RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

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.