President Donald Trump’s capture of the Kennedy Center and the associated federal arts institutions has triggered a quiet earthquake among a small slice of the electorate: artists, writers, and creatives on the Right.
The new board of the capital’s premier performing arts center now includes an impressive lineup of influential conservatives: Fox News anchors, Cabinet officials, and even Trump’s wonderful chief of staff, Susie Wiles. This is a huge improvement over the last regime’s board, which was stuffed with the worst woke feminist busybodies, liberal fanatics, and censorious propagandists.
But it’s important to make sure that new performances and programming do not cater just to the Fox News Right. I’d hate to see the new slate devolve into a mirror image of the programming the left-wing former Kennedy Center board championed: lectures by Marxist academics, BLM-style propaganda, feminist and transgender projects, and fashionable liberal tripe such as Hamilton.
There’s nothing wrong with some good old-fashioned Republican red meat, but my hope is that at least some of the cultural products of this newly reformed institution will speak to larger themes that can transcend politics. Humanity, truth, beauty, goodness, masculinity, femininity, history and tradition, Western civilization, and what it means to be American.
These are timeless themes that have been explored in the greatest literary, artistic, and musical traditions of the era. If you are drawn to these themes and ideas, you are by definition on the right, since the left has long since fled for the Land of Lunacy. But even more important are the themes and ideas we do not celebrate: transgenderism, body positivity, “equity,” diversity, a hatred of America, and liberal feminism, to name a few.
The great Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton once said that “if you marry the spirit of the age, you become a widow in the next,” meaning that tying oneself to the fads and fashions of a particular moment is a surefire way to be forgotten because those fads have no relevance to the past or the future.
The same idea applies to injecting political ideology into traditional art forms and stories. A good story is a good story whether it’s set in the future, the past, or the present, and the timeless ways of telling it still apply. Good triumphing over evil, the hero’s journey, love conquering all, what it means to be human, the existential exigency of existence and all that this entails — this is how you create something that lasts. Conjuring new classics: this is the ultimate goal of any real arts renewal.
Of course, returning to an era of excellence and humanity over gender and political identity is in itself a deeply subversive and right-wing political statement! But where will all these non-left-wing artists and creatives come from? They have largely been cast out of the art schools and creative credentialing pipelines. If you’re, let’s say, a talented painter who doesn’t toe the left-wing party line, and you’re wondering where your MacArthur Genius grant is, it was sent to some nonbinary Indigenous folk artist who makes paper maché sculptures of phalluses as a critique on the patriarchy. She/they also received $100,000 from a Biden-era NGO to create an exhibit in the Smithsonian called “Achieving Equity Through Tie-Dye.”
Publishing, galleries, museums, film festivals, and theaters have made it clear: our kind is not welcome. The Venn Diagram of “Trump supporter,” “published novelist,” “award-winning playwright,” “acclaimed fine artist” and “award-winning director” is a bunch of circles that barely overlap. This is because a crucial piece of the arts production pipeline has long been sealed off from non-ideologues and dissidents: the schools. All, and I mean all, art schools, design schools, creative writing schools, film schools, and arts foundations strictly enforce left-wing politics with a fanatical religious fervor.
Walk into any museum in the country, or visit a local theater, and you will encounter the same shrill, left-wing trends and the same overtly politicized stories. Art as propaganda, as simply another vehicle for stale messaging, is the norm. Recapturing and reforming a single prestigious art school — or forming a new one — could radically transform the figure of art and creativity in America.
In the near term, we can also start refilling the nation’s depleted strategic reserve of talent — by simply uncovering it. There are plenty of amazing and talented people on our side, but most wisely choose not to take a political stand, out of self-preservation and economic necessity. Maybe they’re out there, but many stay quiet to protect their careers. Many others never even get a chance. Lord knows it is already insane to try and make a living in the arts. Now imagine doing it in a MAGA hat; enjoy unemployment!
Luring talent out will take some convincing and incentives by people with discerning taste. There are certainly playwrights and painters and comedians out there who would love to be part of a renewal, but most remain quiet; the arts regime in the United States is an authoritarian dictatorship where one dissident remark will get you immediately canceled.
Making it more socially acceptable for creatives to accept grant money from a Trump administration, or even debut a new play, say, at the Kennedy Center, would almost certainly come at the cost of burning their bridges to the industry at large. This makes the takeover of the Kennedy Center and its ancillary arts programs an exciting herald of a new, unexplored frontier opening up for the political right. Broadway and Hollywood may still be walled gardens of cringeworthy productions that exclusively appeal to the Left, but outside of those sclerotic and creatively drained patronage networks, an independent artistic ecosystem of new platforms, creatives, and visionaries is coming into focus. Many of these initiatives are still so new that it will take a few years for the first fruits to ripen, but it is most certainly on the way.
Capturing even one additional piece of this pipeline could make all the difference: a gallery, a theater. Hm…Trump Broadway?
It feels strange and almost alien to contemplate a new creative cultural infrastructure developing to serve artists and audiences who are not left-wing activists. Why is that? Maybe because we are so used to ceding creative production to the left that it feels almost unnatural to attempt to claw it back, to build something ourselves. These muscles haven’t been exercised in many decades. After all, what was the point? If you even bother to write your novel, you think some girlboss literary agent with an “I’m With Her” pin still on her NPR tote is going to like it?
Maybe we ceded the culture because ceding ground to the left was the right’s favorite hobby for many years. When people would wonder why the right doesn’t march in the streets like the left does: because we have jobs and families and the losers on the left don’t. They’ve got nowhere to be during the day, so they might as well loot a few stores and burn down a few buildings. Besides, if you go too far, you end up in solitary confinement for 20 years because you sat at Nancy Pelosi’s desk for five minutes.
Overt political actions don’t really come naturally to someone who has more conservative tendencies — and neither do overt creative endeavors. There aren’t a lot of right-wing parents who are going to encourage their children to follow their dreams and become poets or playwrights. In this economy? After paying for college? You better go out and get a job, son — you can write your limericks and do your little doodles on your own time.
The most important rule of making new culture and art, whatever it is, is this: the product itself doesn’t have to be an explicitly political project that is “right-wing” or conservative. In fact, it shouldn’t be. Instead, it should simply be truthful, beautiful, enlightening, lasting. Art should in general reject politics if it wants to have a real and lasting impact. You can’t create new classics if they are riddled with the political trends of the current moment. Only by rejecting political whims can any art not immediately become obsolete.
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Therefore, it is not about creating “right-wing art.” Instead, it is about unleashing the talents of right-wing or even politically neutral artists and creators. Instead of nurturing artists as activists, we need to nurture artists as artists. Any artistic renewal should not just be to please core audiences. It should also be to identify creative talent and nurture it before it is lost before people give up. It is not just about championing excellence. It’s also about championing our people.
Now that the means of cultural production have been officially seized, it’s time for us to replant our fallow fields with seeds that will grow robust crops of talent and untold cultural riches.
Peachy Keenan is a writer and mother of five living in Los Angeles. She is the author of Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War (2023, Regnery), Supervillains (Passage Press, late 2025), and a forthcoming novel. She also writes for a variety of publications, including the Los Angeles Times and for Substack at peachykeenan.com. Follow her on X @keenanpeachy.