Hey, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, Internet's busiest music nerd, and we have to ask, once again, what the hell is Nicki Minaj doing?

In the past 24 hours of me shooting this video, Nicki Minaj spoke at an event in New York hosted by the UN, one that was led by Ambassador Mike Walsh and was called "Combating Religious Violence and the Killing of Christians in Nigeria," which is a wild combination of factors to be coming together here.

You may be asking in response, how exactly did we get here?

Well, the trajectory itself is very winding, and weird, and doesn't completely make sense. But let me do my best to paint an origin story for all of this weird propaganda that we're seeing here, and it is propaganda. As we have covered on this channel before, Nicki Minaj's music career and social media presence have not been doing super well lately, or, rather, it's all soured with having fallen flat on her face in the midst of a beef with Megan Thee Stallion that she herself started. And then her last album, Pink Friday 2, not only paling in comparison creatively to the original Pink Friday, but, despite the album's first week's success, it hasn't really had a whole lot of lasting power. Certainly not as much as a lot of Nicki's past projects.

Combine this with an increasingly erratic presence on platforms like Twitter.com, where she could be seen repeatedly crashing out over a variety of different topics. But peppered in the midst of all of these frantic posts here and there lately, I have been noticing Nicki Minaj has been posting tweets, or sharing videos and media, that has a bit of a right-wing slant. Including this video, apparently of Trump's granddaughter doing the "Beez in the Trap" TikTok remix trend, which is something that brings all kinds of implications, even if you're trying to reduce it down to, "Oh, she's just posting it because it's her song being remixed, and it's a trend." I mean, there's hundreds of thousands of people recording videos like this right now. Why pick this one over any of the other ones that are visually cooler and more creative? She's obviously posting this video because of who this person is and the family she's connected to. And with the Trump admin polls being basically in the toilet right now, they're desperate looking for a win or at least a distraction from all of this Epstein email stuff, which I'll mention again in a second.

So yeah, I guess in the midst of all of this, Nikki was invited to speak at this UN event over a topic that Trump and his administration have been trying to make a lot of hay over. But before I get into that, let's maybe play a section of Nikki's speech at this UN event:

"Religious freedom means we all can sing our faith regardless of who we are, where we live, and what we believe. But today, faith is under attack in way too many places. In Nigeria, Christians are being targeted, driven from their homes, and killed. Entire communities live in fear constantly, simply because of how they pray. Sadly, this problem is not only a growing problem in Nigeria, but also in so many other countries across the world, and it demands urgent action. I want to be clear, protecting Christians in Nigeria is not about taking sides. It is about uniting humanity."

Now, as you can see from that clip, and when you look at the entire speech itself, there's nothing really crazy, unhinged, or off the rails, or hateful about any of Nicki's rhetoric in this speech. She's just speaking openly about discrimination, persecution along cultural and religious lines, which is something that, sure, all of us should be be concerned with.

There's nothing specifically wrong with what she is saying here in this speech. It's more what she is giving credence to, because there are also points in this talk that she gives here where she talks about thanking the Trump administration and endorsing their action and their focus on this issue. And so we have to wonder, what exactly is the issue? What is Nicki openly endorsing here beyond what she is saying here at the podium? Well, Trump and his administration in the midst of record lows in the polls are trying to sell the American people on the idea that there's this massive countrywide, violent persecution of Christians going on in Nigeria right now that is so violent, so extreme, so scary, so beyond the pale, that we have to intervene, probably militarily, as soon as possible.

Again, you may notice, Nicki made no mention of that as something that we have to do in this speech of hers. And that is most definitely by design if Nicki were openly endorsing an action of international war here directly and verbally. For sure, her speech here would not be as well received as it is. And that's not to say it's been well received at all. It hasn't. Because many of Nicki's fans, even a lot of the diehards are seeing right through this smokes screen, and it's not ending well for her. Apparently, she has lost hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers in a matter of hours, and she is being torn apart, left and right, by the exact groups of people who at one point found her audience to be a safe space. Be it either women who personally take issue with all of Trump's sexual abuse allegations and his clear ties to sex traffickers, immigrants who see their livelihoods threatened by all of Trump's interactions with ICE, and members of the LGBTQ community, who over the past 10 years, have seen right-wing politicians only get more and more hostile toward their community through policy around trans people, gay marriage, too.

There's nothing going on in Nigeria that is going to make these groups of people overlook what the Trump administration is doing right here in their own country today, which is why you're seeing all of this rebellion going on in Nicki's fan base right now.

Now, as far as the situation in Nigeria is concerned, I'm not here to deny the fact that there may be rogue groups of religious extremists who are persecuting Christians and others in the country. We have to ask ourselves whether or not the facts of this situation are being skewed a little bit, and if the Trump administration's interest in this is coming from a genuine place. Because while the violence in Nigeria isn't great, it doesn't seem to be government-backed or endorsed, and mostly the result of rogue actors, which militarily intervening in another country on behalf of its government to kill or take care of, again, rogue or isolated groups within its borders is just very weird international policy.

I mean, not that America hasn't done it before, but every time it has, it's always blown up in our faces. This is just a very odd context for focusing in on this issue. Not only because while this has been going on, America has also been funding an ongoing genocide in Palestine. One that still is very much going on even with the recent "ceasefire." Also, as long as we're talking about the government of Nigeria currently on the books, it is illegal to have any open expression of homosexuality. Some real government persecution there, and yet the Trump administration is not trying to intervene over that.

And again, I don't bring these instances up to say, "Hey, there's violence going on all around the world. You shouldn't care about one example of it over another." I'm more here asking the question of, you to have these other raging wildfires, socially-speaking, going on, why is Trump only focusing in on one of them and advocating for military intervention as a fix for it? Something that, again, looking at history, not even distant history, recent history, we know doesn't work.

America swooping in to save the day is just a fairy tale that some people tell themselves after seeing their dollars be sent overseas to enrich military contractors, oil companies, companies that mine for minerals. It's all an insane, bloody, capitalist web that's being weaved here, and Nicki Minaj is somehow caught up in it and doing propaganda for it. For what benefit? I don't know. You also have to ask: Why is she being picked to do this? It just feels like Trump is grabbing Nicki to talk about this topic, and his fans will most likely see her and just think she's an authority on it by virtue of her being famous and not being white.

I said I would mention it before, but again, remember that Nicki Minaj is doing this endorsement as Trump has just been outed as being so deeply connected to Jeffrey Epstein, the most famous sex trafficker and pedophile ever, all time in history ever, ever. Which, after that, you would think anyone in their right mind would be like, "Might want to stay away from that guy." But as it is known, Nicki does have a hard time of keeping her distance from people with SA allegations.

So there you go. Wild and disappointing stuff. Disappointing, even though my expectations were already in the toilet. And I'm going to leave it there.

Anthony Fantano, forever.