On Friday, Hamilton: the Movie debuted on Disney+. On Monday, Lin Manuel-Miranda responded to fair criticism of his Pulitzer Prize-winning musical: that the show fails to truly reconcile with the ways in which its founding father protagonists profited from and participated in the American slave trade. “The sheer tonnage of complexities & failings of these people I couldn’t get. Or wrestled with but cut,” Miranda admitted on Twitter. “I took 6 years and fit as much as I could in a 2.5 hour musical. Did my best. It’s all fair game.”

Too bad Miranda didn’t consult Fox News host Brian Kilmeade first.

“It should be a lesson to people out there that even if you think you’re liberal and you’re woke, it’s not going to be good enough,” the Fox & Friends host complained Tuesday, speaking about Miranda’s response in an interview with New York Post columnist Miranda Devine. “I liked one musical in my life, and that is it; it’s an instant American history lesson while showing the realities of these characters.” Then Kilmeade turned to his guest, asking, “Are you as disappointed as I am with his tweet?”

“He’s just being woke. That’s what it is,” responded Devine. “They’re sort of trapped. It’s like Stockholm Syndrome. If you’re a liberal and you’re caught in this woke revolution, you can’t believe that you’re on the wrong side of history.”

Invoking the inflammatory speech President Donald Trump delivered at Mount Rushmore on Independence Day, Devine then addressed the phantom folks allegedly not just questioning Hamilton’s treatment of slavery, but actively calling for it to be “canceled.”

“It’s really not about the individual sins or not sins of Alexander Hamilton. It’s really about trying to erase and cancel American history and cast everything in the past as being irredeemably racist and hateful,” she said. “President Trump called it out in his speech at Mount Rushmore: the cancel culture is this left-wing fascist, totalitarian ideology and they want a ground zero. They want to destroy everything about America, everything that is good and start from the beginning to create God knows what. I think they’re all about destruction.”

As protesters around the world continue to topple statues and monuments built to honor men who profited from and participated in slavery, the argument that progressives will (and more importantly should) seek to deplatform Hamilton has gained a foothold in conservative media. “Can Hamilton—a show that celebrates America and her founders—survive cancel culture?” former Fox News host Megyn Kelly wrote last week on Twitter, linking to an opinion piece published by the New York Post that claimed “leftists would find much to criticize” in Hamilton, adding that “it isn’t hard to imagine their criticisms leading to the show’s cancellation.”

But the coverage of #cancelhamilton pales in comparison to the number of actual reappraisals of the show. The source of that hashtag is a tweet by Rosa A. Clemente, a former vice presidential candidate from the Green Party who has promoted a petition that calls for Disney to stop profiting from the film. (Thus far, that petition has less than 400 signatures.) On Twitter, most instances of the hashtag either question why anyone is tweeting #cancelhamilton in the first place or serve as bad faith attacks designed to discredit the progressive debate about who, precisely, American history has traditionally celebrated.

Besides, true, nuanced criticism of Hamilton: the Musical existed long before Hamilton: the Movie reignited interest in the show. Shortly after its Broadway debut in 2015, for instance, acclaimed writer and playwright Ishamel Reed wrote a scathing analysis of Hamilton, pointing out that it all but ignores how many of the show’s ostensible heroes were deeply intertwined with slavery. Reed later turned his critiques of Hamilton and Miranda himself into a show of his own.

And Miranda has previously acknowledged those who wonder why slavery is not a main focus of his work. “Even I think the notion of our Founders being these perfect men who got these stone tablets from the sky that became our Constitution and Bill of Rights is bullshit,” he told Rolling Stone in 2016. “They did a remarkable thing in sticking the landing from revolution to government. That’s the hardest thing to do. You can go across the ocean to France, where they totally fucked it up and then got stuck in a cycle of revolution and tyranny. So that’s not nothing. But that being said, there’s compromise in our founding documents. There’s compromise between North and South. There’s compromise between manufacture and agriculture. The same fights we have over the role of our government now and the size of our government now are the fights they were having. Add the brutality of slavery to that mix as an undercurrent in all of those decisions.”

In that same interview, Miranda noted that a previous version of Hamilton included a song performed by Hamilton, Jefferson, and James Madison that directly addressed each of their participation in system of slavery. But it was cut, he said, because none of those men did anything to stop the practice. “We realized we were bringing our show to a halt on something that none of them really did enough on,” Miranda explained.

More recently, Miranda has acknowledged more of his blind spots. He apologized for waiting to tweet support for the Black Lives Matter movement under the Hamilton social media banner, calling the decision a “moral failure.”

“Hamilton doesn’t exist without the Black and brown artists who created and revolutionized and changed the world through the culture, music, and language of hip-hop. Literally, the idea of the show doesn’t exist without the brilliant Black and brown artists in our cast, crew, and production team who breathe life into this story every time it’s performed,” he said in May.

Disney has not yet responded to a request for comment about this “controversy”—but regardless of whether the company has any plans to somehow remove Hamilton from Disney+ (an unlikely scenario, to put it lightly), we shouldn’t expect certain conservatives to let this debate go anytime soon. After all, playing into the culture war has become a major part of President Trump’s reelection strategy.

“Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution,” Trump said of “cancel culture” on the Fourth of July. “In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.”

On Wednesday, it was also reported that future Trump campaign rallies might actually feature statues of America’s Founding Fathers. For the president, who has openly criticized Hamilton in the past, it apparently is nice to have Washington on his side.

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