Nicki Minaj and the Politics of Performative Stupidity

How Turning Point USA used a celebrity co-sign to launder grievance politics as 'normal.'

Kristoffer Ealy is a political science professor who teaches at California State University Fullerton. He is the author of the upcoming book, Political Illiteracy: Learning the Wrong Lessons. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class.

Illustration by Riley Levine

We are past “misinformed.” We’re in “willfully stupid” territory now. At a certain point, being stupid is a choice—and some folks have turned it into a lifestyle brand. Not a bad habit. Not a rough season. A brand. A full-blown personal aesthetic. Like “I don’t read,” “I don’t learn,” and “I don’t know how anything works” are all features, not bugs.

And before anybody gets excited: yes, I was deliberately trying to avoid talking about Nicki Minaj because fuck Nicki Minaj. She is not a thinker. She is not known for being profound. Nobody is ever going to mistake her for MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, Monie Love, Lauryn Hill, or Eve. That’s not a diss on her style of rap. That’s a diss on depth. There are artists who understood that lyrics were a vehicle for something bigger than “look at me,” and there are artists who treat the mic like it’s just a mirror. Nicki has always leaned heavily toward the mirror. Sometimes the reflection is entertaining. Lately it’s just sad.

Now, to be fair, I’m not going to sit here and pretend Minaj can’t rap. She’s a serviceable rapper and—dare I say—even a good rapper on certain songs. Hell, I still love the “she’s on a diet but her pockets eating cheesecake” line on “Monster.” I’m not allergic to giving credit where it’s due. There are tracks where her verse makes the song better. There are moments where the cadence snaps, the punchlines land, and you can hear the version of her that could’ve just stayed in her lane and been a musician instead of trying to become the patron saint of unserious political cosplay.

But as a person? I haven’t liked her for a while.

Some people mark the beginning of their Nicki fatigue at the way she treated Mariah Carey on American Idol. If that’s your origin story, cool. It’s valid. I honestly didn’t care, because I don’t watch reality TV like that. I’m not doing a dissertation on backstage diva politics. I’m not trying to litigate who rolled their eyes first in a judge’s chair. That’s between Mariah, Nicki, and the producers who thought chaos was a substitute for entertainment.

Nicki Minaj lost me when she reduced Malcolm X to a prop. I will never forgive her for turning Malcolm into some “lookin-ass” aesthetic, like he was just a spooky Halloween decoration you pull out when you want to cosplay “revolutionary” without having to actually read anything. And let’s be clear about that famous rifle photo: it’s not “cool.” It’s not “edgy.” Malcolm was peering out the window with a gun because he had credible threats on his life and he was protecting his family. That’s not a “looking-ass ni99a.” That’s survival. That’s a Black man in America understanding exactly what happens when you tell the truth too loudly and the wrong people decide you’ve become an inconvenience. When you turn that into a punchline, you’re not just ignorant—you’re disrespectful. You’re announcing that history is just a mood board to you.

So yeah, I had already been done with her.

But this Turning Point USA stuff? This is a new low, because now the ignorance isn’t just embarrassing—it’s politically dangerous. And the part that makes me want to punt my laptop across the room is that I’m not even sure Nicki Minaj is smart enough to understand the psychology behind what she’s doing. This isn’t “I have a hot take.” This is celebrity social proof being used as political weaponry. This is peripheral-route persuasion in real time: no arguments, no evidence, just vibes, applause, and a famous face telling a crowd, “Don’t worry, you’re normal. You’re the cool kids.” And when you lend your fame to a movement like that, you’re doing legitimacy laundering—taking something rotten and helping it pass as respectable because people recognize you from the radio.

That’s why I was writing about J.D. Vance at the same event when he said we “no longer have to apologize for being white.” Those dumb comments were the priority because he is a stone’s throw away from the presidency. Actually more like an eyelash, because Trump and whatever his routine mri situation might not be long for this world. That’s not me wishing death on anybody—spare me the dramatic fainting couch. That’s me acknowledging reality: age is undefeated, and the presidency is a job where the line of succession matters. When a guy with a grievance fetish is that close to the nuclear codes, I’m going to prioritize that over whatever Nicki’s doing in her “please clap for me” era.

So for that reason Minaj got a temporary pass from me.

Temporary. Not permanent.

Because then she walked into AmericaFest and decided to open her mouth.

Let’s start with the moment that was funny in the exact way a car crash is funny when you’re not in it. Nicki gets on stage with Erika Kirk and starts praising Trump and Vance like she’s auditioning to be the official rapper of the Department of White Tears. She’s doing the full “utmost respect and admiration” routine. She’s calling Trump handsome and dashing like she’s describing a Disney prince and not a man who looks like he permanently smells like spray tan and resentment. It’s the type of flattery you do when you’re trying to get adopted by a new friend group and you’re willing to laugh at jokes you don’t even understand just to stay in the room.

And then she tries to compliment J.D. Vance and calls him … an “assassin.”

An assassin.

Not “a killer debater.” Not “a killer speaker.” Not “he’s surgical.” Not “he’s sharp.” She says “assassin,” and the second the word leaves her mouth you can practically see the thought bubble over her head: “Oh my God. That is literally what happened to Charlie Kirk.”

That’s why the room weirdly laughed. That’s why she froze. That’s why Erika had to step in and do the public “it’s okay” damage control. Because this wasn’t some abstract word. Charlie Kirk was killed. And you’re sitting next to his widow. This is not the moment to accidentally cosplay as the Grim Reaper’s publicist. It was like watching someone try to do crowd work at a funeral and realizing too late that “read the room” is not a metaphor—it’s a requirement.

And the roast writes itself: Nicki Minaj is so committed to clout-chasing in a conservative room that she couldn’t even keep her metaphors straight. She’s so busy trying to sound like she belongs there that she stepped on the one landmine nobody in that room wanted to joke about. It was the purest form of “I don’t actually know these people, I just know they’ll clap for me.”

And if you think this was just one awkward slip, no. The rot goes deeper.

Because she also decided to do the culture-war thing where you punch down and then hide behind “I just care about kids.” She mocked California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s support for trans youth with that “Imagine being the guy running on wanting to see trans kids … not even a trans adult would run on that” line, and then pivoted to “normal adults want healthy, safe, happy kids.” Do you see the move? Drive-by cruelty, then a fake halo. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of throwing a brick and then immediately yelling, “I’m actually a lifeguard!” It’s not even clever. It’s just mean, and it’s lazy, and it relies on the audience being too emotionally charged to notice the bait-and-switch.

Then she slid into, “There’s nothing wrong with being a boy … boys will be boys,” like she was delivering the lost gospel of masculinity nobody has ever heard before. Like the world hasn’t spent the last three thousand years pampering male ego so aggressively that men can fail upward into the White House. “Boys will be boys” is the oldest excuse in the book—and when you’re saying it in a room that already believes accountability is a liberal conspiracy, you’re not being brave. You’re being useful.

And that’s what makes it so gross: she’s not just saying it. She’s saying it on that stage, for that crowd, where “protect the kids” is code for “police gender and punish difference.” It’s not about kids. It’s about power. It’s about control. It’s about giving grown adults permission to treat other people’s children like political props. It’s the emotional manipulation of pretending you’re concerned while you’re actually just participating in a moral panic.

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Then she did the “blonde hair and blue eyes” comment—“I don’t need someone with blonde hair and blue eyes to downplay their beauty because I know my beauty”—trying to sound like she was doing a race-and-gender TED Talk, as if she just stumbled out of a graduate seminar on intersectionality and decided to freestyle.

Here’s the thing: this whole point is built on a fantasy. The idea that Black women are out here demanding blonde women “downplay their beauty” so Black women can feel okay is not a serious description of reality. Black women aren’t walking into rooms policing white women’s self-esteem. They’re usually too busy navigating their own devaluation—being ignored, overlooked, stereotyped, and told they’re “aggressive” for breathing with confidence—to spend energy running some reverse beauty-standards grievance patrol.

So when Nicki says, “I don’t need someone with blonde hair and blue eyes to downplay their beauty because I know my beauty,” she’s not offering nuance. She’s feeding the audience a flattering lie: that the real problem is Black women demanding too much, being too sensitive, or making white women feel bad for being pretty. Conservatives love that story because it flips the power dynamic into a Hallmark card. It turns centuries of racialized beauty hierarchy into a little self-help moment where the “solution” is to protect the feelings of the people who were never structurally punished for fitting the standard in the first place.

And Turning Point doesn’t want nuance anyway. They want a clip. They want a Black woman wellsaying something that can be translated into: “See? Even the black woman thinks you’re being bullied for having blonde hair.” That’s the play—use her as a shield to validate a grievance that doesn’t exist, and dress it up as “empowerment” so nobody notices the manipulation.

And Nicki is being used as a shield.

That’s the scam. They don’t need her to be coherent. They need her to be Black. They need her to be a Black woman who will stand next to them and say things that let them point and go, “well, the negro agrees with us.” It’s the oldest trick in American politics: use the identity of someone you don’t respect to legitimize an agenda that will still hurt the group they belong to. Celebrity social proof. Legitimacy laundering. Weaponized optics.

Which brings me to the internet circus about whether she lost millions of followers.

There have been conflicting reports on Minaj losing millions of followers after the Turning Point appearance. Some outlets claimed she lost nearly ten million followers. Others pushed back and said the viral claims were exaggerated or unverifiable. Forbes jumped in to address the rumor mill. People covered her deactivating Instagram. The New York Post did the usual tabloid thing where everything is a BREAKING NEWS ALERT. UNILAD ran with the drama like follower counts are the Constitution.

And I honestly do not care if she loses social media followers or not.

I’m not a teenager who thinks the universe ends if your engagement drops. My issue is the political illiteracy sweating through her pores. Nicki Minaj is not a serious person, but because she is a Black woman that will lie for Trump, she will get propped up by other unserious people—and these unserious people are in serious positions. That’s the danger. Not her follower count. The fact that a movement that wants to roll back civil rights is thrilled to put a famous Black woman on stage to sell it as “cool.”

And the irony is that even they didn’t like her until she became useful.

What’s funny about Minaj is Charlie Kirk, when he was alive, made it known he wasn’t a fan. He criticized Nicki and Cardi B as not being good role models for young Black girls, and then admitted he didn’t even know which one made the song he was mad about—because those two Black women were interchangeable to him. Maybe that criticism could be “valid” if it were coming from a genuine place, but we already know how that ecosystem talks about Black women, so I’m going to assume he was using them to degrade Black women, not uplift anybody. Now she walks into the same political universe and they’re acting like she’s Harriet Tubman with a mic. Of course they are. She’s useful now. That’s what happens when your political movement has no shame: today’s “bad role model” becomes tomorrow’s “brave truth-teller” the moment she agrees with you.

Then there’s the Nigeria thread, where she decided to weigh in on violence against Christians in Nigeria with that Western lecturing energy—like an outsider scolding people she doesn’t understand from a platform. She framed it like she was appointed global spokesperson for “persecuted Christians,” talking down in that way Western celebrities do when they discover a complex conflict and immediately start speaking like they’ve been on the ground doing fieldwork. The problem isn’t that she mentioned Christians in Nigeria—the problem is the posture: the confident, finger-wagging performance of concern from someone who clearly hasn’t done the homework and isn’t accountable to the people living the reality. Nicki doesn’t do “context.” Nicki does “performance.” She grabs a narrative conservatives already love and then walks around like she’s the moral authority.

Don’t get me started on the most disgusting part: the “protect the kids” theater.

Because while Nicki is up there making trans kids into a punchline and acting like she’s the guardian of childhood innocence, she is married to a registered sex offender. That’s not a rumor. That’s not “Twitter said.” That’s public record. So when Nicki stands on stage doing the “healthy, safe, happy kids” routine, my first question is: which kids? Because the way she’s using “kids” is political theater—something to hide behind when she wants to attack marginalized people. It’s a costume. It’s not a value. It’s the kind of moral grandstanding that only works if the audience agrees to stop thinking. And I already told you: at a certain point, being stupid is a choice.

And it’s extra wild because Nicki has, for years, had a huge LGBTQ following. Club culture didn’t just tolerate her—it embraced her. Queer audiences have been some of her loudest defenders, the ones who kept her music alive in spaces where pop culture actually breathes. And it takes a special kind of audacity to cash in on that love for years and then stroll into a movement that thrives on anti-trans panic and do the “Imagine wanting to see trans kids” routine like you just discovered intolerance and decided it was your new aesthetic. It’s not just betrayal; it’s opportunism with glitter on it.

At least she’s gotten support from another woman who has gotten kicked out of the culture: Amber Rose. Amber did the “free country” defense—“she has the right to be Team MAGA”—as if anyone is trying to outlaw Nicki’s mouth. Nobody’s saying she doesn’t have the right. We’re saying we have the right to judge her for being reckless, unserious, and politically illiterate in public. That’s how speech works. You don’t get to scream in the town square and then demand applause as a civil right. If you want to be loud, you also get to be checked.

And yes, the internet has been speculating about Minaj’s angle. Some people are saying she’s trying to get her brother a pardon—and just to be clear, her brother, Jelani Maraj, isn’t in prison for some vague “mistake.” He was convicted of predatory sexual assault against a child and sentenced to 25 years to life. So if Nicki is out here doing the political groupie routine because she thinks it’ll help him, then on top of being morally bankrupt, it’s also politically illiterate—because the presidential pardon power applies to federal offenses, not state convictions like his New York case.

And this is where her “protect the kids” performance really starts to stink, because it’s not just her husband. Her husband, Kenneth Petty, is a registered sex offender—convicted of attempted rape—and her brother is doing a life-leaning sentence for child sexual assault. So when she climbs on a Turning Point stage acting like she’s Captain Save-the-Children while throwing cheap shots at trans kids, miss me with the moral panic. If “think of the kids” is your whole political personality, but the men you’ve defended and attached yourself to are literally sex offenders, then what you’re doing isn’t concern—it’s theater.

But honestly, we don’t even need a conspiracy theory. The simplest explanation is usually the right one: she likes applause. She likes being treated like a rebel. She likes being centered. She likes walking into a room where people already hate the same people she’s mad at and saying, “I’m with you now,” and watching them reward her for it. That’s audience capture. That’s ego. That’s the dopamine loop of celebrity mixed with politics. And it’s dangerous because the crowd she’s feeding doesn’t just want entertainment—they want power. They want policy. They want judges. They want school boards. They want a country that looks like their nostalgia fantasy, even if they have to bully reality until it cooperates.

I feel sick to my stomach that I wrote this, but people wanted my take, so I had to talk about it. Just like I’ve had to talk about Snoop, Nelly, Rick Ross, Ice Cube, or Kanye West before her, I have to roast Nicki when she steps into the political arena and starts throwing ignorance around like it’s confetti. I do not care about Nicki Minaj’s opinion. I am 44 years old. Minaj is 43. This means that like me, she should know better. Minaj feels like she has to do this kind of bullshit to chase relevancy, and her politics is her business—but you do not get to lie without getting fact checked by me.

And if that means I have to spend my precious time on earth explaining why “protect the kids” is just a costume for cruelty, why Malcolm X isn’t a prop for unserious rappers, why presidential pardon power isn’t a magic wand, and why conservatives keep renting celebrity Blackness like it’s an Airbnb—so be it.

I hate it here, but apparently this is the timeline, and somebody has to keep receipts.