RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.theblaze.com/news/hamilton-problematic-lin-manuel-miranda-criticism?utm_source=theblaze-breaking&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=
Leftists trying to cancel ‘Hamilton’ is peak 2020. The circular firing squad of progressivism has taken aim on one of its former darlings. Leftists loved the musical “Hamilton” when it hit Broadway in January 2015. Democratic leaders, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and the Obama family, flocked to see Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical over the years. The musical is based on founding father Alexander Hamilton but with a modern twist and heavy influence of hip-hop.Flash forward to 2020, and now the progressives say the founding fathers should solely be remembered for being slave owners, and all of their achievements have been nullified by many leftists. Some progressives not only declare that the founding fathers should no longer be admired, but they call for their statues to be ripped down. Now, there are people who want to cancel the “Hamilton” musical because it is based on the founding fathers. Many of the harsh critics are the same people who made the musical into a cultural leviathan.

“Hamilton” was trending on social media this weekend as the film-version made its debut on Disney Plus. There was also an undercurrent of leftists saying that “Hamilton” is “problematic.”

“Are y’all ready to talk about how problematic Hamilton is? Lin Manuel Miranda created a piece of work that used hip hop (a genre created by black people) to tell the story of colonizers and slave owners,” one Twitter user wrote.

“As much as I love the show, it and it’s writer are deeply problematic,” another wrote. “I’ve intentionally or unintentionally ignored these things for years, but I’m trying to fix this now so I can fully contextualize and understand Hamilton and it’s effect as a whole.”

“Hamilton is deeply problematic in concept and so is Lin Manuel Miranda to some degree,” another person tweeted.

“I mean I think the fact that a musical like Hamilton (which is deeply problematic and nationalist) has to exist in order for non-white actors to have a space on Broadway is just very indicative of how non-white stories will never be able to thrive on this elitist medium,” another person said.

https://www.tsowell.com/spmultic.html

Most of the arguments for so-called “multicultural” education are so flimsy, inconsistent, and downright silly that it is hard to imagine that they would have been taken seriously if they were not backed up by shrill rhetoric, character assassination, and the implied or open threat of organized disruption and violence on campus.
    Let us examine the multiculturalists’ questions, one by one:

  Why do we study Western civilization, to the neglect of other civilizations?
    Why is that question asked in English, rather than in some non-Western language?  Because English is what we speak.  Why do we concern ourselves with the Earth, which is an infinitesimal part of the known universe?  Because that is where we live.  If we want to understand the cultural and institutional world in which we carry on our daily lives, we need to understand the underlying rationale and the historical evolution of the way of life we have been born into.
    None of this has anything to do with whether English is a better language than some other languages.  English is in fact more inconsistent and less melodic than French, for example.  But we speak English for the same practical reasons that cause people in China to speak Chinese.  Attempts to turn this into an invidious comparisons issue miss the fundamental point that (1) languages exist to serve practical purposes and (2) they serve those purposes better, the more people in the same society speak the same language.
    Why don’t we study other civilizations equally?  The most obvious answer is the 24-hour day and the limited number of days we spend in college.  It is stretching things very thin to try to cover Western civilization in two semesters.  Throw in a couple of other civilizations and you are just kidding yourself that you are educating anybody, when all that you are really doing is teaching them to accept superficiality.  Those whose real agenda is propaganda are of course untroubled by such considerations.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/great-awokening-year-of-stupid/Has any people’s uprising ever been as moronic as the Great Awokening?

 I t turned out that the novel coronavirus was only the second-most-infectious disease to spread through the U.S. this year. Satan’s Cupcake has, after all, been diagnosed in less than 1 percent of Americans. The not-so-novel imbecility virus is, on the other hand, ravaging the minds of everyone from news reporters and politicians to brand managers, high-school kids, and utility-company executives. The fervor out there is often compared to the French Revolution, complete with the installation of a toy guillotine/vegetable chopper in front of Jeff Bezos’s house. But this revolution has a distinctly 21st-century American flavor: Let’s hear it for liberté, égalité, stupidité. Has any people’s uprising ever been this moronic? It’s like a sketch-comedy spoof of history, Bastille Day reenacted by the characters from Anchorman.

Item: In Minneapolis, the City Council votes unanimously to disband the police department and replace it with a “department of community safety and violence prevention” driven by “a holistic, public-health-oriented approach.” So, a Committee of Public Safety, then? Should Minneapolis ever follow through on this barmy scheme, which it won’t, I guess the Mini Apple can look forward to friendship bracelets instead of handcuffs, armed robbers getting suites at the nearest Hilton Garden Inn instead of jail cells, and lots of holistic counseling sessions for rapists. If there’s one thing we owe black folks, it’s to let criminals roam unchecked in their neighborhoods while rich, white, and well-connected people surround themselves with private security. People like, er, the members of the Minneapolis City Council.

Item: In Washington, D.C., working with the loud backing of leading public intellectuals who claim Abraham Lincoln and other Republicans did nothing to free the slaves, a mob of the historically challenged gather around a statue commemorating emancipation that was universally understood as a moving symbol of the liberation of black America until ten minutes ago, before the super-spreading of the stupidity virus.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/attacks-western-civilization-about-power-not-progress/

I n his recent cover story for National Review, Andrew Roberts, the most recent of many biographers of Winston Churchill, warned that, though their methods are “obviously not so appallingly extreme,” a new wave of zealots — as found among Instagram influencers and the dominant media class — are “now succeeding where Adolf Hitler and the Nazis failed” in undoing Western civilization. That’s a strong statement. And yet, these days, the examples bombard us.

Across Europe, as in America, many have taken to attacking statues of controversial historical figures. In Bristol, England, a 125-year-old statue of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, was thrown into a nearby harbor. In London’s Parliament Square, a statue of Winston Churchill was graffitied with the words “is a fascist,” (“wait until they hear about the other guy,” one Twitter user responded). The mayor of London has promised to review all statues, landmarks, and street names associated with slavery to ensure that they “suitably reflect London’s achievements and diversity.” The Spectator’s satirical column, “Steerpike,” suggested starting with Downing Street (“named after George Downing, who defended from first-hand experience the economics of West-Indian slavery”) as well as Buckingham Palace (“built by John Sheffield . . . who was the founding governor and largest shareholder of the Royal African Company”).

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/jk_rowling_has_been_mugged_by_gender_reality.html

In December, J.K. Rowling, the billionaire author of the Harry Potter books, dared to support a woman who argues that men cannot magically become women. For this crime, Rowling, who has been a lockstep leftist, became the subject of a sustained hate campaign. On Thursday, she published an essay justifying her belief in biological womanhood and expressing concern that the transgender movement is part of a sustained attack on women.

Transgender madness has progressed further in Britain than in America. The woman Rowling was defending, Maya Forstater, lost her job for challenging proposed amendments to the Gender Recognition Act of 2004. Under the GRA, people who want legal “gender” recognition have to jump through a few hoops showing their commitment to their non-biological gender. The proposed revisions would end any requirements other than a person’s say-so.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/on-name-changing-and-statue-toppling/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=first

General David Petraeus wrote an impassioned article in the Atlantic this week about the need to change the names of military bases that for over a century have been named after Confederate generals and to recalibrate iconic remembrances such as statues commemorating Robert E. Lee at West Point — points of reference he reminds us that have been central in his own experience and career.

His relevant points were twofold and ostensibly rational: Commanders such as Bragg and Benning (Petraeus proposes the renaming of other eponymous bases as well) were not especially effective commanders worthy of such majestic base commemoration. In some cases, as Petraeus notes, they were not even highly regarded by their peers. No one, certainly, would wish to defend the worldview of a Braxton Bragg. And, as Petraeus put it, as “traitors” they fought for an ignoble cause that perpetuated slavery. (Of course, the logic of renaming should then apply to the northern California community of Fort Bragg, also named after the unattractive Braxton Bragg — an idea to which some in the Democratic California legislature failed to win over the town’s mayor in 2015).

I think Petraeus is in many ways correct about his anguish. Yet, the bases were named not so much to glorify overt racists as for a variety of more mundane, insidious reasons in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — from concessions to local southerners where many of these bases were to be located, to obtain bipartisan congressional support for their funding, and to address the need in the decades-long and bitter aftermath of the Civil War to promote “healing” between the still hostile former opponents.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/19/the-tide-is-turning-back-to-biological-definitions-of-gender/

In 2014 Kevin Williamson wrote a column in the Chicago Tribune titled “Laverne Cox Is Not A Woman.” The premise of the piece, focused on the actor, was that trans women are not women but rather individuals who believe they are women. In what was at the time one of the biggest victories of the trans advocacy movement the Tribune retracted the piece for misleading facts and a poor tone. The message had been sent. Saying trans women are not women was forbidden and style guides were changed across the country.

But in the past week or so events in a Connecticut courthouse have ushered in a dramatic change to this rule. Mainstream outlets like the New York Post and Newsweek published pieces explicitly advocating the position that got Williamson’s piece banned six years ago. Both are written by women and both make clear that the authors believe in a biological definition of sex. An article from February in the Wall Street Journal also took this stance even earlier. What is emerging is a more concerted effort to defend biological gender in the news media space.

This is really pretty remarkable. Progressives and trans advocates had every reason to believe that the arc of history could only move in their direction. After all, once defining gender based on biology became offensive, even a slur, how could it ever make its way back into polite society? But what they didn’t understand was just how massive the gap was between their beliefs about the nature of gender and those of the American people.