Cardi B has some thoughts on the partial government shutdown — and she’s not holding back.
Cardi B’s viral shutdown rant made some really good points
“Like, our country is a hellhole right now, all for a fucking wall.”
Emily Stewart covered business and economics for Vox and wrote the newsletter The Big Squeeze, examining the ways ordinary people are being squeezed under capitalism. Before joining Vox, she worked for TheStreet.
The 26-year-old Bronx-born rapper posted a video on Instagram on Wednesday night addressing the now 27-day government shutdown and blasted President Donald Trump for refusing to fund the government over a “fucking wall.”
“This shit is crazy,” she said in the profanity-laced video. “Like, our country is a hellhole right now, all for a fucking wall. And we really need to take this serious.”
She pointed out that the shutdown has been going on for more than three weeks and noted that federal government workers were being forced to work without pay.
“Now, I don’t want to hear y’all motherfuckers talking about oh, but Obama shut down the government for 17 days. Yeah, bitch, for health care,” she said. “So your grandma could check her blood pressure and you bitches could go check your pussy in the gynecologist with no motherfucking problem.”
Cardi B, whose real name is Belcalis Almanzar, later continued, “I feel like we need to take some action. I don’t know what type of action, because that’s not what I do, but bitch, I’m scared. This is crazy. And I really feel bad for these people that gotta go to fucking work to not get motherfucking paid.”
The video, posted to Cardi B’s nearly 40 million followers, quickly went viral. By Thursday morning, it had racked up more than 9.4 million views.
It obviously generated buzz on Twitter, including among lawmakers in Washington, DC. Sens. Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) discussed whether they would retweet the video, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer weighed in on the debate.
“Guys, I’m still holding my breath. Are you gonna RT Cardi B or not?” Schumer tweeted.
Cardi B apparently didn’t realize what had happened with the video until she signed on to Twitter Wednesday night, when she asked why she was trending.
In a separate Instagram Live video this week, she blasted Trump’s insistence on the border wall, according to the Hill.
“You promised these fucking racist rednecks that you was gonna build the wall, but you know that was impossible,” she said. “But they voted for you and you promised them this shit, so now you have to do it.”
Trump appears dug in on his insistence that he get $5.7 billion for some 200 miles of barrier along the US-Mexico border in order to sign a bill to fund the government. It’s not clear what, if any, plan he has to negotiate his way out of this.
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This isn’t the first time Cardi B has made her thoughts known in the political realm. As Antonia Noori Farzan at the Washington Post notes, she’s previously weighed in on the United Nations’ role in Libya and US gun laws.
“I love political science. I love government. I’m obsessed with presidents. I’m obsessed to know how the system works,” she said in a 2018 interview with GQ.
In the same interview, she said she comments on world events because she’s genuinely interested.
”Me, I’m always watching the news,” she said. “I’m always looking at it on my phone. I hate when you talk about something that’s going on in the community, people think, because you’re famous, you doing it for clout. But you concerned about it because you are a citizen of America; you are a citizen of the world. If I want to get cool points, I could take a picture with a thong and my ass and y’all gonna give me the same amount of likes. I’m gonna trend even bigger.”
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