Manifest mendacity
Conservatives duck the point of Billie Eilish's remarks on ICE and immigrants
By Sam Bellamy
Given MAGA’s virulent reaction to Billie Eilish’s brief tempest-in-a-teapot speech at the Grammys, you’d think the singer had followed up by visiting notable conservatives and thwacking each on the head with said teapot.
In case you missed it, Eilish said the following while accepting the award for song of the year:
As grateful as I feel, I honestly don’t feel like I need to say anything but that no one is illegal on stolen land. And, yeah, it’s just really hard to know what to say and what to do right now, and I feel really hopeful in this room, and I feel like we just need to keep fighting and speaking up and protesting, and our voices really do matter, and the people matter, and fuck ICE. That’s all I’m going to say. Sorry. Thank you so much.
Conservatives, who seem especially touchy these days, howled like Custer at Little Bighorn.
“Oh, gee, this ‘stolen land’ nonsense again?” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wrote on X. “Maybe she should step up and forfeit her Southern California mansion since it is supposedly on ‘stolen land.’ ”
Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who appears to spend most of his waking hours on social media, growled, “Any white person who does a public ‘stolen land’ acknowledgement should immediately give his or her land to native Americans. Otherwise they don’t mean it. Also, I’m pretty sure they don’t mean it.”
Others jumped in too, with conservative media gleefully reporting that Eilish’s $3 million mansion in Los Angeles (inflated by some to $14 million) sits on what the indigenous Tongva consider ancestral land. Headlines trumpeted a press release from the tribe stating that they appreciate when public figures call attention to historic wrongs but would like a mention next time.
The Washington Post’s newly libertarian opinion section ran a piece by two New York University law professors impatiently explaining how real estate transactions and statutes of limitations work. Native Americans can’t just retake land they once had.
“The universal doctrine of jus tertii,” they wrote, “holds that if a random squatter, let’s call him Jerry Garcia, trespasses on the property of Charlie Parker, he cannot defend himself in court by saying that Frank Sinatra is the actual owner.”
OK. “Sorry, your honor, I was stoned” might work, though.
I am by no means a Billie Eilishologist. I’m only vaguely aware of her music, although I have noticed in the past that she often appears to be on the verge of nodding off in photos accompanying the articles about her that I don’t read. It appears the two of us share the same opinion of entertainment news coverage.
I don’t know what precisely was in Eilish’s mind at the Grammys, of course, but when I’ve heard others refer to “stolen land” in that context, I don’t take the words quite as literally as the esteemed DeSantis and Lee do. Or pretend to do.
I interpret Eilish’s comments to mean that, given its origins, our nation should show a bit of humility in how we treat those who come after us. That we should peacefully remove immigrants who’ve committed violent crimes while here. That we should accept those who snuck past our artificially low immigration limits, especially those seeking asylum.
Humility, of course, is not a Republican strong suit, especially these days and especially at the top.
DeSantis would be wise to remember that Florida is composed partly from land seized during three wars against the Seminoles, with many of the survivors ending up on the notoriously brutal Trail of Tears. Today’s state-run Alligator Alcatraz is a direct descendant of that thinking. So is Stephen Miller’s version of ICE, for that matter.
Sen. Lee also should recall that Utah’s Mormon settlers didn’t always coexist peacefully with the indigenous folks around latter-day Salt Lake City and Provo either. Brigham Young committed to print a charming anecdote about settlers who accused a Timpanogos neighbor of stealing a shirt, shot him and then “ripped his bowels open and filled them with rocks” before sinking the body in the Provo River. At least he called it murder.
Were indigenous people living peacefully before the arrival of European settlers? Not entirely. Some tribes fought each other and enslaved the defeated. Did early settlers sometimes pay Native Americans for the land they occupied? Yes, although the terms rarely seem to have been favorable to them. Manhattan pops to mind.
But neither question is relevant to whether America’s earliest forebears stole land or to the specious argument that acknowledging theft means we should all leave our homes so that Native Americans can move in.
For one thing, there aren’t enough indigenous people to call moving trucks for. By some estimates, as much as 96% of the indigenous population was wiped out by disease, violence and displacement during European colonization.
By most measures, that’s genocide.
At the very least, we should admit that whatever good the United States has done in the world since then, its founding included horrendous brutality, including the slaughter of indigenous people. Many of us weren’t descended from those early settlers, but as a whole, we have an obligation to right wrongs – and behave ourselves.
But conservatives often struggle with the concept of holding two opposing thoughts in their heads at the same time, perhaps now more than ever.
This week, during a Senate antitrust hearing about the proposed sale of Netflix to Warner Bros., Ted Cruz brought up Eilish’s comment. He asked Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos and Warner Bros Discovery chief revenue officer Bruce Campbell if they were on stolen land (video clip below.)
The two men seemed puzzled. Chuckling nervously, Sarandos replied that he had “no idea of the history of this land where we’re sitting today.”
“It speaks volumes that neither of you are willing to say ‘hell no, we’re not on stolen land,’” Cruz said in his oozy way. “And I will say, at the Grammys, when you see an entertainer say ‘nobody is illegal while we’re on stolen land’ and then you see entertainers leap to their feet so excitedly at the notion that America is fundamentally illegitimate, it starts to convey the entertainment world is deeply corrupt.”
Oh, my.
What, pray tell, will we learn next? That the men and women in control of Capitol Hill and the White House are also disingenuous?
Say it ain’t say, Rafael. Say it ain’t so.