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(LifeSiteNews) — Pop culture icon Nicki Minaj made international headlines last week when she posted a comment to Twitter encouraging fans not to be “bullied” into getting a COVID shot.

The 38-year-old Trinidad-born rapper urged followers to “pray on it” and “make sure you’re comfortable” with the decision to take or refuse the experimental drug. For herself, Minaj said she was doing her own research before she decided whether to get the jab.

The obviously “irresponsible” comments advocating personal autonomy and due diligence set off a firestorm of frenzied media attention.

MSNBC’s Joy Reid expressed the views of many in the mainstream press when she slammed Minaj for her tweet in a now-viral segment. During her diatribe, Reid trotted out old accusations that Minaj and others who question the shots are killing people by encouraging them to make their own medical decisions.

Never one to pass up using the race card, Reid added that she was “so sad” that a woman of color would steer people in “our community” away from getting the shot, and jeered when Minaj retweeted a clip of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson (a far-right “white supremacist,” of course) backing the pop star’s message.

Minaj refused to back down, defending herself for standing on the same side as Carlson on at least this one issue, while throwing the race card back at Reid.

But the primary takeaway from the Nicki Minaj dust-up is not so much what Minaj said, or the spicy back-and-forths traded with Reid via Twitter.

The real story is that the media and the political establishment have once again shown their hand.

The point is that in today’s culture, race is just a stand-in for politics, and vaccine acceptance versus refusal is not “black and white.”

It’s not about race, it’s about ideology

In going after Minaj for recommending that people make their own decisions about whether or not to get the COVID jab, the establishment media proved once again that the culture war has nothing to do with race and everything to do with ideology.

Social media was abuzz with the Nicki Minaj story throughout all of last week, with conservatives quick to point out the seeming hypocrisy of the leftist media.

After all, Reid and other corporate media pundits would normally fawn over the political opinions of a mixed-race female rap-star. Popular culture and racial politics are firmly entrenched territory for the left.

But instead, Reid attacked Minaj for daring to express an opinion contrary to the prevailing leftist narrative on COVID that requires everyone, regardless of risk factors, age, or natural immunity, to “get vaccinated,” with no questions asked.

Unknowingly, Reid stirred up a hornet’s nest.

As it turns out, Minaj, whose Instagram account boasts 1.57 million followers, is not the stereotypical “anti-vaxxer” that talking heads in the political and media establishment love to hate.

And she’s not alone.

CNN, MSNBC, and the corporate media as a whole take delight in pigeon-holing those opposed to their mass vaccination strategy as uniformly white, Christian, Trump-supporting rural Americans.

These are the “deplorables,” to quote Hillary Clinton; they, who so foolishly resist government intrusion into every aspect of their private lives, are “stupid” and should be “shunned,” CNN’s Don Lemon tells us.

Unfortunately for the establishment, it’s not nearly so simple.

By percentage, black Americans continue to be less likely to get the jab than white Americans. But you don’t hear CNN saying that black Americans are “stupid” or advocating that they be ostracized from society.

Regardless of race, politics, or socioeconomic bracket, many Americans feel that everyone should be able to make up their own minds about the medical procedures they do or do not undergo, and should not be subjected to public shaming for it.

It’s an American value that is widely shared among racial and economic groups, but not, incidentally, by members of the ruling class.

‘The black face of white supremacy’

While the left extols race as a defining characteristic of one’s personhood, a slew of recent examples have made clear that race is only important if it exists in conjunction with political ideology.

To have the “wrong” political perspective is to lose even one’s racial identity.

Thus a black man, who rose from poverty in South Central Los Angeles to prominence and acclaim as an influential political commentator and broadcaster, is attacked by the corporate media as “the black face of white supremacy” when he chooses to run as the Republican candidate for California governor.

Larry Elder’s skin color and success story ought to have made him the darling of the left, if people of color attaining power is really what they care about.

But the Los Angeles Times’ ridiculous headline proves the point once again that the culture war has nothing to do with race and everything to do with ideology.

As Joe Biden so articulately pointed out during his basement campaign last year, “If you have a problem figuring out who you’re voting for, you ain’t black.”

For the left, it seems blackness is not so much a skin color as a status bestowed upon those black Americans who fall in line with the prevailing agenda.

Blacks who espouse conservative values are manifestly not “black,” because they refuse to identify as victims who can only be helped by the benevolent oligarchic political establishment that alone can grant them power.

And indeed, to align with the ideologies of the left is to hold political power, often paradoxically through the claim of victimhood.

Contrary to the ravings of the L.A. Times, Elder is obviously not a white supremacist. But he does seem to believe in the supremacy of the American values of free markets, free speech, and freedom of religion. 

Elder ran on a ticket that promoted the view that being free to make one’s own personal medical decisions is superior to being forced by government and business entities to muzzle oneself in public and inject an experimental concoction into one’s body.

But as the Nicki Minaj story indicates, the left’s stranglehold on specific demographic groups may be starting to weaken.

As the ideology falters, the left is losing its grip on institutional power

The Nicki Minaj saga, together with the bitter smackdown of Larry Elder in his bid for the governorship of California, reveals what happens when the prevailing ideological narrative is interrupted, and proves that race and celebrity are only ever significant factors when it is politically convenient for the establishment.

That’s why the race-baiting corporate media was forced to disavow Elder, an obvious success story, for his politics.

Meanwhile, left-wing media, which has long made use of its death grip on Hollywood and the entertainment industry to cudgel Americans into some of its most pernicious sexual and political ideologies, have been put on the back foot with the Nicki Minaj story, forced to decry the “troubling intersection of entertainment and politics,” at least where the pop star is concerned.

The flare-up and ensuing Twitter war between Reid and Minaj was not an isolated incident, and signals that the leftist establishment is increasingly out of touch with its own base.

The leftist establishment, attempting to strong-arm its traditional voter block of minority Americans to align themselves with all of its pet projects and ambitions, is losing support as it pursues its manic no-holds-barred totalitarian scheme to vaccinate 100% of the country and apparently the world.

In the wake of increasing vaccine mandates, Biden’s already cratering approval ratings have nosedived, suffering a 12-point drop among black voters this month fueled by a 17-point drop among unvaccinated black voters.

It turns out that many Americans of all races and backgrounds share a common value: making their own decisions about their personal health, and maintaining a very rational distrust of government intrusion.

It may be that black Americans are beginning to push back against the radical bureaucrats who decry “systemic racism” while insisting that the government has the right to control the movements and bodily autonomy of black people.

The awakening of people like Minaj, whose fan base is undoubtedly diverse and likely not overly conservative, is bad news for Democrats. But what is bad news for the left is good news for everyone interested in freedom and a return to a rational and representative system of government.

While the establishment has amassed more power than arguably ever before using the excuse of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are emerging indicators that it is actually beginning to lose its grip.

Holding onto the fraying ends of a badly woven narrative of systemic racism, public health, and climate change, the ruling class has lost the plot in increasingly transparent ways.

And as the power structures of the system erode, old partnerships are also beginning to collapse.

Converging interests have made for some uncomfortable developments for the left

In New York City this week, members of the local Black Lives Matter (BLM) chapter, a radical leftist organization committed to abolishing the nuclear family and toppling capitalism, is now protesting the city’s vaccine passport scheme, arguing (rightfully) that it disproportionately affects black New Yorkers.

It’s a notable development, as BLM has been ideologically aligned with the same political left that has treated vaccination as a sacrament of the secular public health religion and pushed for increasing mandates throughout the country.

“Seventy-two percent of black people in this city from ages 18 to 44 are unvaccinated,” said Chivona Newsome, an organizer with Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, during a protest at a New York Italian restaurant, where several women became involved in a physical altercation over showing proof of vaccination earlier this week.

“So what is going to stop the Gestapo, I mean the NYPD, from rounding up black people, from snatching them off the train, off the bus?” Newsome wanted to know.

“We’re putting this city on notice that your mandate will not be another racist social distance practice,” the BLM leader said. “Black people are not going to stand by, or you will see another uprising. And that is not a threat. That is a promise. The vaccination passport is not a free passport to racism.”

Meanwhile, on the continent of Australia, which since March 2020 has evidently gone back to its historical roots and become a prison colony again, contractors protesting the harsh and totalitarian lockdown policies were accused of being “white supremacists” and “neo-Nazis” for fighting the liberty-crushing COVID protocols supported and implemented by leftist elites.

Live footage of the event, however, showed a diverse crowd, giving the lie to the media narrative that only one political ideology or racial group opposes the notion of living in what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has called a “biomedical security state.”

‘Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction’

Minaj and Elder, diverse working-class Australians, and even the Black Lives Matter protesters fighting the vaccine passport scheme in New York prove that the west is not enduring a “racial reckoning,” as we were told after the death of George Floyd last year, but an ideological reckoning.

People of all racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds are being forced to take sides on fundamental beliefs and values, not immutable biological characteristics.

We must choose either to get involved in the political process and make our voices heard to defend freedom and self-government, or else put on our masks, take our shots, and submit to the oligarchy of unelected bureaucrats that is overtaking the democracies of the west at breakneck speed.

Nowhere is this more necessary than in the United States, the proverbial City on the Hill.

As observed by many who have fled communist oppression in their home countries to seek freedom in the United States, if America falls, where else is there to go?

Former President Ronald Reagan said it best in a 1987 speech, observing that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

“We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream,” Reagan said. “It must be fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same.”

In an admonition never more appropriate than it is today, Reagan warned that if we fail to defend our freedom, we may be consigned to “spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”