BREAKING: NY Times Tries to Kill Me

My only hope is to go into the professional paranoia business.

If you’ve been aware of my work for a while, you may have a sense of what my feelings were when I came across a big opinion piece, in this week’s Sunday Times, on the subject of the tenth anniversary of the Hamilton musical, or you will have a sense when I tell you this: the burden of the piece is that while nobody could have seen it at the time, looking back now, the musical turns out to be not only an artifact of optimistic, Obama-era liberalism but also replete with the inner contradictions that have played a role in that era’s demise.

The writer, Ezekiel Kweku, presents this idea, which I and others have been writing about since the musical became a hit, as a revelation—a poignant one—and mentions none of my or anyone else’s decade-long, readily available critiques in very similar and related terms. It’s almost as if he and others on the Times Opinion staff have no idea that those critiques exist.

I’ve looked at this situation from every conceivable angle. I keep coming back to the only logical conclusion.

The New York Times is trying to kill me.

It’s a major escalation. Erase me, sure, I’m used to that. Bar, from certified middlebrow discourse, my decades of work on Hamilton and various perennially relevant Hamilton phenomena beginning long before the musical and continuing right through and beyond it—I’ve come to terms with being barred.

But this latest move is something else: a naked attempt to ratchet my blood pressure to the deadliest heights or, at the very least, drive me all the way around the bend—that bend’s not far off, as you can see—and leave me dribbling a Trumpian word salad for the rest of my days.

Here’s the silver bullet:

“Hamilton” was a victory party—we were living in a perfected version of the world it imagined. And who could doubt it? It was such a huge hit.

“Who could doubt it?”!?

Only a lot of people. Very publicly. So loudly that one might expect a Times Opinion editor and writer and staff to be aware — !!

Sorry.

Quick review, just to clarify:

Leave aside the interpretations I published on my old blog. Leave aside the opening chapter in Historians on “Hamilton” (Rutgers University Press, edited by the historians Claire Potter and Renee Russo, 2018), where I criticized Ron Chernow’s Hamilton biography, which the Times op-ed cites as if it’s authoritative (along with the work of another Alexander Hamilton fanboy, Stephen Knott). Leave aside the epilogue to my very recent book The Hamilton Scheme (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024), where I delve into the musical’s ineluctable connections to Obamism and the 2008-09 financial crisis and bailout and more.

Leave all that aside. It's not (all) about me. Even though the Times is trying to kill me, there’s a bigger picture.

The critique, ongoing, lo, these many years, has been by no means mine alone. Nor has it been by any means obscure. The Baffler’s not obscure; that’s where Matt Stoller published “The Hamilton Hustle,” in 2017. A major 2016 story in Harper’s —a cover story—by the widely read Robert Sullivan wasn't obscure. (Some others are mentioned below.) While it’s true that fewer people read long, thoughtful pieces in The Baffler and Harper’s than leaf or scroll through Sunday Times Opinion, the Times serves, self-appointed, as sola scriptura for what its readers are meant to take on faith for What’s Going On, so it’s mind-boggling (I fear fatally, in my case) to imagine Opinion staff in 2025 operating in total ignorance of such longstanding critiques.

But it must be operating in that state of ignorance. Otherwise how could there be a story about one of their own, venturing into a theater more or less, as he claims, tabula rasa and getting that thunderclap of insight about the musical and the Obama period?

His insight is political, of course, with inherent biases. So are my critique and the related critiques that the op-ed doesn’t know about or want to acknowledge. I think one reason Kweku takes no notice of longstanding discourse on problems with the play with reference to Obamism is that he finds his insight a painful, even “heartbreaking” one, as the print headline has it. Despite what he presents as a new clear-sightedness, and despite what he says he finds “dubious” about the play’s “racial and rhetorical gamesmanship,” the piece’s overall mood—in keeping with the presumed mood of its readers, the day before Trump’s second inauguration—is a rueful nostalgia for, and in that sense a literary re-creation of, the Obama presidency, that bygone time when the musical, despite its flaws, could be taken on balance and without argument as a decidedly positive force.

As if we all naturally assumed so at the time.

Kweku sneaks his apologetics for the play into what might appear to be an acknowledgment of its flaws. For example:

A necessary side effect of the musical’s central gimmick is that it necessarily obliterates the actual Black people of the era: Sally Hemings, Jefferson’s slave, is the only Black person named, relegated to an aside.

The “necessary”/“necessarily” repetition may be a proofreading gaffe, but the insistence is a tell. Without presenting any kind of argument, Kweku calls the play’s obliteration of black people in founding America an unavoidable side effect of casting people of color in the roles of white founders and their friends and families, whereas anybody interested in that issue would have to have read and taken into account the historian Lyra Monteiro’s argument—published in 2016 in Public History (https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2016.38.1.89)—that the obliteration, far from a side effect, is an essential element in the cultural work the play carries out. Rebecca Onion, a historian and an editor at Slate, interviewed Monteiro on the subject at the time, and guess who else covered it: The New York Times. Maybe worth a nod, then, just to demonstrate familiarity with the issues? Unless there isn’t any?

At one point Kweku seems to be acknowledging the play’s and Chernow’s exaggeration of the real Hamilton’s abolitionism …

He later calls himself and his friends “manumission abolitionists,” a coinage that follows Chernow in his tendency to take the most generous possible view of Hamilton’s antislavery credentials and enlightened bona fides more generally; the real Hamilton slung nativist attacks at his enemies and took a restrictive posture on immigration later in life.

…but while Hamilton was indeed nativist and anti-immigration, and certainly not egalitarian, what's neatly elided there are the more salient facts that he a) wasn’t an abolitionist and b) was an enslaver, facts hardly obscure, the latter, too, having been reported in the Times.

While bringing those facts up would have strengthened the intended point, bringing them up would also have required confronting a starker fact: Chernow and Miranda don’t take an overly generous view; they're flatly contradicted by reality on some pretty dire historical issues. That's what's ignored throughout the op-ed (and I mean ignored, assiduously, not argued against): any critique suggesting that the play’s dubious elements are not lapses but driving forces. In 2019, the Times reported on the poet, novelist, and playwright Ishmael Reed’s play “The Haunting,” staged-read at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. In the play, Lin-Manuel Miranda, author of the musical, is schooled by ghosts of colonialisms past in the historical realities of founding America; in a hilarious climactic scene, a disillusioned Miranda confronts Ron Chernow, just as the biographer is about to ascend to Heaven. Reed’s critique is radical. Kweku’s not only isn’t radical—fair enough—but ignores rather than refutes those that are.

The op-ed is so long because all of this thinkiness about the play is really meant to serve as a frame for a very broad history of the country. Kweku looks at the American founding in terms of what he calls “the Hamilton consensus”—now we're in David Brooksland, fantasizing about Hamilton as a promoter of upward mobility—and how that supposed consensus has and has not worked in building a meritocratic approach to American government and society, encapsulated for Kweku by Obama.

To me, the analysis is largely useless, in part because its founding-era history is glib to the point of absurdity, but mainly because it focuses on viewpoints, beliefs, moods, and philosophies and not on government policies. When a real-life issue does come up—loss of income mobility—it’s ascribed to big, ruthless economic forces; no attention is given to decisions made by leaders, certainly including but not limited to Obama, and definitely in the spirit of Hamilton, about which classes of economic actors government policy should favor. The sense is that things just kind of got worse, so now the country, left and right, is fighting about that and about how to view the founders. Meritocracy is no longer believed in.

At best useless—at worst an outright distortion of both founding history and current events. But so what: people disagree. The important thing for me is that the analysis is framed by a conceit in which Kweku has suddenly seen a connection between the Hamilton musical and a political sensibility prevailing during the musical’s big moment—and between the musical and certain problems with that sensibility and moment—which he says would have been hard to see at the time, and the only way to support that conceit is to eradicate what I, and I’m hardly the only one, have been working on, quite publicly, all this long, goddamned, tedious time. It’s possible that if influential people had paid some attention to us back then, seen some benefit in the critiques instead of brushing us off as killjoys, public discussion of such matters at places like the Times might be less impoverished than it is today.

Which might be helpful. Given, you know, everything.

But no. So back to the real issue:

The New York Times is trying to kill me, and I’m doing everything I can to prevent being killed.

One way might be to join the professional paranoids who really believe such things—really believe The New York Times is literally trying to kill them and whatnot—and who are gaining much charisma and many bedazzled followers as a result. Lately I’ve been watching with fascination the tweeting of the novelist and journalist Walter Kirn, and especially the replies of his followers. He’s got a spooky, visionary, mythopoeic shtick going, which I take to be 100% sincere, reporting gnostic perceptions of hidden systems controlling public life in America: the Smoking Man meets Chief Broom’s Combine to bring off what Kirn sees as a mass theatrical production that explains everything from the Trump assassination attempt to the Mangione arrest to the decision to move the inauguration indoors (to mute its impact, see, because that’s how the controllers arrange things). Kirn can explain whatever may happen to happen. Yet what happens will always remain mysterious. People love that.

I’d prefer not to go that route and doubt, frankly, that I could pull it off with a straight face. These are tough times, though. What are we supposed to do, when the once-respectable legacy media seems committed to performing magic tricks that make reality disappear? I’m just trying to stay alive.