The British rapper and singer M.I.A. has issued a clarification regarding statements she made earlier this week comparing Alex Jones’ defamatory comments about the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting to celebrities supporting the COVID-19 vaccines. The musician’s comments followed shortly after Jones was ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in damages to the victims of the shooting’s families.
On October 12, M.I.A. took to Twitter to offer her response on Jones’ verdict, arguing that “If Alex jones pays for lying shouldn’t every celebrity pushing vaccines pay too,” suggesting to fans that she believes that support for vaccines to be a lie on a similar magnitude to Jones’ suggestion that the Sandy Hook shootings were a government sponsored hoax.
According to NME, the artist was recently asked about her comments in an interview related to her upcoming album MATA, to which she ridiculed the idea that she was against vaccines: “The language they use to attack anybody is to say: ‘Oh, she’s an anti-vaxxer’ or blah blah blah. And it’s like, no, not really.”
She goes on to talk about her own purported experiences with the vaccine, saying that “I know three people who have died from taking the vaccine and I know three people who have died from COVID. This is in my life, in my experience. If anyone is going to deny that experience and gaslight me, saying: ‘No, that’s not your experience,’ then what is the point of anything?” She goes on to argue that “What is the existence that you are trying to protect by giving me a vaccine if I can’t even have an experience and process that information in my own brain and come to some sort of conclusion? And live within a society where I have to make choices every day?”
The artist goes on to claim that she is not free to speak what she believes: “There’s this weird idea that we’re all free, and that we fight for everything, and we can say what we want, but on the other hand, I feel like there’s even more of a crackdown on that.”
M.I.A. rejects the idea that her comments indicate any support for Alex Jones, and condemns his treatment of the victims of Sandy Hook, saying that “Today, you’ve got some white guy who apparently lied and made some families feel terrible, who now has to pay $1bn because he denied someone’s real experience, real loss and real emotional trauma.” She argues that if Jones is to be prosecuted, we should be open to prosecuting the people who lie about the genocide of the Tamil people: “If we’re going to have a scapegoat in society where somebody’s going to pay for [lying], then I would like to bring the same sort of court case against every western publication that said only 40,000 Tamils were killed in the last days of the war.”
Late last month, M.I.A. dropped a new single entitled “Beep.” The musician has previously teased collaborations with Doja Cat and Nicki Minaj after returning to drop singles “Popular” and “The One.“
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