BRETT: Woke Shakespeare. That’s right. You didn’t misunderstand me. Woke Shakespeare. “Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre,” the Globe Theatre there over in England is “‘Decolonising the Plays of Shakespeare.'” Wait a minute. “‘Decolonizing the plays of Shakespeare'”? Well…
“Shakespeare’s Globe, which works primarily out of a reconstruction of the iconic Globe Theatre built by William Shakespeare’s own playing company in the 1500s, suggested that the webinars, supported by Cambridge University Press, were an answer to its own rhetorical question: ‘What does it mean to read Shakespeare through an anti-racist lens?’
Ummm. He has “strong views on a variety of issues, expressing relief when Sadiq Khan was re-elected as Mayor of London and tweeting about ‘the inanity of Brexit’ and ‘the monstrosity of Trump’, ‘white privilege’, ‘white male mediocrity’, and the ‘heavy hand of white supremacy’ in academia, among other things.”
Okaaaay. So they’re gonna put this on as an anti-racist play. It’s really an amazing thing. The woke culture wade its way all the way to that Globe Theatre right there on Stratford-upon-Avon. Can cancel culture kill Shakespeare? Back in 2017, Rush talked about the left hijacking Shakespeare for their own purposes, in that case having a Trump look-alike as Julius Caesar.
RUSH: Shakespeare in the Park.
This is a big deal for the theater world. You might think this is off-off-off-off Broadway. No, no, this is not off-off-off-off-off Broadway. This is a big deal and corporations love being seen. It’s connected to this. You have to have lived in New York and understand the New York theater and arts and croissant crowd, coupled with the corporate culture.
It’s how they all tell themselves and demonstrate to everyone else that they are cultured and sophisticated and supportive of the performing arts, some of the finest and most valuable elements of high society. The actors work in there for not very much and they do variations on Shakespeare plays.
What they’re doing now is Julius Caesar who, of course, as you know is assassinated by Et tu, Brute, as he’s walking into the Senate. Well, guess who’s playing Caesar in this adaptation? An orange-headed Julius Caesar made to look like Donald Trump gets stabbed to death and killed and the audiences cheer, and it is clear it is President Trump being assassinated.
So we know that the left enjoys watching a Donald Trump character stabbed to death on stage. We know that the left enjoys Donald Trump cut to pieces by a thousand illegal leaks. We know that some on the left actually appreciated the art of Kathy Griffin’s decapitation of Trump and that photo-op.
We know that left, for the most part, will actively and loudly and proudly support the political assassination of Donald Trump — and as far as that goes, nothing is out of bounds. Nothing is out of bounds. If collusion won’t kill Trump, if obstruction of justice narratives will not kill Trump’s presidency, then let’s kill it on stage. And we’ll call it art.
The political assassination of Donald Trump is art. It’s all in the phrasing. It’s good to see just how ugly the left is when their masks of acceptability and sophistication are removed. There’s no nuance here. The media ignores hypocrisy when practiced by Democrats, but there has been an accumulation of double standards that may overwhelm the media and their elected minions because these double standards are continuing to pile up on each other.
Do you remember when Sarah Palin was accused of being responsible for the shooting of Gabby Giffords and then I, secondarily, was similarly accused of this. Why? Well, on Sarah Palin’s website, she happened to have a graphic of the scope in a rifle. And that graphic happened to be discovered right around the time Giffords was shot.
So the left and its willing accomplices are running out saying that Palin inspired the shooting, and Palin had nothing to do with it. And the left and the media excoriated her, and in any public shooting, be it a movie theater or a school shooting, the left first tries to find if the perp is a Tea Party member.
Then they try to find out if the perp listens to talk radio. Then they try to find out if the perp watches Fox News. Then they try to find out if the perp voted Republican. They never find that out. The perps are always deranged either apolitical leftists who love Democrats or they’re just insane lunatics. But they are never conservative right-wingers, listeners to talk radio, and they’re never Sarah Palin acolytes.
But the point is, Sarah Palin had nothing to do with Gabby Giffords being shot. And yet, when it happened, that’s the only person the left blamed. Here Donald Trump is assassinated every night in Central Park on the stage, and the left applauds this and says it’s art and wants more of it. Kathy Griffin decapitates Trump and there’s some who think that went too far but privately they’re very happy.
BRETT: One of the things that’s most incredible when you watch these leftists come out and do this sort of stuff, whether it’s “decolonizing” Shakespeare’s plays or if it’s reimagining or redoing the Julius Caesar in the form of Donald Trump, it belies something about the left that I think people are not always really aware of, and it’s this.
They’re not great creators.
The leftists, they’re not great creators.
What they are… A lot of them are driven by nihilism, which is destruction for the sake of destruction. They want to be editors. They want to edit history. They want to remove names and statues and buildings and books and movies and plays and television shows, they want to remove them all from history, right?
They want to decide, “We’re gonna amputate that part of our culture, that part of our culture, that part of our culture,” but they don’t create very much. They really don’t create very much. You could easily write a bunch of plays that are anti-racist. You could easily write a bunch of plays that are anti-racist and take place back during the time of Shakespeare.
I mean, it’s not creative — it’s not creativity — if you were to do Romeo and Juliet and to have the Montagues and the Capulets and say, “You know wha we’ve done? We’ve modernized it and it turns out the reason the families hate each other is a beef off of Facebook. There’s a Twitter fight. There’s an Instagram hate going on right here. You know, we’ll do this and we’ll do that.”
They never go out and actually create anything new. They want to edit what exists and tell you that it doesn’t meet their standard, but they never offer up a product that we can critique. They just expect us to either defend the original product or to critique their critique, and what we’re doing is we’re giving them a veto in that regard.
Fine.
You want to go and do these things? Great. Let’s see you write plays, movies, stuff that is uplifting, empowering, worthy of celebration. Instead, they want to edit everything according to their taste. I get it. It’s a lot easier to engage in subtraction than it is to engage in addition, and the reality is with identity politics, it’s all about division and subtraction.
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