The actor Jane Fonda joined journalists, musicians and writers outside Washington’s John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in urging US citizens to “break your silence” and “stand tall against authoritarianism”.

At a damp but defiant rally hosted by Fonda’s Committee for the First Amendment on Friday, around a hundred invited guests gathered to hear speakers and singers rail against book bans, political censorship and other threats to free speech under Donald Trump.

“Today, books are being banned, plaques and monuments depicting historical events this administration wants to forget are being removed,” Fonda said from a stage under a grey, rainy sky. “Museums, the National Endowment for the Arts, state arts councils, public broadcasting – they’re all being defunded.”

The choice of the Kennedy Center as a backdrop was pointed: the US president has seized control of the national arts complex, targeted so-called “woke” programming, had his name added to its marble facade and announced that it will close for two years of renovations. Dozens of layoffs began this week.

Fonda observed: “This beloved citadel of the arts has become a symbol of what is happening. The centre has been effectively silenced after artists refused to bow to ideological demands and the racist erasure of history.

“As a cover, Trump is shutting it down for at least two years, supposedly to make repairs, and he even suggested it may be necessary to take it down to the studs. What’s he gonna do? Build another ballroom where he can dance and, like Nero, fiddle while his country burns?”

The 88-year-old has a storied career as performer – she won two best actress Oscars – and activist dating back to the Vietnam war. Last year she relaunched the Committee for the First Amendment, the McCarthy-era initiative co-founded by her father, Henry Fonda, to combat Hollywood blacklists.

She said the committee “felt it was time to expose the range and depth of the attacks on the bedrock of our democracy – the first amendment – and encourage you, the press, and American citizens in general, to understand that it’s time to break your silence and stand tall against the authoritarianism that is taking hold and consolidating fast. We know that when fear takes hold, silence spreads. We must not let that happen.”

Dubbed “Artists United for Our Freedoms”, Friday’s event featured blistering critiques of the administration’s crackdown on the press. Veteran broadcasters Joy Reid and Jim Acosta painted a grim portrait of a media landscape cowed by political pressure and corporate consolidation. They urged the press not to mince words.

Reid said: “We are living in autocracy and you know that the media is tainted at least, or at least is shy about giving you the facts, when every single anchor and journalist is not calling it autocracy, calling it fascism and describing this as a regime.

“If it acts like a regime, if it arrests like a regime, if it mints money with the president’s face on it like a regime, if it steals the Kennedy Center like a regime to aggrandize the president of the United States, if the supreme court kneels to it like the regime, if the speaker of the House gives the president a fake, made-up new award that he’s the only one who ever got like it’s a regime, if it smells like a regime, if its diaper smells like regime, baby, it’s a regime.”

Jessica González, co-chief executive of the media policy watchdog Free Press, elaborated on the dangers of billionaires acquiring media empires to curry favor with the White House. She condemned a proposed merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers, arguing that oligarchs are systematically dismantling diversity efforts and installing “bias monitors” to appease the administration.

The assault on the written word was another focus. Novelist Ann Patchett argued that, while more than 300 book titles have been purged from school libraries, genuinely dangerous items remain entirely unregulated. “What book can you think of that is as dangerous as an iPhone?” she asked the crowd, noting how mobile devices can flood a child’s life with anxiety and suicidal thoughts.

“No one bans anything that they love. So no matter how dangerous it is, we are a nation in love with phones and guns and so conversations about keeping our children safe by default go to books.”

Comedy writer Bess Kalb recounted how her picture-book tour was derailed in Montana by the very movement that claims to oppose cancel culture, demonstrating how local school boards are increasingly bowing to intimidation. Kalb also detailed the administration’s campaign against late-night comedians. “These permanent and temporary cancellations aren’t just about controlling jokes. They’re about controlling criticism of this administration.”

To illustrate the historical gravity of the moment, actors Billy Porter, Griffin Dunne and Sam Waterston delivered a dramatic reading of the House Un-American Activities Committee testimony of Paul Robeson, the pioneering Black singer and activist whose career was decimated by 1950s McCarthyism.

Waterston, who appeared in the film The Killing Fields and the TV series The Newsroom, told the gathering: “What’s happening here at the Kennedy Center is not a culture war sideshow. As it says in the anti-authoritarian playbook, before the camps, before the purges, before the marches, there is a theatre going dark. The gallery closed, the comedian silenced, the musician banned. This is not coincidence. The assault on artistic expression in America is central to the authoritarian project.”

Folk singer Joan Baez, a veteran of countless civil rights struggles, revealed she had considered returning her prestigious Kennedy Center Honor, but ultimately decided against it. “That would be admitting defeat,” she said. “It would mean that we’d given in to a bully and a tyrant who is doing his best to strip us of our freedoms, to strip us of our joy.

“I’m going to hang on to that glorious rainbow ribbon award and keep fighting like hell alongside of all of you until we restore our right to speak freely, to tell our history, to report the truth and to sing our freedom.”

Baez joined the singer Maggie Rogers for a moving rendition of the Bob Dylan song The Times They Are A-Changin’, then gave an a cappella performance of the civil rights-era anthem Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round.

Other performers included Kristy Lee, a country-folk singer who recently withdrew from performing at the Kennedy Center over concerns about political censorship. Baez and Fonda will also take part in a No Kings rally in St Paul, Minnesota, on Saturday.

Fonda warned: “The general public may think all this doesn’t affect them but it does. If we don’t fight back, the news we get will be increasingly fake. We won’t be allowed to know what’s really happening. Our children’s academic curricula will be actually censored. Ticket costs for cultural events will go up while the quality will go down. Books and films will be shallower, lacking nuance and complexity.”

She recalled being in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and witnessing an exhibition of so-called “degenerate art” getting bulldozed. “This is the direction that we’re headed in if we don’t wake up and stop what is happening,” she said.