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At a time when Taylor Swift is facing backlash from Donald Trump, Elon Musk and more MAGA supporters, Hillary Clinton is throwing her support behind the pop star.
While discussing the 2024 presidential election on Kara Swisher’s podcast, the former secretary of state opened up about why she thinks Swift’s recent endorsement of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris was essential — even if it did lead Trump to post “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” on Truth Social shortly afterward. “That sends a strong message,” Clinton said. “I’m a huge admirer. I think this has real impact.”
“Her fanbase is so intense and incredibly influenced by her,” she continued before bringing up Swift’s successful sexual assault lawsuit against radio DJ David Mueller in 2017 and her feud with Scooter Braun over the 2019 sale of her masters. “She’s a singer who charts the course of her life — which they relate to as their own lives — but she’s also somebody who stood up to a guy who groped her. She stood up to get her music back from someone she thought had illegitimately taken it from her.”
Clinton’s remarks come just days after Swift finally broke her silence on the 2024 election with an Instagram post backing Harris on Sept. 10, just moments after the presidential debate concluded. In addition to praising the VP for being a “steady-handed, gifted leader” in a long letter to fans, the 14-time Grammy winner also called out the Trump campaign for posting AI-generated images falsely painting her as a MAGA supporter.
Since then, the Republican nominee has suggested that Swift will “pay a price” in the “marketplace” for siding against him, in addition to declaring his “hate” for her. Musk, an avid Trump supporter, also issued a response to her endorsement, joking on X: “Fine Taylor, you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.”
Calling the Tesla founder’s words “rotten and creepy,” Clinton theorized why Swift might’ve struck a chord with right-wing conservatives. “The fact that [Swift’s endorsement] happened right after the debate and just added to Kamala’s momentum must have just set them all off,” she told Swisher. “They gravitate toward toughness and brutality and machoism. And here’s Taylor Swift, a self-made billionaire who brings joy to people and who imparts life lessons, particularly to girls and women. They can’t stand it.
“I can’t understand why [Musk] says what he says,” Clinton added of the tech billionaire, calling his tweet to Swift “another way of saying rape.” “It just is beyond my imagination.”
Listen to Clinton talk about Swift’s endorsement below.
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes. Keeping a tidy house requires owning a few essential cleaning supplies including a vacuum to help suck up any dirt that […]
09/16/2024
The politician has praised the singer’s looks & disparaged her political views.
09/16/2024
Tyler, the Creator is making his way to the big screen. The artist is set to make his feature film debut in the Josh Safdie-directed movie, Marty Supreme, which is set to star Gwyneth Paltrow and Timothée Chalamet, according to Deadline. While the upcoming movie’s plot details and casting information are yet to be publicly revealed, the […]
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Calling all Bachelor Nation fans! Get ready to watch Joan Vassos’ journey to find love as the first star of The Golden Bachelorette, premiering Wednesday night (Sept. 18) at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.
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Vassos quickly became a fan favorite on the first season of The Golden Bachelor. Despite her strong connection with Golden Bachelor star Gerry Turner, she made the difficult decision to leave the show to address a medical issue involving her daughter.
Now, it’s Vassos’ turn to find the love of her life. “For the first time in Bachelor franchise history, 24 seasoned men in the prime of their lives will roll up their sleeves and step into the spotlight, all vying to make a lasting impression on Golden Bachelorette Joan Vassos,” ABC shared in a press release.
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Jesse Palmer returns as host of the new season. In July, the former Bachelor star posted a photo on Instagram featuring himself and Vasso in front of the iconic Bachelor Mansion with the caption, “It’s been a busy summer.”
Keep reading for details on how to watch the first season of The Golden Bachelorette.
How to Watch The Golden Bachelorette Online for Free
The first season of The Golden Bachelorette airs Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC, and streams on Hulu the following day.
If you have cable, you can catch The Golden Bachelorette on your local ABC affiliate. For those without cable, ABC can be streamed online via ABC.com with a provider login. You can also access ABC through free trials from DirecTV Stream, fuboTV or SlingTV (and Express VPN or Pure VPN, if you’re outside of the U.S.). With these options, you’ll be able to watch the latest Bachelorette season live on TV or stream from your laptop, tablet or phone.
Fubo and DirecTV Stream offer free trials for up to a week (plans start at $75-$85/month). DirecTV Stream’s most affordable plan, the Entertainment package, comes with 90+ channels including ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, MTV, ESPN, BET, VH1, TLC, WeTV, Lifetime, HGTV and more.
The Golden Bachelorette is also available to stream free with a Hulu subscription. Not subscribed for Hulu? Hulu is currently offering a 30-day free trial which you can use to watch new season of The Golden Bachelorette. You can also catch up on Vasso’s journey and learn more about her previous experience by streaming The Golden Bachelor.
You can catch episodes of The Bachelorette, The Bachelor and more with a subscription to Hulu+Live TV ($77) which includes, Hulu, Disney+ and ESPN+ in addition to 90+ channels.
Looking for another streaming option? You might want to consider subscribing to Sling TV. Subscriptions start at just $20 for the first month (regular $40) to stream dozens of channels including ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox in select regions and cable channels such as Bravo, E!, MSNBC, TLC, USA, Food Network, Discovery Channel, FX, ESPN and more.
The Golden Bachelorette 2024: Who Are the Contestants?
A retired videographer, a chiropractor, a portfolio manager, a retired financial analyst, an insurance executive, a contractor and more are among the 24 men who compete for Vassos’s heart this season.
The full list of contestants range from ages 57 to 69, and come from all over the country.
William “Bill,” 68, a retired videographer from Portland, Ore.
Robert “Bob,” 66, a chiropractor from Marina Del Ray, Calif.
Charles K., 62, a portfolio manager from Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.
Charles L., 66, a retired financial analyst from Philadelphia, Pa.
Charles “Chock,” 60, an insurance executive from Wichita, Kan.
Christopher, 64, a contractor from West Babylon, N.Y.
Daniel “Dan,” 64, a private investor from Naples, Fla.
David, 68, a rancher from Austin, Texas
Gary, 65, a retired finance executive from Palm Desert, Calif.
Gil, 60, an educator from Mission Viejo, Calif.
Gregg, 64, a retired university VP from Longboat Key, Fla.
Guy, 66, an ER doctor from Reno, Nev.
John “Jack,” 68, a caterer from Chicago, Ill.
Jonathan, 61, a shipping consultant from Oakland, Iowa
Jordan, 61, a sales manager from Chicago, Ill.
Keith, 62, a girl dad from San Jose, Calif.
Kenneth “Ken,” 60, a property management treasurer from Peabody, Mass.
Kim, 69, a retired Navy captain from Seattle, Wash.
Mark, 57, an Army veteran from Leesville, La.
Michael, 65, a retired banking CEO from Denver, N.C.
Pablo, 63, a retired UN agency director from Cambridge, Md.
Pascal, 69, a salon owner from Chicago, Ill.
Ralph “RJ,” 66, a financial advisor from Irvine, Calif.
Thomas, 62, a fire department chief from New York, N.Y.
Watch a sneak peek of The Golden Bachelorette below.
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Bowen Yang can say for sure that he’s been changed for good after becoming friends with Ariana Grande on the set of Wicked last year.
In a new interview with The New Yorker published Monday (Sept. 16), the actor-comedian got candid about struggling with his mental health while shooting the Jon M. Chu-directed musical duology in England throughout 2023, during which he was also flying back and forth to work as a cast member on Saturday Night Live on the weekends. Luckily, there was someone looking out for him during that time.
“This cannot sound anything but name-droppy, but Ariana Grande was reaching out and going, ‘Are you OK? Come over! Let’s just watch a movie. Let’s get you better,’” Yang recalled. “She was there for me in a true way.”
The “Yes, And?” singer also recalled thinking that her friend’s hectic schedule was “worrisome.” “I understand what it feels like to travel back and forth so often and then have to perform the next day, with no time for your body or mind to figure out what’s going on,” Grande told the publication. “It is incredibly hard and unusual. So I just wanted to make sure he had an ear and a hug and the support he needed.”
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The interview comes just a couple months ahead of the first Wicked film’s Nov. 22 premiere. As recently announced, the second installment will come almost exactly one year later.
Just like in real life, Yang and Grande’s characters (a Shiz student named Pfannee and Glinda, respectively) are friends in the Wicked movies, which take inspiration from both the Broadway musical and Gregory Maguire’s novel of the same name. The Fire Island actor has also proven that he’s as much of a ride-or-die for the two-time Grammy winner as she is for him, with Yang coming to her defense on a March episode of his Las Culturistas podcast with Matt Rogers.
“The narrative is wrong,” Yang said on the show of last year’s tabloid frenzy surrounding Grande’s romance with another Wicked actor, Ethan Slater. “I can tell you for a fact that what people out there seem to be clinging on to is incorrect.”
“If you think this invites karma, I’m here to tell you, your set of facts – I’m not going to reveal the actual facts, because they’re not mine to reveal,” he continued at the time, directly addressing critics who ran with the unsubstantiated narrative that Grande “home-wrecked” Slater’s relationship with ex-wife Lilly Jay, with whom the Broadway alum shares a young son. “But I can say that the matrix of information that you are using to draw a line to the karmic outcome you want is not existent.”
In the weeks preceding my trip to Grenada to celebrate Spicemas 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris – amid her ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket – became the subject of a kind of Birtherism 2.0, in which former President Donald Trump attacked and undermined her Blackness because, in his mind, a person cannot be both Black and South Asian or any combination of races.
While I am not mixed, I identified with those attacks. I grew up the only son and eldest child of two St. Lucian immigrants in a majority Afro-Caribbean neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. I’m Black. I’m American. Ethnically, I’m Afro-Caribbean. Culturally, I’m a pretty solid mixture of Caribbean and African-American. I’ve always understood myself to be all of these things at the same time. Trump’s attacks on Harris’ Blackness hit so close to home, not because she and I share the exact same racial-ethnic-cultural makeup, but because his disrespectful jabs were an extension of a nefarious movement to strip non-American Black people of their Blackness. All this is to say, how I perceive and define my own Blackness was heavy on my mind as I boarded my flight to Grenada on Aug. 9.
I should note that I’ve yet to visit St. Lucia – fingers crossed for this winter – so this trip to Grenada was my first visit to the Caribbean, the place in the world where the majority of my roots lie. Upon reviewing the trip’s itinerary, which was painstakingly curated by the Grenada Tourism Authority, Industry 360 and Mel&N Media Group, I noticed that we would be learning the history of the Grenadian tradition of jab jab. Now, I had heard about jab jab here and there growing up, but with descriptors that often landed on some variation of “demonic,” I wasn’t really sure what I was actually getting into. I wasn’t afraid, but I was relentlessly curious. After feeding my musical soul at Soca Monarch and Panorama, I was ready to indulge myself in the rawer parts of my Caribbean heritage – and hear from actual Grenadians about this specific cultural practice.
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On Friday, J’Ouvert morning, about two hours before the sun announced itself, my fellow revelers and I enjoyed a traditional Grenadian breakfast at Friday’s Bar, where we got to hear the true history of jab jab.
“Black was seen as the devil. Black was seen as bad, substandard, scum of the earth. So, we got even blacker,” explained Ian Charles, one of the founders of Jambalasee Grenada, a group committed to the preservation of Grenada’s culture and history. “You have to understand that jab jab utilizes satire, mockery, [and] ridicule to fight against a system which was designed deliberately to mentally, physically [and] spiritually break us.”
Dating back to 1834, the jab jab tradition finds its roots in freed Afro-Grenadians celebrating the abolition of British-operated slavery through masquerading. Across the island, Grenadians literally become “blacker” by coating their entire bodies in molasses, black paint, tar, engine oil, or the more recent (and more sustainable) combination of vegetable oil and charcoal powder.
Repurposed helmets adorned with either cow or goat horns crown their heads, while their hands drag loose chains (also black) in recognition of their freedom. Although we hit the road a bit later than anticipated, I was still able to catch a glimpse of the Capitals — individuals who lead different groups of jab jabs in call-and-response chants (also known as spellings) that blended unifying proclamations with historical and sociopolitical commentary.
Spicemas
Querine Salandy for Chambers Media Solutions
As I rubbed the charcoal-oil concoction over my body – and eventually gave into the gravity of the engine oil’s richer pigmentation – everything clicked. Jab felt natural in a way that I wasn’t necessarily anticipating. Everything was so Black. From the dozens to the Black ballroom practice of “reading,” satire, sarcasm and a general finessing and manipulation of language is inherently Black. It shows up across the diaspora in the ways we converse and the ways our intonations shift mid-dialogue. By painting ourselves black, we were tapping into the tradition of “playing the devil.” (“Jab” means “devil” in Patois). If slave masters were going to call us devilish, we were going to take it, flip it and mock them. As we made our way down the road, I thought about the ways I’ve unknowingly “played Jab” in different contexts in my life.
I haven’t been on this Earth for too long, but my story is pretty lengthy: lots of twists, and a few turns as well. I’ll spare you all the details here, but there were more than a few instances in my life in which my Blackness was demonized with the hopes that I would try my best to detach myself from it. I doubled down every time. Yes, the scales are vastly different, but, to me, the essence is one and the same. When all is said and done, our Blackness will never be demonized; not by ourselves, and certainly never by those who are wholly unable to see Blackness for what it truly is.
In conversation with the late Greg Tate, hip-hop artist Djinji Brown said: “Sometimes when I’m rhyming on the [mic], I feel like there’s nothing inside me but blackness – no veins, no organs, just a shell physically, but open and full of universes from my toes to my hair follicles. There are rhymes coming out of me, because there ain’t no stomach, there ain’t no heart, no intestines to get in the way of that s–t.”
We weren’t rapping on the road – although some of those chants were a not-so-subtle sonic bridge between call-and-response rhythms and hip-hop song structures – but there was indeed nothing but blackness inside of and all around us. In that blackness lay a level of liberation that was hard-fought, and a predisposition for resistance that was inherited – and reinvigorated in the wake of Hurrican Beryl. Like everything else, my Spicemas experience exists in the context of all that came before it, including Hurricane Beryl, which particularly ravaged Grenada’s sister islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique. While stepping into Grenadian culture, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the Global South – and its people, artists and culture – will be the first to feel the cruelest effects of climate change primarily spurred by superpowers in the Global North. It’s not fair and it’s not right. It’s just the latest effect of the incredibly violent and heinous project that is colonialism. But it’s also a stark reminder that we must protect the breadth of our West Indian cultures with every fiber of our beings.
Spicemas
Querine Salandy for Chambers Media Solutions
Whenever my height doesn’t annoy me, it can be quite an advantage. My heart swelled as I took a look at the sea of Blackness in front of me and the waves of Blackness behind me. I was literally and figuratively consumed by Blackness on all sides and it couldn’t have been a more picturesque sight. I’ve always considered Brooklyn to be home, and I still do – those blocks raised me, after all – but the sense of connection I felt to the literal land of Grenada while playing jab forced me to, if only for a few moments, seriously reconsider how I understand the term “home.” As far as I know, I don’t have any family in Grenada, but the air felt familiar, as did the energy that permeated the atmosphere. Almost all of my family hails from another island just over 100 miles away, but I still felt the connection of a deep, shared history that I felt an innate responsibility to help protect.
From Miami to Notting Hill, the Caribbean carnival experience has evolved into myriad celebrations around the world – many of them inching further away from the history that grounds those practices. As we continue to wade our way through this particular era of globalization and the commercialization and corporatization of carnival celebrations, maintaining and respecting the rich history of its formative traditions will be paramount to protecting the integrity and sanctity of the Caribbean at large. Jab jab is resistance in one of its purest forms, rooted in the soil of Grenada. What’s Blacker than that?
Seeing how fiercely protective and reverent Charles was in his explanation of jab jab reminded me of something chart-topping Afrobeats superstar Rema said in an Apple Music interview promoting his new Heis album. “Everyone is chasing something that the whole world can enjoy… we’re listening to the voices of the world too much,” he said. “We gotta listen to the voices back home to keep our roots. Our roots [are] very important.”
But how do we balance prioritizing “the voices back home” while inviting outsiders amid an effort to increase the amount of capital we can squeeze out of centuries-old cultural practices? That’s a question I toyed with a lot. After all, I’m a first-generation St. Lucian-American experiencing Spicemas by way of a press trip — is the call not coming from inside of the house, to some degree? For Jab King, a Grenadian soca powerhouse whose “Jab Did” was inescapable throughout Spicemas, it’s certainly a “bad idea” when cultural practices start bending to the whims of capitalism and corporatization, and we should “let the Carnival evolve on its own and control it along the way.”
Ideally, that’s the next frontier of this era of musical and cultural globalization: concerted efforts to protect the history of the cultures that so often get pillaged and bastardized for capitalism-blinded, voyeuristic eyes. The pessimist in me says that’s wishful thinking, but there was simply too much hope in that sea of blackness for me to let that voice win.
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Pamper your feet and treat yourself to Amazon’s bestselling foot file. This handy foot file is a great tool for removing calluses, scraping heels and scrubbing away dead skin in the shower. You can also add this tool for your at-home pedicures.
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Originally priced at $21.99, you can now get it for just $14.99. Whether you’re looking to enhance your self-care routine or in search of a budget-friendly and effective foot file for soft and smooth feet, consider adding this Bare August Foot File to your cart. One Amazon customer said, “Super soft feet…Works great right after the shower and keeps my feet soft! Rinses off easily and is very durable. I dropped it twice, didn’t crack. Love this!”
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According to the brand, this foot file works great on wet or dry feet. With its scrubbing surface and easy to hold shape, you’ll be able to remove rough patches easily. Plus, its compact and travel-friendly size makes it easy to take with you wherever you go.
You can get this Bare August Glass Foot File in three different styles: Classic, Professional, or Teal-Handle in Classic. Keep in mind, prices vary based on the style you select.
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Amazon users love how easy it is to use. One Amazon customer said, “I like that this was easier to hold than a traditional foot scraper… my feet felt really smooth and I was happy with the results.”
For those with dry heels or feet, this scrubber can be a great start to achieving soft and smooth feet. Another Amazon customer said, “I’ve always had incredibly dry heels and feet (it would hurt to walk). This scrubber is amazing! You don’t have to use much pressure and the dead skin just comes right off. Easy to use, durable and a wonderful asset to have for dried heels and feet! Worth the purchase!”
What are you waiting for? Level up your foot care routine in just seconds for great results.
For more product recommendations, check out this Everlane’s Bestselling Catch-All Case, this Peter Thomas Roth Pumpkin Enzyme Mask to add to your skincare routine, and this travel-friendly Olay Face Cleansing Melts.