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I used to go to movies, have season tickets to the Atlanta Broadway series and season tickets to the Atlanta Symphony. I quit them all because the appallingly glaring political slant.

Two weeks ago I was gifted tickets to “Hadestown” a Tony award winning musical. The politics were so obvious. There was a song about a wall and how bad it was to keep us safe inside and the others out! In the play the devil worked hard and the heroes thought they were above working. Oh, and climate change was what made them poor and hungry sending them to hell to work. Craziest play. What a birthday gift. Rogers and Hammerstein please come back!

Bottom line. I’m done with the arts. And I’m sad about that. Someday someone will see that there are a lot of people who would support art. Just art. No politics. I’m going to donate to the ballet theater mentioned in the piece.

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I run a not for profit arts organization, all of this is spot on. My organization is straight up barred from the vast majority of private foundations in my area because our board is too “white.” The FIRST questions on most foundation applications are about how I identity as the director, down to my gender identity. I’m toying with becoming a they/them, because in 2023 being just old gay is nearly as “bad” as being straight (after all gays reinforce the dreaded “gender binary” by virtue of the fact that we’re only attracted to one gender).

And what this DEI initiative has done to arts organizations and artists is disgusting. It’s full scale brain washing. Cultural organizations are devolving into nothing more than amen-corners for the church of woke; echo chambers for radical leftists where no diversity of opinion is allowed, and dissent is punishable by losing quite literally everything.

I am someone who is entirely self made in my field, I have no family or generational wealth, which means I can’t afford to say anything that goes against the grain. I’m being purposely vague on what sector of the arts I work in, because if this heresy ever got tied back to me, I’d be finished-- we aren’t allowed to have any position other than the most Marxist, extremist, Orwellian views on DEI-- Peace be upon it.

It is a crime that we’re in this space. We have allowed our universities to be completely taken over by extremist leftists, who are turning out waves of completely brain washed, radicalized Marxist foot soldiers. That is the core of our problem. We used to just say, oh well the college campuses are crazy and not pay it much mind, but those inmates are out of the asylum now, and they’re seizing power at all of our institutions, and the old guard liberals are all folding like wet rags to their demands. As the saying goes we all live on campus now.

This life time democrat is now a closet independent. I voted Republican for the first time in my life as a protest against the crazy coming from my side. The gop makes me sick for its own crazy problems (Election deniers, trump, etc.) but the democrats have gone equally crazy in the other direction. Where’s a sane person to turn?

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I'm a cellist who works on Broadway, I've been working there for more than two decades, and hiring practices there for musicians these days has become almost exclusively based on one's race and gender, followed closely by one's public declarations of only the most liberal political identity.

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So no white actors can portray animals in the lion king. But all white historical figures must only be played by non white actors in Hamilton? (Other than the “baddie” king who is white)

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Unfortunately, this great article confirms what many of us already know: if you want great opera, go to France or Italy; if you want great music and theater go to England or Germany; if you're wondering where this all leads, go to China. I'm just grateful we have YouTube because I for one would not spend one dime on these fools.

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I think Andrew Klavan has the best take on this phenomenon. He likened it to the Protestant Reformation/Catholic Counter-Reformation.

Which makes sense. This is a religious movement we’re seeing.

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It seems to me that if society continually portrays POC as victims and policies are made to therefore rectify by implementing discriminatory practices against non-POC we perpetuate racism into a never ending cycle of oppressors and victims. When enough of the white leftists are adversely affected by their own ideology things will change. At some point we need to get to the point of race neutral policies, but I fear it will not happen till pain is inflicted on all.

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This is also happening in academia, law, medicine, government, business as well as the arts. It is a full on assault on every aspect of our society. It is astonishing in its seemingly organized manner, dangerous and scary.

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It is straight out of Kurt Vonnegut's short story, Harrison Bergeron, which I did read in high school a long time ago. (It wouldn't be allowed now.)

Everyone must be the same. You can't have any above average abilities. Equal outcomes are mandated by law. There are NO individuals, only groups. Of course, you can't make everyone excel so everyone else must be handicapped. But even this dystopian short story didn't have the added layer of race on top. What is even more fitting, the story highlights ballet dancers and their handicaps. Story here: https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Bergeron_djvu.txt

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The world was shocked when, in 2001, the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddha statues. It has taken less than 20 years for our new cult to bring the same insanity here.

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"You either fit in or perish," or you do your work outside of the institutional mainstream and find alternative sources of funding. Artists don't have to undermine their integrity to do their work. It is possible to step outside of the bubble, an action artists used to take as part of their responsibility to the world: Be fearless and dedicated to your vision no matter what.

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Great article. The arts are clearly dying in the US and across the modern world. What passes for art today, in many domains, is largely driven by a self-indulgent egotism on the part of the artists themselves and their sponsors. It has to be a part of some grand narrative think-piece, instead of simply letting the art speak for itself. DEI is simply a species of this delusion.

Look at the monstrosities that are the MLK statue in Boston and the new Medusa-like creature that now adorns the top of the NYC courthouse.

I wrote about modern art and our new culture of bas taste here: https://www.gordoncomstock.com/p/mlk-modern-art-and-the-culture-of

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To all the writers at Free Press, please don't stop shining a light on the causes of our societal decay. Though I'm still relatively young, like some of the more accomplished anonymous artists in this article I myself have given up hope. I've found it quite freeing. Sometimes a forest has to burn down to flourish again.

This is a long quote, but one I keep coming back to recently, from The Golden Notebook, an all-time great novel. It felt particularly relevant while reading this article.

"The nightmare takes various forms, comes in sleep, or in wakefulness, and can be pictured most simply like this: There is a blindfolded man standing with his back to a brick wall. He has been tortured nearly to death. Opposite him are six men with their rifles raised ready to shoot, commanded by a seventh, who has his hand raised. When he drops his hand, the shots will ring out, and the prisoner will fall dead. But suddenly there is something unexpected – yet not altogether unexpected, for the seventh has been listening all this while in case it happens. There is an outburst of shouting and fighting in the street outside. The six men look, in query at their officer, the seventh. The officer stands waiting to see how the fighting outside will resolve itself. There is a shout: ‘We have won!’ At which the officer crosses the space to the wall, unties the bound man, and stands in his place. The man, hitherto bound, now binds the other. There is a moment, and this is the moment of horror in the nightmare, when they smile at each other: it is a brief, bitter, accepting smile. They are brothers in the smile. The smile holds a terrible truth that I want to evade. Because it cancels all creative emotion. The officer, the seventh, now stands blindfolded and waiting with his back to the wall. The former prisoner walks to the firing squad who are still standing with their weapons ready. He lifts his hand, then drops it. The shots ring out, and the body by the wall falls twitching. The six soldiers are shaken and sick; now they will go and drink to drown the memory of their murder. But the man who was bound, who is now free, smiles as they stumble away, cursing and hating him, just as they would have cursed and hated the other, now dead. And in this man’s smile at the six innocent soldiers there is a terrible understanding irony. This is the nightmare."

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We need more Landsmans standing up to this madness. I find it utterly shocking that so many white people got vicious over a stupid black square that did absolutely nothing to stop George Floyd from flooding his system with fentanyl. George Floyd, the only person with COVID to die of "murder."

And don't you know it's white people who are hiring by race and "gender," acting as useful idiots to a cause that undermines and will destroy their own institutions with what should be obvious to anyone is a ridiculous, self-serving, vapid, useless perspective on race. And it's RACIST as all get out. Indeed, in my 60 years on this planet, the past few have been the most racist of them all.

It has occurred to me: If being around white people is so hard for certain non-white people, why don't they start their own institutions? Why don't they publish their own books? Why don't they open their own art galleries?

Can't the useful idiot white people in charge see what's happening here? They're allowing themselves to be narcissistically gaslit into sabotage.

And while it doesn't do any real harm that every single TV commercial features a black family, or a white woman married to a "black or brown" man, and every TV therapist is a black woman lording it over the mentally unstable white man --

People really do not appreciate it. And the irony is that Landsman's institution will be the last one standing when this is over.

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Growing up, we were taught and we lived "You can not judge someone by the color of their skin". Wow, how far we have come as a society, even our POTUS boasts about doing just the opposite. If only MLK were around to see it...

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An excellent article.

Yes this is happening all across the arts including in publishing. There is a spiral of silence and people are frightened to speak out.

The only thing which will stop it will be the lawsuits and to a certain extent the profit motive. The NYT op-ed about American Dirt which Bari highlighted earlier in her twitter feed mentioned how well that book had done in part due to its notoriety. This is the archived version: https://archive.ph/pHU4V

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