Cynthia Erivo (she/her), one of the stars of the new movie Wicked, is an angry black woman. That’s not me saying it; it’s Erivo herself, who was openly livid when a fan used computer design skills to take a promo image from the movie and reimagine it to be more like the poster from the Broadway version of Wicked. According to Erivo, the fan erased the power of Erivo’s black womanhood. Erivo’s temper tantrum may go a long way to explaining why black men don’t like Kamala—and it’s the same reason white men didn’t like Hillary.

Before about a month ago, I’d never heard of Erivo. I know her only because, when I went to see Reagan and Am I Racist?, the theaters ran promos for Wicked. My sense was of a massively over-produced, insanely loud movie, with Erivo possessing a generic talent.

Of course, I’m biased because I despised the book, which really started the trend of re-doing the Western canon so that all that is good became evil and vice versa. I wasn’t surprised to learn that Wicked’s creator, Gregory Maguire, is gay and, if I’m reading Open Secrets correctly, a Democrat party donor.

Image from X.

But I digress.

While I may not have liked Wicked, half of America did. It went from being a book to being a hugely successful Broadway musical. That musical had an iconic graphic poster. The image below is the original poster (fair use) for the very first cast:

As part of promoting the movie, the studio put out a photograph in which Erivo (as the green-skinned non-Wicked Witch of the West) and Ariana Grande (as Glinda) mimicked that now-iconic graphic. A fan decided to do some fan art that harked back to the original poster. In this tweet, you can see a video showing how the fan made the changes:

Normal people look at that and think “cute and clever.”

However, Erivo is not normal. She is an angry black person and had a total meltdown because this one fan dared obscure her powerful black-woman gaze. Erivo removed her original X and Instagram posts, but here’s a screen capture:

This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen, equal to that awful Ai of us fighting, equal to people posing the question “is your ***** green”

None of this is funny

None of it is cute

It degrades me

It degrades us

The original poster is an ILLUSTRATION

I am a real life human being, who chose to to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer...because, without words we communicate with our eyes.

Our poster is an homage not an imitation, to edit my face and hide my eyes is to erase me.

And that is just deeply hurtful.

Put aside how foolish it is to attack the fan base. What matters for purposes of this post is the hypersensitive anger. This isn’t a black thing, although Erivo is black. This is a leftist woman thing. I’ve written endless posts about crazy leftist white women. (See, e.g., here and here.)

These women are broken creatures who have been told that they are simultaneously victims and oppressors, which is enough to drive anyone crazy. Meanwhile, black women get the same message, only without the part about them being oppressors. Instead, they’re told that they’re the most oppressed people in the world.

The fact that women are doing way better than men (more money, more college degrees, less dangerous jobs, less criminal activity) is irrelevant to these women. The fact that some of the richest, most powerful people in the world are women (e.g., Kamala, Hillary, Oprah, Laurene Powell-Jobs, etc.) is also irrelevant. What matters is that they are victims of the system, of men, of racism, of everything.

There’s a saying that depression is anger turned inward. Well, the opposite is true, too. Anger is depression turned outward. America’s women are deeply depressed, and that depression is often based on leftist lies about their status. So, leftist women are really angry.

And here’s the deal about angry people: No one likes them. The secret of being popular (to hark back to that song from Wicked, which focuses on the mindlessly superficial) is to be a happy, friendly, empathetic person. Being angry, bitter, vengeful, and self-centered is alienating—and in women, it’s very alienating to men. White men didn’t like angry Hillary, and black men don’t like angry Kamala.

This isn’t sexism. Sexism says that women aren’t up to the job, and no men are saying that. Instead, this is revulsion. Both Hillary and Kamala remind men of their ex-wives, the nagging, haranguing shrews who never appreciated their virtues and made their lives a misery. (And whether those women were right or not isn’t the issue.)

That’s why Obama’s scolding black men for being sexist if they don’t vote for Kamala isn’t going to move the needle. It’s the rage Kamala radiates now that the faux joy gone is what will keep black men home or even send them to Trump and the Republican party, because that’s where women like men and men are valued.