing patriotic art in celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary next year, effectively swapping untold stories for jingoistic nationalism.”
Here we go again with those “untold stories.” Victim stories, “undeserved communities” (cottages filled with Salvadoran gang members?) and tales of oppression that take aim at the patriarchy or men, religion, the family, Christianity, etcetera. These are the stories that urban theater has been telling for the last decade or more.
But the swinging pendulum demands a return to balance.
Caroline Kennedy – who’s embarrassing video screed against family member RFK Jr. showed Americans the awful Dr. Jekyll inside her Mr. Hyde – now wants to meet with President Trump to discuss the D.C.-based center named in honor of her father John F. Kennedy.
According to the Daily Mail, the Emeritus Trustee at the center will meet Trump with her daughter, Rose Kennedy Schlossberg, an out lesbian who condemns Trump administration policies against biological men in women’s sports – a radical queer position that has effectively “invalidated” the LGBT movement in the heads of many gays and lesbians – in an effort to “address the drama at the institution…”
It’s unlikely this meeting, if it ever takes place, will amount to anything.
The challenge for conservatives and the new board at the Kennedy Center will be to deliver substantive performances that don’t fall into the stereotype of what liberals think about so called ‘conservative art,’ that being non-challenging marshmallow fare as yawn inducing as an old Walt Disney Haley Mills movie.
As The Guardian, that left-wing publication of note stated almost twenty years ago in a moment of illustrious illumination:
Where are the right-wing voices who will take the establishment on? For decades, theatre has been dominated by playwrights sympathetic to a liberal consensus. The culture of the left has been represented by strident plays and angry playwrights-but where are the voices of the right, and why can’t the stage accommodate both?
