Recently, El Cheeto Loco announced he would remove the Chair of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and replace that person with … himself!
Since he’s already made his horse a senator, I suppose he has no one more qualified on hand. In any event, he has declared himself Emperor of American Culture, promising to whip us all into he-manly shape with no more of that icky drag stuff that reminds him of, I suppose, that time he went on a date with Rudy Giuliani.
Unsurprisingly, the response from the arts world has been a resounding chorus of “Oh, fuck no!” for about 10,000 serious reasons.
As I’m part of the arts world, I’m joining the chorus. I hope to talk you all down a bit about it but also pep you up a bit.
Like everything that asshole does, this move starts out scary but comes apart under scrutiny and yields to a plan of action. Let’s parse it out.
The Scary Part:
You are correct. This is a precursor to a program of censorship, perhaps a retread of Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare campaign of terror in the 1950s, with the modern witch-hunters’ obvious, but only first, targets being trans people and the wider LGBTQ+ community.
I’d be willing to bet, in fact, that McCarthyism 2.0 is the literal plan because El Cheeto’s first evil mentor was Roy Cohn.
For those lucky enough not to remember, Roy Cohn was a lawyer notorious for, among other unpleasant things, assisting McCarthy as chief counsel in his crusade to accuse and destroy supposed communists in the media and government, until both men were taken down by their own over-reach plus exposés by Edward R. Murrow.
Cohn then went into private practice in New York. There, he was so infamously crooked that he was eventually disbarred, but not before collecting a list of rich, famous clients, including one Donald J. Trump.
Those two were a match made in hell, by many accounts, and cut quite the swath together through the Studio 54 party scene. It ended in 1986 when Cohn died, sick, alone, and despised. His best bud, Little Donnie Dipshit, refused to visit him and denied their relationship at the very end. (Sound familiar, Rudy?)
Nevertheless, El Cheeto has yearned for his old friend over the years, lamenting every time some attorney tells him something he wants to do is illegal, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
(He’s dead, Donnie, and you wouldn’t even go when he called for you on his deathbed, you backstabbing bastard.)
So with one of the architects of McCarthyism as a formative guru, we can be sure Trump is dreaming of a 21st century HUAC, endless show-trial hearings led by Gym Jordan and the Three Weird Sisters of the House Maga Caucus, Boebert, Greene, and Mace, ruinous SLAPP lawsuits, bans, cancelling, and gleeful mobs.
The goal will be to erase any art and literature that doesn’t glorify the maga ideal. We can expect floods of AI-generated versions of “Birth of a Nation,” full of racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes and heavy doses of christian-nationalist propaganda, in which the heroes are the kinds of bulked-up, gun-slinging dudes Trump enjoys looking at, in slo-mo.
We’ll also have the spectacle of media companies, music labels, publishing houses, and key celebrities, piddling themselves to be the new regime’s favorite Leni Riefenstals.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will run like rats in fear of what the mobs will do to us if we take one wrong step.
I’m pretty sure that’s the plan.
Only it won’t work.
The Coming Apart Part:
This escalation of the culture war will fail for two reasons.
I. The first reason is there’s no there there.
The magaists are like most Americans in that they don’t understand there is no arts system in the USA. We have no credentialing bodies, no established academies, closely linked to government or social elites, that dictate American Arts & Letters. We have people who claim to be that, but they’re bullshitters.
Many people believe the federal government does support the arts, because politicians talk about supporting the arts, but that’s bullshit, too. Our government support consists basically of the National Endowment for the Arts and a few sincere but fragmented programs with painfully tiny budgets that are constantly being cut. If people knew how meager federal arts funding is, even diehard art-haters would think, “Damn, that’s cold.”
This lack of support has a few causes, but it’s mostly due to the US having never given two shits about the arts. Sorry, but facts.
Except for that brief fling with the WPA, the creative sector has never been important enough to warrant a bureaucracy of our own. We have no departments or agencies. Hell, we couldn’t even get into education despite the traditional pairing of the arts and sciences – and STEAM being an objectively better acronym than STEM.
Which means that there is nothing for Mango Mussolini to weaponize.
He can cut institutional funding, and that will hurt PBS, museums, and state programs, but they’ve been surviving political sabotage for decades. And 99+% of individual creatives never see a dime of that money anyway.
He can threaten and bribe media to act as censors for him, but they’re already at war with artists, replacing us with AI and churning out slop-buckets of conformist garbage.
At the federal level, there’s no infrastructure, no organization, not even any money – no way for him to blanket-crush us the way he blanket-cut-off everyone else’s funding and blanket-pardoned his pet insurrectionists.
This was true in McCarthy’s day, too, but back then limited technology allowed media companies to own the means of cultural production. You had to go through Big Media to make movies and television, publish books, record and distribute music, etc. McCarthy could attack speech indirectly, evading the First Amendment, by attacking the companies the arts depended on with bogus national security claims. And they were only too happy to serve up sacrificial victims, such as the Hollywood Ten.
Even so, censorship mainly hit corporate media, while in the greater art world, that period saw a flood of innovative, avant-garde, politically charged, and socially challenging creativity. How? I’ll get back to that.
And let’s remember, the 2020s are not the 1950s. Thanks to modern technology, artists today are more independent than we’ve been in centuries. And as the US’s red-headed stepchildren, we are used to self-funding our projects with no corporate middlemen (because we’re not that profitable). If you want to know what real-life “bootstrapping” looks like, consult an indie creative. It’s not as glamorous as the oligarchs make out.
When Trump comes for the arts, lacking any kind of structure or leverage, he’ll find it’s like emptying the ocean with his hands. He’ll have to terrorize each one of us individually, and nobody even knows how many of us, professional and amateur, there are. I don’t see him doing that for very long, do you?
II. Especially since the second reason his culture war will fail is that there’s no there there on his side, either.
The culture war has always been fake – mere inflammatory slogans, and the more ephemeral and illusory the scapegoats, the better they serve to enrage and divide people.
When you turn the concept into a thing, however, then you have problems.
So Clementine Caligula takes over the Kennedy Center. Whatever. It’s just a theater. It’s not attached to anything. No dominoes will fall, nor ripples spread because of it. This hostile takeover will thud into nothing, just like the thousands more hostile takeovers he’ll have to do if he wants to make a moral crusade of it.
And none of it will actually impact the arts.
The Kennedy Center is just a theater like any other. It is legendary only because of the audience that goes there. Its association with the Presidency makes it a favorite venue for wealthy art patrons – the glitterati whom Trump envies and hates to his rotten core.
By an amusing coincidence, many of them are also among the country’s biggest political donors. Oops.
But that glamorous world he resents is completely separate from the sweaty, ink- and paint-stained, 80+ hours/week world where art is actually made. Artists and Kennedy Center patrons exist in different realities, only crossing paths briefly at a few events per year.
Magaists don’t realize this because they never see either artists or art. All they see are the glitterati, and their own culture war slogans, through the filter of their angry fantasies.
By grabbing the Kennedy Center, Trump made the fantasy real and revealed its emptiness. Like he always does.
Meanwhile, we artists keep on working. Like we always do.
The Plan of Action Part:
But the McCarthyist threat has been made, and the malicious, destructive intent behind it is more real than Trump himself. It must be understood to be counteracted.
The Red Scare, the blacklist, today’s culture war, even the First Amendment fights over Black history, women’s history, and trans representation – none of that is really about the arts. The books, artworks, shows and films being defunded and banned don’t actually matter to fascists. We are not the fascists’ true targets. We are just a means to an end.
They really mean it when they go after the news media, because journalists confront them head-on, exposing their secrets. They understand that kind of threat to their power. That’s a hard danger to them.
They don’t see artists that way. To them, we’re just a bunch of farty flibberty-gibbits who can’t take a punch. But lots of people like us, so they go after us to get to those other people – the public, We the People.
They destroy the arts because art is personal and emotional, and they want to hurt and scare the people and tell them they can’t have anything private, anything just their own. The fascists have to be the center of their attention.
It’s like the abuser who punishes a child by putting down their pet.
They see artists as weak, disposable, something someone else loves, and no more threat to them than so many puppies.
They think that way because they are stupid. They can only understand the hard danger of direct confrontation. They don’t understand the soft danger of the arts.
Journalism is about information. The arts are about hearts and minds. Journalism tells you what happened. The arts tell you how to feel about it. Journalism speaks in plain words and clear images. The arts speak a subtle, even subliminal, language of symbolism and emotion. Art can deliver its messages without anyone being aware what it’s doing, let alone able to pinpoint its methods.
This brings us back to the outpouring of challenging art in the 1950s despite McCarthy’s pogroms.
I guarantee that any maga-fascist who happens to read this essay will laugh at me right about now. This is such self-soothing copium bullshit, right? Art is crap.
That’s what the McCarthyists thought. We are nothing to them. They can’t detect our signals or break our codes. They don’t get our banter. They don’t see anything in us that is target-worthy in our own right. Unless they want to drown a puppy to make children cry, they pay us no attention.
And that’s how the 1950s was full of American art, literature, drama, and music that protested injustice, called out corruption, challenged social and moral norms, critiqued the church, the government, the draft, specific news events, etc., and included the voices of people of color, immigrants, women, LGBTQ+ people, and more.
Artists even went after McCarthyism itself. Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, came out in 1953, the height of the Scare just before its collapse.
So what does this mean? What should we do right now?
Make Art.
That’s what we should do.
I realize it sounds glib to play up all this drama and end with telling people to carry on as they’ve been doing, but hear me out.
I believe the most direct, foundational form of protest is to keep doing the things the oppressors don’t want us to do. This is related to Timothy Snyder’s advice, “do not obey in advance,” i.e. don’t cede our agency, our liberty, our principles to appease the autocrat.
I amend that advice to simply this: Don’t Obey. Full stop. Forget “in advance.” Don’t obey ever.
Fascists want artists to shut up because, if we shut up, others will, too. They think that, if they silence artists, they will have taken something personal, something intimate and meaningful to the people – our cultural identity – and the people will become demoralized and will submit.
But they can’t silence us by force. Instead, they try to scare or depress us into silencing ourselves to appease them, and then they’ll take the credit for having done it to us, and everyone will fear them, and they’ll win. That’s what the blacklists, book bans, censorship, and mobs are for – to get us to stop making art.
So how should we respond to that?
By making art, that’s how.
But Jen, I sense you shouting, how???? I want to fight fascism, but I’m tired and confused and stressed and poor. How am I supposed to do this?
I hear you. Your concerns are legitimate, but this is doable. Plenty of experts on this stuff (and how fucked up is it that there are experts on this stuff?) offer tips on sustainable resistance. Here are a few that are working for me, so far. Your mileage may vary, but give them a try:
1. Breathe.
Deep, cleansing breaths, calm and grounded. Attacks on the arts are psychological warfare, intended to scare and upset people, but it only works if we let it into our heads. When you feel the tension rising inside, take a break. Get off the internet. Go outdoors. Go to your work or practice space, and do your creative exercises. Natural light and art are literally, neurologically, the best tonic for calming the nerves and mind. Apply liberally as needed.
2. Protect yourself.
Beef up your cyber security. Get your own website, backed up offline, so your work is not dependent on any corporate platform. If you’re a creative employee, start an independent side hustle, and have a lawyer look over your employment/contract terms re ownership and exclusivity. Save your money. Choose whom you allow into your personal circle, even as you reach out to the world. No more universal love and light, kumbaya, all are welcome bullshit. Take anyone’s money, but vet your friends.
3. Connect.
It will fall to all of us to look out for each other and to support and protect the vulnerable. Collaborate with your fellow artists. Network within your communities. Pour energy into local arts cooperatives and mutual aid groups (after vetting them, of course). Network across interest groups, too, for practical support with living costs, political action, legal services, schooling, even sharing healthy food and consumer goods.
Footnote: Avoid excessive ideological purity. When vetting the people you bring in and the groups you collaborate with, keep your ethical standards high, but judge people more on their values and actions than their labels. We will need carefully chosen friends in police departments, for example.
4. Keep it sustainable.
This is an “in it for the duration” situation, so don’t try to do it all on your own, and don’t put unreasonable pressure on yourself. Assess your skills, interests, passions, resources, obligations, personality. Ask yourself realistically what kinds of actions, artistic, economic, political, etc., fit with what you can do going forward. Make a manageable list, and do those things, knowing there are millions of other people making similar assessments and lists. Carry your weight, and trust others to carry theirs.
And if some don’t, kick ‘em and carry on with those who do. Part of sustainability has to be not wasting energy on the uncooperative.
5. Be Kryptonite.
Existence is Resistance. Being an artist is resistance. Choosing who you will or won’t work for is resistance. Choosing where you will or won’t spend your money is resistance. Growing a garden, sewing your clothes, sharing with neighbors, teaching children, cleaning rivers – all that stuff is the resistance, because it undoes or undermines what the fascists are trying to impose on us. So live your life on your own terms, not just in reaction against what they do. Don’t force yourself into fighting fascism as a separate, additional thing you must do. Being a free human being is the fight against fascism. So when you’re figuring out how to be in the fight, consider all the things you do every day and try to do them in a way, with an energy, that makes them toxic to fascism. Thus, just by your existence, you are poisoning the well of that evil ideology. Then everything else you add to your to-do list is gravy. Liberty gravy.
No sugarcoating. The world is in trouble. There is a disease in our body politic, and it will take more than just ousting the current crop of villains to cure it.
We in the arts, being the cultural influencers, have a vital role to play. We may be disorganized and freaked-out, but this is our moment to do what we do. Win hearts and minds. Soothe shattered nerves. Awaken atrophied senses. Guide the narratives, and shine light in the darkness.
So breathe, hydrate, touch grass. And keep making art.
-Jen
Illustrated with details from my collage. XIX. The Sun, symbolically relevant on many levels.
