this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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bUt tHe fOuNdiNg fAtHeRs...
The fact that women didn't get the right to vote until 1920 tells you all you need to know about the founding fathers and the US constitution. It was a piece of crap when written, and is a piece of crap today. Its the reason they push the whole "the constitution is immutable" BS.
Yep. Also how it used to count both indigenous and enslaved people as fractions of a full human. It's an incredible feat of propaganda that anyone can mistake it for being something different than what it explicitly says it is.
The founding fathers never intended the constitution to be so sacrosanct in the first place. That it should change with the needs of the nation.
Perhaps I've been a communist too long to understand the feeling anymore, but I don't think I've ever really understood the hero worship of the Founding Fathers. Even when I was a lib and accepted them as important and not totally evil figures in history, I didn't take their words as gospel. Like, the idealized whitewashing of the senate and electoral college were things I understood the historical context and reasoning for, but even hack then I viewed them as absurdly antiquated.
Thanks to dogshit revisionist history like Hamilton, American civic religion is doing just fine. I’m not even being glib, its success and adoption by the actual modern US government represents a new strategy which is basically just make the mythos of America Inclusive™️ and turn the FF into lovable characters (rather than actual real historical figures that did real actual lasting harm to the world) so that people can make their crappy fan art and fanfic. I’m thinking specifically of the Miku binder Thomas Jefferson fan”art” shudders.
In this sense, it becomes self-reinforcing by fandom culture because trying to explain how it’s cringey and bad for the world becomes a conversation about Letting People Enjoy Things. Trust me, I’ve had this conversation and that’s exactly how it goes.
The people can keep Spongebob but they must reject Hamilton.
In all seriousness tho, it is very weird. It's likely that most Yankees, if they heard of a popular piece of media that makes Hitler into a lovable character, they would rightfully go "that's Nazis trying to sanitize his image and whitewash what he was like." But then they'll miss it when it's their own history. Cause us Yankees grow up being told how important and intellectual the founding fathers were.
It IS weird! I remember when there were all these headlines during Trump the first about Mike Pence going to a production and getting an impotent finger wagging from the cast (before continuing anyways, the show must go on you see) and everybody was talking about how much of an epic own it was and it's like.... is nobody gonna ask why Mike Pence finds this play palatable enough to attend in person? Is nobody gonna ask why the drone striker in chief and his genocidaire VP and their ghoul friends welcomed Hamilton into the white house with open arms?? Also why is there literally not a single enslaved person character nor hardly a mention of slavery in the whole damn play? Lin Manual (idc how its spelt lol) Miranda was asked directly and he squirmed a bit and basically just said he didn't want to cuz he didn't find it relevant. Alright, then!
I could write a whole paper on why Hamilton isn't just critically bad but also genuinely, materially bad but i don't wanna eat up space on this post lol.
And the rap fucking sucks I'm sorry, I put a good faith effort into trying to watch the Disney+ production and got about 20 minutes in before checking out from the cringe. It's rappin' granny type shit.
TLDR: The american ruling class merging their mythos with modern pop culture/fandom culture was very effective to the point where even self-identified yank ""leftists"" can't see a problem with supporting it.
I always hated that dumbfuck ass play. It's an insult to Black people and our culture using shitty rap and replacing slaveowners with Black people. Fuck Hamilton and fuck that bum ass whoever the fuck who made it.
They can get you when you're young enough. I was probably indoctrinated since kindergarten. Only much later did I realize that a few white male slaveholding land speculators maybe, just maybe, didn't have everyone's interests at heart with the "revolution" they started.
I was taught a lot of the indoctrination as well, but I think it was the fact I was a Muslim growing up post 9/11. I'd also been to the region where my parents were from a couple times. So I guess because I saw first hand and has experience with my anti-western intervention family and community, I'd been inoculated from US civil religion to a certain extent.
Like, it's kinda hard to deify a nation whose children call you a terrorist, and whose people hold sweeping beliefs about countries that you've seen are not true with your own eyes. I'd been in Syria a few months before the initial color revolution attempt, although I was young, I do remember many parts of it. Iran even more so.
Also, I was a contrarian little shit.