Lin-Manuel Miranda’s takedown, from a lefty cultural icon to a cultural enemy of the people, was always inevitable. You can only ride the beast so much until you get eaten and I have little sympathy for lefties who play with identity politics only to discover it has sharp bigoted teeth.

The takedown of Miranda’s In The Heights on identity politics picked an easy target, a struggling movie, and pounded in the usual BLM stuff.

In The Heights is accused of representing Latinos instead of black people. And since Washington Heights does have a large black population, some of whom come from other parts of the hemisphere, the canceling was underway.

Rita Moreno went on Colbert to dismiss the controversy and was soon forced to join Miranda in apologizing for, the usual, dismissiveness. 

One of the worst sins is dismissiveness in the face of cancel culture. The message is, “You will be made to care.”

I’m not here to launch a defense of Lin-Manuel Miranda or In The Heights except to say that people, white, black, or Latino, have the right to their own stories. And they have the right to tell them how they please. And unless they’re depicting another group negatively, accusing them of bigotry is an attempt to control their story. I don’t have to care for the story. Neither does some Afro-studies grad with a Twitter account hoping that Jeff Bezos’ ex and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey will throw a few million her way if she cancels enough famous people on Twitter.

But what I will say is that Latinos already hate critical race theory. And the attacks on In The Heights and Rita Moreno are not going to help.

Among Hispanics though, only 13% rank it very favorably. That’s worse than the numbers among white men without college degrees.

42% do have an overall favorable impression of CRT, but 49% have a very unfavorable view of it and a total of 53% don’t like it.

Want to predict which way the growing assault on Latino culture by CRT is going to move the needle?

The black nationalist campaigns have the political wind at their back thanks to Democrats, corporations, and the entire establishment, but they may also be flying toward the cliff. Just because you currently have the power to force your racialist agenda on people, doesn’t mean that it’s wise to do so.