A few decades ago, it seemed like defenestrating the Kennedy family from the cathedral of American power was an impossible task.
No matter how many women drowned in cars he was driving or “waitress sandwiches” he participated in, Edward Kennedy continued in his role as “The Lion of the Senate” until his death in 2009.
Since then, pretty much any Kennedy relative who expressed much interest in politics was hailed as the Second Coming of Camelot. Ted’s son Patrick came the closest to matching the legacy; a representative from Rhode Island until 2011, his upward trajectory was halted after a charge of driving under the influence when he crashed his car on Capitol Hill in 2006.
(Not that his issues weren’t pretty much public knowledge before then: The polemicist Christopher Hitchens, no stranger to insobriety, penned an essay three years before the accident in which he noted Patrick’s “ability to find his way to the House unaided has long been a source of intermittent wonder.”)
Now, there is a Kennedy back in a position of power: the one they don’t like, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had the temerity to oppose 1) COVID vaccine mandates and 2) Joe Biden. The most famous structure and institution that bears its name, the Kennedy Center, is now being run on an interim basis by Richard Grenell, one of the Trump’s closest allies.
And when it gets reformed, who’ll be one of the first acts playing there? According to Steve Bannon’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, it’ll be the J6 Prison Choir.
The group, which is comprised of men who spent time behind bars for their roles in the Jan. 6. 2021 Capitol incursion, has been invited to the Kennedy Center by Grenell, according to Bannon.
“I think the J6 Choir is going to play the Kennedy Center for a night in honor of their families,” he told the crowd to applause.
“In fact, I got an idea. The night that they play — the J6 Choir plays and opens the new [Kennedy Center] with Rick Grenell and President Trump as chairman.
Would you go to see the J6 Choir perform in person?
“We have the J6 Choir, right? And we invite all the families they tried to destroy, the J6ers, and they get to sit in the boxes where the elites sit, right?” he continued, to applause. “And we take the elite for just one night, and we take them down to the D.C. gulag, right? For one night.”
Steve Bannon: The J6ers are here at CPAC! All of them! The J6 choir is gonna play the Kennedy Center! pic.twitter.com/Lkj3nRPxqD
— Grace Chong, MBI (@gc22gc) February 20, 2025
Now, that’s probably not going to happen — the D.C. gulag part, at least — and it’s not going to happen soon, since the 2025 season is already set.
However, I can tell you this much: Once Grenell and the like reform the Kennedy Center, you won’t see programs like what’s being put on Friday — Liberated Muse, a group that describes itself thusly on its X profile,”Multidisciplinary Arts Company of Black Women gracing stages of national theaters, libraries, schools & non-traditional spaces since 2008.”
We return to the Kennedy Center on February 21https://t.co/IDjqunyThJ pic.twitter.com/w3SKVi2kJ5
— ✽Liberated Muse✽ (@LiberatedMuse) December 21, 2024
As for the event, from the Kennedy Center’s website: “Liberated Muse presents ‘The Soundtrack for Social Justice,’ a poetic and musical reflection on the ways we can manifest a world of fairness and equity where human rights are recognized and upheld.”
That’s likely to change under Trump and Grenell. And what a more perfect way to let Washington and Caroline Kennedy know how drastic the change will be? It’s almost as perfect as removing the name from the USAID building.
The New York Times’ typically dire report on how the new president is handling the venerable Washington liberal institution: “Mr. Trump, who ended up canceling the reception and shunning the annual awards ceremony all four years of his first term, got his revenge last week when he purged the bipartisan Kennedy Center board of Biden appointees, fired the center’s president and made himself the new chairman.
“The question now is what a thin-skinned showman will do with an institution of music, theater and dance that has been central to Washington’s cultural life for more than 50 years,” the Times, with typical disdainful restraint, wondered about what it called “a pillar of the city’s establishment.”
Well, now we know. And much like RFK Jr., it’s the same story: The establishment can stick around if it likes, but the next four years are going to be an awfully humiliating period for them. Not only did it put the one Kennedy even the Kennedys don’t like into power, it’s finally working at eroding the rest of the cheap, vestigial Kennedy mystique posthaste.
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