By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, September 16, 2021
Do I believe that hip-hop star’s Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s
friend in Trinidad received a COVID-19 vaccine and then developed swollen
testicles and became impotent? Let’s just say I am going to wait for the full
review in The Lancet medical journal before drawing any firm
conclusions. I also might want a second opinions from the New England
Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Nature, Harvard Medical School, the Mayo Clinic,
Sloan-Kettering, and Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
But there is something spectacularly hilarious about this
absurd turn in the national debate about COVID-19 vaccinations, where no less a figure than Dr. Anthony Fauci felt the need to go on
national television and say, no, there is no evidence that the vaccine
will make your testes blow up like a pair of balloons in some sort of
twisted Ralph Bakshi-animated nightmare.
There is also something hysterical and ludicrous about
the fact that media fact-checkers at places such as USA Today and PolitiFact felt the need to “fact check” a tweet
from a hip-hop star that sounded one step removed from the urban legend that Little Mikey from the
Life cereal commercial died from the explosive effects of mixing Pop Rocks
candy with Coke.
The White House apparently felt the need to reach out to Minaj and offered to
connect her with a doctor with expertise. MSNBC’s Joy Reid did a whole segment denouncing Minaj, and there have been
critical pieces about Minaj at CNN, Vox, CNBC, the BBC, and
elsewhere. Minaj claims she is in “Twitter jail,” while Twitter insists they have not shut down her account. The
late-night comics made her the butt of their jokes, no pun intended.
Overnight, she’s become something akin to Public Enemy Number One.
Her claim of a COVID-19 vaccine inflating testicles is
nonsense, of course, but there was a time when medical, political, and cultural
experts didn’t go to Defcon One if a celebrity had nutty beliefs about medicine
or anything else. Lord knows we’ve joked about Gwyneth Paltrow’s nonsensical
health recommendations for years. The current COVID-vaccine opposition was
built upon preexisting anti-vaccine beliefs, which were heavily fueled by Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, and other anti-vaccine
activists who were given a welcome platform by Oprah Winfrey. (And this isn’t even getting into Robert Kennedy Jr.) You
probably don’t want to know about Sandra Bullock’s facials, where Josh Brolin got sunburned, or what’s in the Kardashian’s smoothies. But rest assured
that Demi Moore only uses “highly trained medical leeches.”
Celebrities are weird. They don’t really live in what you
and I would consider the real world. Their fabulous fortune and fame are often
directly tied into their appearance and the perception of youth, which drives
them to go to ever more extreme lengths to ensure that they keep looking young
and in their physical prime.
But now, in the 20th month of a global pandemic that the
current president pledged to “shut down,” a ludicrous tall tale from a hip-hop
star must be treated as if it’s a Russian intelligence disinformation campaign.
The reaction of public-health experts suggests they genuinely believe Minaj’s
tweet about her cousin’s friend’s testicles will convince some portion of the
public to not get vaccinated.
If you are the kind of person who would choose to not get
a vaccine to protect against a virus that has killed more than 4.6 million
people around the world, because you heard that Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s
friend in Trinidad had his testicles blow up, there’s really not much that
can be done to save you. Your ability to discern a trustworthy source of
information is fatally flawed, perhaps literally. You should not get your
health advice from hip-hop stars who have no idea who you are, just as you
should not take your personal hygiene tips from Steve Jobs, you should not get your tax advice from Wesley Snipes, you should not take
marital advice from O. J. Simpson, and you should not ask Armie Hammer to cater your next party. Nicki Minaj may
have the best of intentions, but she is not a doctor and no, wearing a nurse’s outfit in a music video does not count.
The thing is, if you don’t want to get vaccinated because
of a secondhand tale of a hip-hop star, you’re probably not going to be
persuaded by a counterargument from Dr. Anthony Fauci or CNN’s Sanjay Gupta
or PolitiFact. All of these establishment health experts are
putting enormous effort into an attempt to persuade the kinds of people who
instinctively reject the recommendations of establishment health experts.
Readers of this newsletter may or may not be familiar
with Nicki Minaj. She may very well be insane, but she has managed to channel
that insanity into a phenomenally successful music career. She churns out hit
after hit, makes Madonna look modest or even prudish, and eats controversy for
breakfast. Even with my limited familiarity with the hip-hop world — blame one of my
podcast co-hosts — I cannot emphasize this enough; Nicki Minaj’s
career runs on controversy the way most life forms run on oxygen. Her fans
adore her, in part because they see her as uncompromising and authentic, an
indefatigable fighter who never backs down from any critic or challenge.
(Say, does that description remind you of anyone else who
has been on the political scene lately?)
But Minaj’s career has thus far thrived on the kinds of
controversies that were almost standard-issue for hip-hop or top-tier
celebrities — fights and beefs and rivalries with other rappers, wildly explicit depictions of
sexuality, irking members of the LGBTQ community by declaring that she “used to be bi, now I’m just hetero.” Deviating from the
dominant American cultural orthodoxy since the millennium means inevitably you
will run afoul of at least one of the tenets of progressivism. Minaj described having an abortion as a teenager and
recounted her intense internal conflict about her choice, saying it “haunted me
all my life.” While she describes herself as pro-choice, she seems resistant to
the emerging sentiment from abortion proponents that terminating the pregnancy
does not involve an emotional cost to the mother-to-be. Some Christian readers
may also raise eyebrows at Minaj’s
advice regarding whether to get vaccinated, “Just pray on it and make sure
you’re comfortable with your decision, not bullied.” You don’t have to like all
of Minaj’s music to look at her and wonder if there’s a more complicated and
nuanced soul inside than the flashy image would suggest.
Hip-hop stars get a lot of leeway, even in our
increasingly censorious culture. Provoking outrage is the coin of the realm,
and combative controversy-courting is almost a requirement for stardom.
But by expressing a certain degree of vaccine skepticism
or wariness, Minaj has crossed a line that public-health experts, media voices,
and certain politicians enforce, and committed a sin they cannot ignore or
forgive. Watching the entire medical, media, and political establishments bring
all of their weight to bear upon Minaj, you would think she was Alex Jones or
Joe Rogan. Every claim, no matter how spectacularly outlandish and no matter
the source, must be policed by our public-health-disinformation watchers,
because those gullible masses could be swayed by any blasphemy. But people will
believe what they want to believe, and you can’t reason someone out of a
position that he didn’t reason himself into.
I doubt the furious and widespread denunciation and
mockery of Minaj will have the effect the medical, media, and political
establishments intend. Late Wednesday, Minaj demonstrated her contrition
by approvingly retweeting a Tucker Carlson segment.
In this, the entire establishment/anti-establishment
dynamic in our culture is vividly illustrated. Nicki Minaj is going to be just
about impossible to “cancel.” She’s already fabulously wealthy — her
estimated net worth is $80 million to $100 million — and doesn’t need money.
Her fan base isn’t going to abandon her if she maintains a vaccine-skeptical
position. Defiance of what other people think is her brand. You might see this
similar sensibility in Donald Trump, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Kanye West, and
other famous figures who are seen as politically incorrect or more controversial
than others in their field. They do what they want to do and speak their minds,
confident that no one can fire them and no one can fully de-platform them. It’s
easy to see why some people would look up to those larger-than-life figures;
many undoubtedly envy their full-spectrum freedom.
And in an American culture that feels particularly
censorious, intolerant, and eager to suppress those who dissent against the
orthodoxy of elites, a lot of people who might never think much about Nicki
Minaj one way or another might admire her furious and fierce rejection of those
insisting she must not say the things she’s said. When Reid denounced her,
Minaj reminded her followers of Reid’s old homophobic blog posts.
When someone objected to her retweeting Tucker Carlson, she
offered a particularly off-color description of what Democratic Party loyalty
demanded of African Americans. She utterly rejects the moral authority of
her critics — and a lot of Americans will probably relate to that sentiment . .
. even if they don’t care for her music, or believe what she said about her
cousin’s friend.
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