In May 2016, I surprised my daughter for her 18th birthday with a getaway to New York City to see her favorite play, Hamilton, in the Richard Rogers Theater with the original cast. We would fly out for a day and then fly back. It would cost way too much money, I’d get my wallet stolen, but I only had one daughter, and you only turned 18 once.
We were both obsessed with Hamilton. We knew every word of every song. It lived inside of us. It wasn’t just that it was brilliant, funny, moving, inventive and original. It also reminded all of us what this country’s founding principles were about. Best of all, it made learning history fun and cool. It was Schoolhouse Rock for a new generation.
When taking long road trips, we would blast the soundtrack, screaming every word. We’d start at the beginning and run through the entire play. Our inside jokes were witty asides from the play that we’d quote to each other so often that we had to force ourselves to stop because, after years of this, it was getting old.
By casting so many diverse people to play historical figures and making it a hip-hop musical, Hamilton was a bridge to the Black communities that were so often excluded from the Broadway experience and elite culture in general. Hamilton was for everybody, I thought. That was eight years ago.
As a devoted Obama supporter and, in 2016, a Hillary Clinton loyalist, I was overjoyed at the prospect of the first woman president to follow the first Black president. Heading into the election, I wrote this piece:
I wrote:
The election of Hillary Clinton is one of the most important battles in the war between two Americas. One America was built and maintained exclusively by and for white men. That demographic has awakened extremists on the left and right. The other America redeems the promise of possibility for everyone, no matter their status or skin color or class. That America has produced the nation’s first black president who not only lasted one term, but two, and who now promises to make history by helping elect another Democrat to follow his two terms. Electing Hillary Clinton doesn’t just say, “We’re electing a woman for the first time in our country’s history.” It also dares to say the first black American president was so successful he did the impossible by electing his chosen successor.
I didn’t notice back then that the Clinton campaign rented the entire Richard Rogers theater as a fundraiser. Tickets start at $2,700 a pop. I would never have thought twice about it. We were on the right side. It was an “all-of-society” effort to stop Trump. We were the good guys fighting the good fight, so why wouldn’t Hamilton be used that way?
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s entire career exists only because of Barack Obama. 15 years ago, in 2009, in Obama’s first year in office, Miranda performed this at the White House:
Over the years, Obama would co-opt the reputations and careers of major artists like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Hanks, and, yes, Lin-Manuel Miranda. They would become ride-or-die for the president, which wasn’t something I would have noticed back then.
As Miranda’s play exploded and became instantly profitable and popular, we all took that to mean that everyone wanted to be included in our America. It was the better, cooler America. But that changed when Trump won. Now, all we could see was a hostile country that just rejected us.
Even when the cast called out Mike Pence during the performance to protest the Trump administration, I never thought about whether it was bipartisan or not. I knew it wasn’t and I agreed with it. I couldn’t see the line between art and propaganda.
But now I can. All it took was this statement by the producer of Hamilton, Jeffrey Seller, wherein the play cancels itself, hiding behind the usual gaslighting and rationalizations so common on the left:
Notice right off the language here. He is doing what all establishment Democrats and Republicans have done for eight years: ignore the voices of the people. Trump defeated them not once but twice. If you believe in the founding principles of this country, you must respect their voices. But they don’t. The message they give is not for all Americans. It is only those Americans who agree with their ongoing delusions about Trump.
What they can’t stand is that Trump is now saying this culture does not belong only to them anymore. It belongs to all of us, even the unwashed masses all of them abandoned years ago and continue to demonize in films, in plays, in comedy, in journalism, in all of their award shows. We’re to accept that this only goes one way. That they have a right to decide what our culture will be and Trump and his supporters do not.
You did this. YOU did this. You forced Trump and his supporters to beat down the walls of the castle to be included in America’s culture. This is YOUR fault. You politicized it. You pushed propaganda on all of us for years. And now, you can’t stand it that you no longer control it, can you?
Trump’s second win was a complete and total humiliation and repudiation. They still refuse to learn that lesson. They refuse to move aside and allow this country to evolve into whatever it will be now.
But know this: they didn’t cancel themselves out of any high-minded ideals or worries about financials or yearning for the past — an America they destroyed by systematically dehumanizing half this country and telling them they are no longer welcome.
No, they canceled themselves out of fear, not of what Trump would do, but of what the Left would do.
The woke scolds already canceled Hamilton for not being hard enough on the slavers.
In the coming years, Miranda would never regain the luster of those early days of Hamilton. His musical In the Heights would be shut out of the Oscars. His film version of Hamilton also got no attention. Was it that Miranda was too tolerant of White America back then? Is that why he was no longer useful to the post-2020 Left?
Yes, that is why. The ideology of the progressive utopian Left goes something like this: you are accepted on a conditional basis. We control everything, so your income, status, reputation, and legacy are all in our tyrannical little hands. You must conform 100%, adhere to the doctrine and ideology, and stay loyal to the cause OR ELSE.
Acceptance can be revoked at any time if the Eye of Sauron falls upon you and someone believes they see something sinister against our utopia lurking just beneath the surface.
She's a RACIST! They cry. She's a BIGOT! He's a TRANSPHOBE! He's a HOMOPHOBE! SHE is a TRUMP SUPPORTER! No one is so powerful they are protected from the Left’s wrath. Not even Obama. One wrong move and their entire reputations can be destroyed overnight. They live with that fear. It has seeped into every corner of Hollywood, book publishing, and universities. Be careful what you wish for.
Art can’t survive on the Left now. Don’t try writing books, film scripts, or even poetry because it is mandated to be propaganda, a dogma delivery device that speaks to one type of person and says the same thing over and over again: the white male patriarchy is bad, and it must be dismantled.
Trump is always the villain, and this story is played over and over again because if the blood that runs through your veins depends on the feeling of being oppressed, you need an endless supply, and Trump provides that.
Very few of them find their way out of it. One of those people is Mike White, whose White Lotus series just dropped its third episode of Season 3. In it, three friends from high school are on vacation together when one of them might be a Trump supporter.
Right away, users on TikTok ran through the same madness and hysteria that is, not only the status quo on the Left, but also perfectly illustrates how disconnected they are from reality—how cold, uncaring, and cruel—they are. It isn’t just that power corrupts. It’s that power is a high no one can give up.
Had the cast of Hamilton actually performed at the Kennedy Center, they’d get a good, hard lesson in just how accepting of free expression they are on the Left now. How bipartisan they are.
No one would be spared. Their reputations, destroyed. They’d be attacked viciously. There would be agonizing op-eds in the New Yorker. They would be disinvited to parties. They might lose Instagram followers. They would be labeled “toxic” and “fascist apologists.” The press would say they were selling out for Hitler.
The truth? Going through with it, performing Hamilton instead of throwing a baby tantrum, would have been the true act of courage. If they were right, and Trump would have canceled the performances, then that would have counted as a win for the Left and Lin-Manuel Miranda, especially heading into the midterms. But they are just too crazy ever to be that smart.
Performing Hamilton would have proved that the play really is for and about all of America. It would mean that art shines through, and we’ll all just have to learn to live with everything else. It would have stayed true to the promise of the original work — and maybe it could have helped to unify this country.
At the very least, it would have shown that they aren’t the immature, petty, overly fragile, punitive, self-pitying brats we all know them to be.
But in canceling themselves, they’ve now proven that Hamilton never was for America. It was only for the half that is still living in the past, in their castle in the sky, their utopia, a utopia that is now collapsing.
Oh, they talk a good game, but they know what I know: they can’t risk their reputations even to stand up for art, decency, unity, and America.
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