A provocative Gerald Horne review, published alongside the insightful poet Ishmael Reed’s 2020 anti-disinformation book, seems noteworthy to U.S. historians:

This powerful play, originally produced at the Nuyorican Poets Café, comprehensively dismantles the phenomenon of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Hamilton. Reed uses the musical’s crimes against history to insist on a radical, cleareyed way of looking at our past and our selves. Both durable and timely, this goes beyond mere corrective – it is a meticulously researched rebuttal, an absorbing drama, and brilliant rallying cry for justice.

This book version of a two act play of 2019 was set to hold Hamilton properly accountable for his obvious crimes against humanity.

…reframes Hamilton’s origin story by emphasizing the years he spent [managing operations] for a slave firm in St. Croix. …he never ceased enslaving people himself, a fact which seems to trip up many historians and fans of the musical alike.

Or as the report “Alexander Hamilton’s Hidden History as an Enslaver” puts it to visitors of the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site:

…Hamilton’s exposure to slavery as a child caused him to internalize the lesson that enslavement was the symbol of success for a white man like himself and could lead to the higher station he sought.

Harper’s Magazine published an extract of the amazing wordplay.

miranda: The Schuylers held slaves for one hundred and fifty years. No wonder there were runaways.

chernow: Blame the publisher. I was confined to eight hundred pages. I couldn’t include everything. I was selective.

miranda: That means you left out information that would have blemished the reputations of your heroes.

chernow: You’re calling me a liar? How dare you. I won the Pulitzer Prize. My book is eight hundred pages long.

miranda: Your reputation is that of tarnish-removing. Scrubbing out the crud from mass murderers and enslavers.

Let’s review.

Robert Carter was notoriously freeing all his slaves in 1790s, the colony of Vermont had abolished slavery before becoming a state in 1770s, and even the colony of Georgia had banned slavery by 1732.

Got that timeline?

Somehow Hamilton’s life-long (1757-1804) habit of disgusting preference for the terrorism of Black Americans, directly engaging in state sanctioned rape of Black women for profit, was intentionally “scrubbed” by historian Chernow.

…Hamilton was in effect a slave trader—a fact overlooked by some historians. […] Hamilton’s grandson, Allan McLane Hamilton, said his grandfather did indeed own them and his own papers proved it. “It has been stated that Hamilton never owned a negro slave, but this is untrue,” he wrote. “We find that in his books there are entries showing that he purchased them for himself and for others.” However, that admission was generally ignored by many historians since it didn’t fit the established narrative.

You have to wonder what is so wrong with Chernow that he has even tried to defend himself by saying evidence found of a single act defines a man (when speaking of anti-slavery), while also saying that a long period of contradictory acts do not define that same man.

Here is Chernow’s retort to suggest that Hamilton opposed slavery:

[Hamilton] helped to defend free blacks when slave masters from out of state brandished bills of sale and tried to snatch them off the New York streets. Does this sound like a man invested in the perpetuation of slavery?

A brief moment, a perfunctory act. Hamilton performed in a manner that may have been self-serving by continuing slavery in a manner that wouldn’t provoke Blacks to overthrow his tyranny. Defending Americans walking around in the street from being suddenly taken hostage is a bar very far below real words and action of abolition. Hamilton also sometimes is credited for jumping into a Manumission Society, yet this group made attempts to silence and censor Black American voices, to prevent their freedom celebrations. Not impressive by standards of actual abolition known to have started at least 25 years before Hamilton was even born.

Perhaps we should say a brief political stand against kidnapping is only one small aspect of Hamilton’s identity? Or that we risk distortion by seeing things only through this lens?

Now consider Chernow’s argument for why extensive evidence of Hamilton’s support of slavery should be casually and intentionally downplayed:

“Whether Hamilton’s involvement with slavery was exemplary or atrocious, it was only one aspect of his identity, however important,” he writes. “There is, inevitably, some distortion of vising by viewing Hamilton’s large and varied life through this single lens.”

Let’s review.

Hamilton spent his entire life involved in slavery, engaging in both owning slaves and trading them for financial gain. Despite this, Chernow minimizes this aspect of his identity, highlighting a brief moment when Hamilton opposed one particular form of kidnapping Americans from the street. Chernow seems to suggest that a man deeply tied into slavery should not be defined solely with such long association and much evidence, yet also he can be defined by one exaggerated isolated period of his choosing.

Chernow presents lopsided apologist views on slavery, a single lens with gross distortion to obscure horrible crimes, which looks…

Awful. Inhumane. Ignorant.

Regardless of the diverse perspective Chernow encourages us to adopt regarding Hamilton’s life, characterizing his longstanding involvement in slavery as an “uncompromising abolitionist” is a highly deceptive choice of words. Disinformation alert.

Chernow’s attempt to downplay the horrors of slavery in Hamilton’s life by redirecting focus elsewhere is not acceptable. This is akin to suggesting that the Nuremberg trials should have portrayed Nazi death camp leader Rudolf Höss as an unwavering freedom fighter because he posted an “Arbeit macht frei” sign. By diminishing the significance of slavery and portraying it as just one facet of an otherwise immoral leader, Chernow risks aligning himself with the wrong side of history. Such calculated “Zone of Interest” thinking repeatedly has been demonstrated as dangerous.

The movie you see observes the mundane day-to-day lives of a well-off German family. Over and over, the father, Rudolf (played by Christian Friedel), goes to and from work; the mother, Hedwig (Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller), tends to her garden; and their children, a rambunctious bunch, play with their toys. In the movie you hear, however, there’s intermittent gunfire, bursts of screams, and an ever-present industrial cacophony. Along with snatches of dialogue and glimpses of details—the costuming, the barbed wire, the smoke—the film makes clear what’s going on: Rudolf is Rudolf Höss, the real-life longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, and this is a portrait of how he and his Nazi family actually lived, going about their days adjacent to the death camp he ran.

What would we think if a historian tried to tell us that a key figure in the establishment of Nazi Germany should not have his torture of slaves in a concentration camp over-emphasized due to fear of distorting whatever his varied interests were outside of this camp?

Repeated ingrained false, racist, and ahistorical narratives are being used to marginalize the voices of Black individuals who have endured significant and enduring atrocities. This is where many American societal accolades seem to stop, and it’s a problem. What makes the situation even more unfortunate is that efforts to bring truths for wider recognition and establish controls for data integrity to counter disinformation are often overlooked or disregarded.

Hamilton’s own grandson had it right when he warned everyone in 1910 about his family’s undeniable legacy of preserving slavery — he was a scientist and a poet, trying his best to get out the horrible hidden truths.

The imbalance in human systemic thinking is also a very bad omen for AI safety, which should be top of mind for everyone these days. There is acceleration potential for generative false history using unregulated low quality software, as I’ve written about here before when ChatGPT fails at basic slavery history. Chernow’s 800 page disinformation bomb could be exploded by anyone into 800,000 bomblets with the click of a button.

As we close out the year, Reed’s clarion and well-founded revelations about a willful distortion of American history ranks as a security professional must read for 2024.

A historian wrote in 2015 that wealthy Americans of the late 1800s pushed hard for the practice of staying home and giving gifts as a specific power play, a politically controlling act.

Christmas gift-giving, then, is the product of overlapping interests between elites who wanted to move raucous celebrations out of the streets and into homes, and families who simultaneously wanted to keep their children safe at home and expose them, in limited amounts, to commercial entertainment. Retailers certainly supported and benefited from this implicit alliance, but not until the turn of the 20th century did they assume a proactive role of marketing directly to children in the hopes that they might entice (or annoy) their parents into spending more money on what was already a well-established practice of Christmas gift-giving.

Shutting down public gatherings to focus on gifts only at home served to redirect attention away from pressing societal issues. It quelled public voices and excused the wealthy families from attending to any discontent or needs that would have been rising in the streets (e.g. civil rights of urban emancipated slaves, such as the 1866 systemic massacre of Blacks who had dared to gather and live among wealthy whites).

By the end of May 3, Memphis’s black community had been devastated. Forty-six blacks had been killed. Two whites died in the conflict, one as the result of an accident and another, a policeman, because of a self-inflicted gunshot. There were five rapes and 285 people were injured. Over one hundred houses and buildings burned down as a result of the riot and the neglect of the firemen. No arrests were made.

Despite strong traditional Christmas habits of large groups roaming outside in loud festivities (e.g. carolling) the American white Protestant leaders perceived such things as risk to their status, an open door to people collectively demanding civil rights.

Even before Christianity, it is thought that midwinter songs existed to keep up people’s spirits, along with dances, plays and feasts. …the carol with the most complicated history is ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’. … lot of people have thought there’s a subversive, hidden message in the lyrics, rallying support for Bonnie Prince Charlie and his family.

What keeps spirits up more than subversive hidden messages in song, as General Tubman might have said?

What would an aspiring white elitist after losing the Civil War, facing the prospect of rapid growth and prosperity in mass mixed-race gatherings (shift in political power), do in response?

Apparently the answer was to shut it all down with a shrewdly enforced family-focus of private gift giving — expectations of “being present” only at home, with some fancy wrapping paper and a bow on top.

America at this time further emphasized the “stay home” edict through widespread racist state-sanctioned massacres of Blacks. Wherever too much growth in collective power and public presence was perceived (e.g. Elaine 1919, Tulsa 1921) white mobs launched multi-pronged attacks to prevent Black prosperity.

Elaine, Arkansas is a perfect example. Blacks had peacefully gathered in a Church to organize a protest about unfair payments for goods. White law enforcement showed up with guns demanding the Blacks stay home under penalty of death. Blacks stood ground and refused to disperse, which ended in President Woodrow Wilson authorizing federal troops to jail or kill them all.

Go ask any American if they know about U.S. troops ordered to kill Blacks who refused to stay home. That’s the context of redefining Christmas as primarily an isolating event emphasizing heavy private spend instead of public festivity.

A lot of ink has been spilled superficially describing English habits during this same period as privacy-centric, desiring time very far apart via emergent railroads. However, consider also an overt emphasis on societal kindness, a very diametric opposite approach to forced isolation in American Christmas. Brits encouraged huge public gatherings for taking care of those in need.

…Victorians felt that everyone was entitled to enjoy themselves at Christmas. In 1851 a marquee was set up in Leicester Square in London, to feed people who were homeless or struggling.

22,000 people were fed roast beef pie, porter, plum pudding, tea, coffee and more, surrounded by festive lights and flowers. Similar events took place in cities all across the country.

This arose from orientations outside the family, showing Christmas traditions as giving publicly.

Some undertook these obligations perfectly cheerfully – the Norfolk clergyman James Woodforde noting in 1788 that he paid sixpence each to 56 “poor people” in his parish, entertained some to dinner, and those who were too lame to come in person had their dinners sent to them.

Anthropologists explain how a rapid shift from public welfare to entirely private gifting is symptomatic of deeper issues in American perceptions of power.

…gifts are also symbolic representations of power and relationships. All gifts, no matter how small, carry with them a responsibility and an obligation. And while we may try to mitigate those responsibilities and obligations with social codes of our own devising, we can’t truly escape them.

The effect of American elites driving hard towards isolating and home-centered over-commercialized practices as a national holiday had such a dramatic power shift away from public traditions, it clearly was reflected into another religion now stuck at home too.

Hanukkah is now one of the two most widely observed holidays for Jewish Americans, Creditor says, and it’s perhaps no surprise that this big rise in its popularity came soon after gift-giving made its way into the picture as part of the quintessential Christmas experience. In the late 1800s, Creditor explains, gift-giving became a “commercialized way of expressing Christmas, and Christmas became a national holiday.”

So, by the early 20th century, American Jews had become accustomed to seeing Christmas gifts abound. Parents didn’t want their children to feel left out as their peers received presents every December.

It seems that without the isolationist push of late 1800s wealthy Americans, emergent in the politics of post Civil War urbanization and industrialization, the pressure on Americans to stay home for excessive gift giving on Christmas/Hanukkah wouldn’t have happened.

Honestly, it sounds nefarious how a group of wealthy Protestants in America swayed their whole country to stay apart and attend only to their own family instead of others’ needs, let alone large societal issues.

Indeed, here’s another arguable byproduct of that targeted sway, which suggests design and intent of modern American Christmas habits has been intentionally preventing the mindfulness and healing the country needs.

Kwanzaa was created by Karenga out of the turbulent times of the 1960’s in Los Angeles, following the 1965 Watts riots, when a young African-American was pulled over on suspicions of drunk driving, resulting in an outbreak of violence.

Here’s an especially apt analysis of the oxygen-starving effect of the American Christmas traditions.

…no single moment or event made her drop Kwanzaa cold turkey. She thinks the momentum fizzled out after Cousin Olivia stopped throwing public parties through church, instead hosting them at her home.

An isolation from others, at an isolating time of year.

The American shift in Christmas to a wealthy white family focus on gift giving unfolded from turbulent times of the 1860s… so is it any wonder that Kwanzaa was invented in the 1960s for those expressing “separate but equal” visions?

Affirmation of a community to bring people together probably seemed a more achievable and healing outcome than trying to undo decades of powerful anti-social elitist commercialization for Christmas. Yet Kwanzaa, like Hanukkah, hasn’t escaped the sparkling allure of expensive and ostentatious displays of isolationism (competition to stay apart).

The best way to foil this Grinch-like situation remains the same, celebrating Christmas in large public gatherings to be festive together and help serve public needs. Be together in festivity with strangers, with a shared humanitarian purpose.

Nast [January 3rd, 1863] depicted Santa Claus decked out in stars and stripes handing out gifts to Union soldiers. If you look closely, you can see Union Santa clutching a puppet resembling the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, with a rope around its neck.

If you really want to celebrate Christmas, take care of each other with kindness.

Ho ho ho.