I Didn't Say It

Hozier, Irish singer-songwriter and longtime LGBTQ+ ally, taking a stand for the transgender community:

“If you believe in a free and open society, part of that is respecting and supporting your fellow citizens’ rights to be who they are. For me, it’s a question of decency and showing up. It’s a very simple question of human decency when you treat someone with respect, you treat them with respect whether that’s their pronoun, their name—it’s so simple. It really is. These things aren’t that complicated, you know? I think it’s grimly predictable at a time we’re in a cost-of-living crisis, this massive crisis of inequality, a rental crisis, housing crisis,” he said. “At a time where there are already huge, huge questions to be asked about how our society is functioning and what we want out of an economy that really isn’t working for everyday folks … there are media companies who love picking soft targets, and rather than having conversations about the actual, serious, difficult questions of our time and our collective predicament, will just take less than one percent of the population and decide the most pressing thing is to talk about them in an existential way. I don’t know who might need to hear this today but you are loved, you are seen and you deserve to be happy and respected for who you are and the God given life you live.”

This isn’t the first time Hozier has spoken out in support of the LGBTQ+ community; his Grammy-nominated 2013 debut single “Take Me to Church” blasted religious dogma and shame around sexuality. And after Tennessee became the first state to ban drag performances, Hozier performed with Sheryl Crow, Maren Morris, and others at the “Love Rising” concert benefiting Tennessee Equality Project, Inclusion Tennessee, and Out Memphis.

Bravo. But on the flip side …

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Jason Aldean, doubling down on his faux outrage and fake patriotism:

“So, all you weirdos out there who escaped your small town? I see you. I know what you went through. And I hope you have found a place where you feel at home and comfortable enough to be yourself. You were never a weirdo. There was never anything wrong with you. You are not depraved. Sometimes we’re just born where we don’t belong. And someone creating an idyllic and violent fantasy of “community” of the place you had to leave behind doesn’t change that one bit.”

Sometimes we’re born where we don’t belong? Fuck all the way off you asshat. In America anyone and everyone should belong where they choose to live and if you think your stance makes you patriotic you need to get a goddamned dictionary. Or just shut the fuck up.

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Chris Christie, on Ron DeSantis and Florida’s new Slavery Wasn’t So Bad education plan:

“First of all, ‘I didn’t do it and I’m not involved in it’ are not the words of leadership. You know, look, Governor DeSantis started this fire with the bill that he signed, and now he doesn’t want to take responsibility for whatever is done in the aftermath of it. And from listening and watching his comments, he’s obviously uncomfortable. The fact is that [he] starts these things for political advantage. I’m talking about governors micromanaging curriculum in schools. And the fact is that, you know, if this was such a big issue for Governor DeSantis, he had four years to do this. He only started to focus on this when he decided he wanted to run for president and tried to get to the right of [Thing 45]. So I think people see this as politically manipulative. We’re dividing our country into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces, and politicians are pitting them against each other to create conflict.”

What the hell is happening in the world where I agree with Chris Christie? But he’s right, DeSantis signed the bill but now acts like he had nothing to do with it, and that’s a chickenshit move. Which is what he is, and what he would be if he ever gets into the White House.

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Jesse Watters, taking over for Tucker Carlson as the most prolific POS on FOX, on Florida’s Slavery Wasn’t So Bad Laws:

“The curriculum includes how Black slaves were able to use their experience in some cases to make their brutally hard lives better. The course examines the various duties and trades performed by slaves like agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation. ‘Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.’ That’s the section everyone’s freaking out about. No one is arguing slaves benefited from slavery. No one is saying that. It’s not true. They’re teaching how Black people developed skills during slavery in some instances that could be applied for their own personal benefit. We can’t have an honest conversation with the likes of Kamala Harris or the likes of MSNBC. They don’t want an honest conversation. Why is Kamala Harris so dishonest about how Black history is taught? Is she ignorant and hasn’t read the curriculum? Is she just being handed talking points by staff? Or does she not want African-American history taught this way? Does she not want students to learn how resilient and capable Black Americans were during slavery and afterwards? What is Kamala Harris hiding?”

Let’s try this, Jesse. You live the life of a slave in the 1860s, okay?

We’ll start with you being chased by strangers and then captured and thrown onto a ship, chained in the bowels where you will spend months crossing an ocean lying in yours, and your fellow slaves,’ excrement; you will hardly be fed, and in fact many of you will die before you reach America. But you reach it, and you are poked and prodded and sold; your name is changed; you are separated from your family. You are put to work on a plantation where you toil from sunup to sundown seven days a week, every single day of the year. You are often starving; you are often beaten by the master for any reason while working in the fields. You sleep twenty or more in one room, often on a bare wooden floor. You cannot marry, you cannot learn to read, and any children you have are taken from you and sold off to who knows where. But then the Civil War happens and you’re suddenly freed and you can be a sharecropper on some white man’s land using the skills you learned on the plantation and you think that’s a positive thing?

Kindly fuck all the way off you self-entitled soulless fool.

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Brian Kilmeade, Fox News host, on Jason Aldean’s inflammatory, racist, hate-filled song:

“I looked at some of the lyrics, because in country music you can actually understand them. He’s taking it from the news. This is happening. This is so outrageous. There’s lawlessness everywhere. He’s trying to say, ‘In a small town—we’ve given up supporting the cops—we elect our own sheriffs, we take care of our own, and if you come in my house, you’re going to get shot.’ That’s called the American dream.”

I must have missed that dream of shooting people; just like I missed the dream where if you’re different from lily white faux-christian gun-toting conservatives then you don’t belong in their towns.

And you should be careful, Brian, because with the plucked eyebrows, and the tinge of blush on the cheeks, along with a hint of gloss on the lips, you’d be run out of Jason Aldean’s small town.

And don’t forget: small towns murdered Emmett Till and Matthew Shepard just for being different.

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Kamala Harris, Vice President, criticizing Florida “extremists” for backing educational guidelines to teach “revisionist history” about slavery being “good” for slave:

“Adults know what slavery really involved. It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother. It involved some of the worst examples of … depriving people of humanity in our world. How is it that anyone could suggest that, in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization? They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not stand for it.”

It's insanity.

Racist, revisionist, insanity.

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