Our friend Ann McIlhinney sent a note to supporters on Thursday about the "mainstream media" campaigning for cancellations at the Trump-Kennedy Center at year's end. The networks and newspapers were thrilled when jazz acts The Cookers and Chuck Redd canceled at the last minute over the addition of the president's name.
Ann and her husband Phelim McAleer have made a number of documentary films and stage plays that ruffle leftist feathers, including a book and movie on the infamous Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell, who went to prison for grotesquely killing babies outside the womb and for the death of a woman from an anesthetic overdose.
Their stage plays are drawn from real-life testimony, and the latest is about the Hamas mass murder of October 7. Would this have played at the Kennedy Center under Biden? Let's guess it wouldn't. Ann wrote:
The mainstream media is currently trying to cancel our performance of the OCTOBER 7 play at the Kennedy Center.
We have just received two very similar "friendly" emails from CNN and the Washington Post. They were inquiring whether we are still moving forward with our production of the OCTOBER 7 play at the Kennedy Center.
So-called artists have already pulled out of planned performances at the DC venue because they hate Trump and the truth. Now the mainstream media are trying to whip up a mob and force others to withdraw. Can you believe they want to cancel a play about the biggest massacre of Jews since the holocaust?
Trump-Kennedy Center president Richard Grenell took after the leftist media campaign. MRC President David Bozell chimed in on X:
Grenell is referring to a play about the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
— David Bozell 🇺🇸 (@DavidBozell) December 31, 2025
CNN and the Washington Post are circling. Intimidation is the point.
Good for the Trump-Kennedy Center for standing firm.
The play stays. https://t.co/EHHs9P5jZV
Ann shared the message they sent back to inquiries to "bullies" at CNN and the Post, which said:
The OCTOBER 7 play will absolutely be on stage on January 28th. Good riddance to these taxpayer-funded cosplaying rebels. They seem to think producing art is about them feeling comfortable and cozy. Artists should always go where they feel uncomfortable, even unwanted — if they want to change the world, that's where they should be, instead of speaking into their taxpayer-funded echo chamber.
These performative walkouts are for their friends and funders — they don't care about the wider audience or creating new audiences. And they wonder why so many theaters are struggling?
Even their friends are bored with the woke, cliched, and hectoring art they are producing. "Doug Varone and Dancers," the New York dance company, said their walkout was "morally exhilarating."
That's very telling. They create to make themselves feel better, not the audience.
We create to bring the truth to the audience. Good to see them leave the stage. It leaves more stage time for the rest of us who want to produce genuine art. We are already thinking about future events at the Kennedy Center.
She told supporters: "This is the way the mainstream media intimidate and bully. The artists fear being called out and canceled. This is how the left and the mainstream media destroy careers and lives."
Plays like October 7 are the kind of productions that should pass muster in a democracy, but our media and cultural elites want to have only half a conversation, even on the worst terrorist events.
