No doubt you’re aware of the international spectacle rapper Nicki Minaj caused when she informed her 156 million followers on social media why she was not attending the Met Gala on Monday night.
It all began when she posted a series of tweets, explaining that she could not provide the proof of Covid vaccination required, er, because she was still conducting her own research. But she blithely shared preliminary findings, which included her cousin down in Trinidad telling her that the Covid vaccine caused a friend to end up with swollen testicles, which rendered him so impotent, his fiancée called off their wedding.
Her tweets compelled the health minister of Trinidad and Tobago to act with dispatch to debunk Trinidad-born Minaj’s claims.
Dr. Terrence Deyalsingh held a press conference Wednesday to debunk Minaj’s outlandish claim about a hitherto unreported side effect of the Covid-19 vaccine…
‘One of the reason we could not respond yesterday in real-time to Ms. Minaj was because we had to check and make sure what she was claiming was either true or false,’ Deyalsingh told reporters, stifling his own laughter mid-sentence.
‘We did, and unfortunately we wasted so much time yesterday running down this false claim. It is — as far as we know, at this point in time — there has been no such reported as a side effect,’ he added.
(RollingStone, September 15, 2021)
What he’s really saying is, if you are so concerned about your cousin’s friend down here in Trinidad, delete those tweets because they make us look like we’re living in a backwards banana republic.
But, remarkably, the White House got ensnared because Minaj also informed her followers that she had received an invitation to discuss her research and abiding concerns, tweeting excitedly on Wednesday that
The White House has invited me and I think it’s a step in the right direction. Yes, I’m going. I’ll be dressed in all pink like Legally Blonde so they know I mean business. I’ll ask questions on behalf of the people who have been made fun of for simply being human.
— Nicki Minaj (@NickiMinaj) September 13, 2021
Except that the White House wasted no time pointing out that the invitation was only for a call, not a visit:
‘As we have with others, we offered a call with Nicki Minaj and one of our doctors to answer questions she has about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine,’ a White House official said in a statement on Wednesday night.
In other words, ain’t nothing special about you, Ms. Minaj.
Ironically, just as it fell to Dr. Deyalsingh, a fellow Caribbean native, to educate her in this context, it fell to me, another fellow Caribbean native, to defend her. I did so by commenting to a New York Times report yesterday on this international spectacle as follows:
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Think what you will of Minaj (and I don’t think much of her ghetto-Barbie shtick), there’s no denying her influence among far too many vaccine-hesitant Americans, especially Blacks. What’s more, she’s objectively far more influential than celebrities like Olivia Rodrigo and Angelina Jolie – both of whom the Biden administration made a public show of inviting to the White House recently.
So why the public show of dismissing Minaj with just a phone call…? Surely if the Trump administration had done this, every liberal pundit in America would be screaming racism, no…? WTF, Joe!
_________
Again, I don’t care for her shtick, which I suspect is all about the clicks. Even worse, whether she realizes it or not, she is doing with tweets what black thugs do with bullets, namely making the death of black folks collateral damage of nihilistic and arrogant ignorance.
But, if you’re going to call her out for proselytizing doubts about Covid vaccines, don’t have scriptures of you doing the same in your proverbial closet. Because only an imperious fool would think none of Minaj’s 156 million followers will drag them out to help her expose your hypocrisy.
Sure enough, Joy Reid of MSNBC was probably feeling pretty self-righteous after hundreds of thousands of political elites in Washington cheered her for giving Minaj a good old-fashioned scolding for fueling that vaccine distrust. But she soon got a newfangled pillorying when Minaj clapped back – to likes from tens of millions on social media – by putting this old tweet (from a year ago today) on blast:
Ooops.
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