RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://reason.com/2020/07/14/gary-garrels-san-francisco-museum-modern-art-racis

Irate employees of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art said the removal of Gary Garrels was “non-negotiable.”

Until last week, Gary Garrels was senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). He resigned his position after museum employees circulated a petition that accused him of racism and demanded his immediate ouster.

“Gary’s removal from SFMOMA is non-negotiable,” read the petition. “Considering his lengthy tenure at this institution, we ask just how long have his toxic white supremacist beliefs regarding race and equity directed his position curating the content of the museum?”

This accusation—that Garrels’ choices as an art curator are guided by white supremacist beliefs—is a very serious one. Unsurprisingly, it does not stand up to even minimal scrutiny.

The petitioners cite few examples of anything even approaching bad behavior from Garrels. Their sole complaint is that he allegedly concluded a presentation on how to diversify the museum’s holdings by saying, “don’t worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/cultural-hijacking-bruce-bawer/

Never underestimate the determination of left-wing ideologues to take over social, cultural, and political institutions – or the willingness of fools and knaves to whitewash the history of those takeovers. Joe McCarthy has become a symbol of unjust persecution, but there were Stalinists in the State Department. The Blacklist has become a byword for political intolerance, but the Hollywood Ten were all Party members, taking orders from Moscow and fiercely dedicated to the overthrow of American democracy. In the years between the wars, Communists took control of one trade union after another, often succeeding simply because, relentless and brutally unscrupulous in their lust for power, they managed either to wear their enemies down or terrify them into submission.

In his fascinating 2015 book Hollywood Traitors, Allan H. Ryskind writes that during World War II, “a cabal of top Communist writers” taught newbies how to work Stalinist ideas into scripts. Seven of the Hollywood Ten – the screenwriters, all Party members, who were blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 – were part of this cabal. The protégés got career boosts; the anti-Communist holdouts often suffered professionally. But while Blacklist victims are still celebrated as heroes, Hollywood writers whose anti-Communism damaged their livelihoods got bupkus.

Ryskind also recalls the powerful Screen Writers Guild (SWG), which, while consisting in 1940 of about 400 members, was run by a small board dominated by Stalinists like Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. When in 1944 anti-Communist filmmakers formed the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), the SWG joined other Moscow-directed unions in attacking it – with flagrant dishonesty – as “fascistic and anti-Semitic.” So effective was this savage campaign in damaging the MPA’s reputation that Ryskind’s father, Morrie, writer of Penny Serenade and His Girl Friday, felt compelled to defend the MPA in an article for the Saturday Review of Literature. It didn’t help: the smear continued.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/leftists-war-cancel-american-history-joseph-klein/

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week reached a new low in recklessness, even for her. She dismissed as no big deal the toppling of a Christopher Columbus statue by a mob who then tossed it into a nearby harbor in her hometown of Baltimore. “People will do what they do,” Pelosi said. “I don’t care that much about the statues.” Pelosi evidently doesn’t care much about mob rule either.

Most Americans do care about preserving the statues and other monuments dedicated to our nation’s heroes. Most Americans certainly do not believe that mobs should decide who does or does not deserve to be honored as part of America’s heritage. But leftists don’t trust the American people. The cancel culture crowd think they are entitled to cancel the American story of great progress towards a more perfect union and replace it with their own alternative of dystopian fiction. According to CNN anchor Don Lemon, for example, young people “have asked for decades” for the removal of certain statues and now “the chickens are coming home to roost.” Lemon said that Americans for too long have been taught “propaganda” and added that “some things you have to un-learn so that you can become a better citizen.” That sounds like what the Chinese Communists were saying during their cultural revolution.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/09/why-do-so-many-white-women-hate-themselves/

Amid societal unrest, woke white women are proving to be a brainwashed force to be reckoned with.

Some might find it odd that so many seemingly middle-class, young, white women are taking up street theater with a vengeance. We’ve seen the woke white woman spitting harangues into the faces of police officers, including black officers, trying to lecture and shame them into obedience.

We saw many of them acting up in the “autonomous zone” of CHAZ or CHOP in Seattle, condescendingly guarding a “blacks only” area. We’ve also seen these women physically attacking those they deem the enemy, including a Democrat state legislator in Wisconsin. A 29-year-old white woman was arrested for setting fire to the Wendy’s restaurant in Atlanta after the police altercation and shooting there last month. Another was filmed setting fire to police cars. The list goes on.

Some observers see all of this as a contradiction. Since the “woke white woman” tends to be college-educated, many think she must be smart. Since she comes from a middle- or even upper-class suburban background, people assume she must be emotionally stable. Because she is socially aware, she must be interested in trying to understand people as individual human beings. How is it that such a woman can so easily become an arsonist, a terrorist, a mobster, and a taunter of black police officers?

She shows none of the positive traits expected of her. Her commitment to identity politics demands she reject people as unique human beings. Since she insists racism is “systemic,” she is forever guilty and therefore cannot be emotionally stable. In her obedience to the coercive thought reform of the education establishment, she has surrendered the right to think independently.

https://whoknewnews.com/massachusetts-first-to-legalize-same-sex-now-first-to-rec

The City of Sommerville in Massachusetts is the first to have an ordinance that allows polyamorous groups to have the same rights as married couples like health benefits.
The policy also does not specify that couples should be in a romantic relationship.
The groundbreaking ordinance recognizes the existence of domestic partnerships of three or more people as married couples.

Massachusetts may now be the haven for same-sex and polyamorous couples in the US. It was the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in 2004, and now its left-leaning city of Sommerville is the first to pass an ordinance to recognize domestic partnerships of three or more people as married couples.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamilton-and-cancellation-11594243514?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

The video debut of a Broadway hit is finding commercial success but also a social-media backlash for its positive portrayal of men who helped found the greatest nation on earth.

Todd Spangler reports this week in Variety:

“Hamilton” delivered for Disney Plus — with the musical movie of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s reimagining of the founding father’s life spurring a spike in app downloads over its July 4th weekend debut.
The movie premiered on the Disney Plus streaming service on Friday, July 3. From Friday through Sunday, the Disney Plus app was downloaded 752,451 times globally…

Samantha Vincenty writes in Oprah Winfrey’s magazine:

But reaching a wider audience also brought a deluge of criticism amid the praise—including concerns about how the work lionized the United States’ slave-owning founding fathers and didn’t accurately portray history.

Hamilton supported the manumission of slaves but did not press for abolition. Ed Morales, a lecturer at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, argues in an op-ed for CNN that times have changed since the play’s 2015 debut:

“Hamilton” is a minefield of mixed messages: Is our takeaway about its main character that he is a revolutionary hero or flawed philanderer? Is its strategy of non-traditional casting a triumph that allows people of color to “rise up” or are they undermined by the irony of how their embodiment as founding fathers ignores the fact that most of the characters they play were slave owners?
“Hamilton” was the perfect play for the Obama era because it fed into Democratic liberalism’s shift away from heroes like Thomas Jefferson — who represented a figure of rugged pastoral individualism — to Hamilton, the master banker/whiz kid financial planner. Miranda crafts “Hamilton” as an immigrant “who gets the job done,” an outsider. But Hamilton in reality faced none of the discrimination wielded against immigrants that he is drawn as a model for…

https://nypost.com/2020/07/07/lin-manuel-miranda-responds-to-hamilton-criticism/

In the wake of recent Black Lives Matter protests, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s multi-Tony-winning “Hamilton” has fallen under scrutiny over its glorification of slave owners.

Miranda, 40, took to Twitter on Monday to respond to those critics.

This wave of criticism stems from the buzzy July 3 release of the show’s movie version on the streaming service Disney+, more than a year ahead of schedule, bringing with it a much wider audience.

On Sunday, Tracy Clayton — host of the Netflix podcast “Strong Black Legends” — tweeted that “ ’Hamilton’ the play and the movie were given to us in two different worlds & our willingness to interrogate things in this way feels like a clear sign of change.” In her thread, which earned 32,000 likes, she goes on to say that “ ’Hamilton’ is a flawed play about flawed people written by an imperfect person that gave my flawed and imperfect little life a big boost when i needed it most … but i do appreciate the change this illustrates & will be following the convo’s evolution.”