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Calls for Madonna to be arrested for her views on yellow purple bananas

By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 24 January 2017

There have been calls for Madonna to be arrested after she said in a speech on Saturday that she had thought “an awful lot about blowing up the White House”. Leading the charge, Republican Newt Gingrich said that the singer is part of “an emerging leftwing fascism”.

Madonna was addressing the Women’s March protest against Donald Trump in Washington, DC on Saturday – which, of course, had a sizeably larger turnout than the new president’s inauguration the previous day. During the address, she said: “Yes, I’m angry. Yes, I am outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House. But I know that this won’t change anything”.

Speaking to Fox News, White House Chief Of Staff Reince Priebus said on Sunday: “Some of the things that were said yesterday, I’m not going to give the person any credit, but one of the actors said that – or one of the singers said she wanted to blow up the White House. I mean, can you imagine saying that about President Obama?”

Good job there Reince, covering up that you didn’t actually know who said this or what exactly was said. I don’t think anyone noticed. Because of course you wouldn’t want to give the actor, I mean singer, any “credit”.

Also, while I couldn’t imagine Madonna saying that she wanted to blow up the White House with President Obama in it, I think it would be fair to say that there were people saying stuff just like that during his presidency. I tried to find out if anyone famous had ever done so, but the first thing I found was this, and I decided it was probably best to leave Google alone.

But, yeah, Madonna did mention blowing up the White House, which it’s not exactly easy to defend. Maybe with some context you could, I guess. But who likes context? Oh, Madonna of course. Ugh.

“I am not a violent person, I do not promote violence and it’s important people hear and understand my speech in it’s entirety rather than one phrase taken wildly out of context”, she said in an Instagram post. “My speech began with ‘I want to start a revolution of love’. I then go on to take this opportunity to encourage women and all marginalised people to not fall into despair but rather to come together and use it as a starting point for unity and to create positive change in the world”.

“I spoke in metaphor and I shared two ways of looking at things”, she continued. “One was to be hopeful, and one was to feel anger and outrage, which I have personally felt. However, I know that acting out of anger doesn’t solve anything. And the only way to change things for the better is to do it with love. It was truly an honour to be part of an audience chanting ‘we choose love'”.

So there’s her take. She was actually pointing out that lashing out in anger is not an effective way to proceed in overcoming hate. Which is presumably why she also said, “To our detractors that insist that this march will never add up to anything, fuck you”.

Has all of this placated Newt Gingrich? Have a guess. No, he still thinks she “ought to be arrested”, he told Fox News yesterday. In fact: “She is parallel to the young fascists who ran around town breaking windows, all of whom should be given the maximum sentence … What you have is an emerging left-wing fascism. She’s part of it, and I think we have to be prepared to protect ourselves”.

Woah, Newt. What about all that context she gave? What about the Instagram post? Adopting one of those sarcastic tones that the kids love so much, the political man continued: “I love the left. When they say ‘I dreamed about blowing up the White House’, they didn’t mean they dreamed about blowing up the White House. They actually meant ‘the yellow purple banana’, but they didn’t wanna say yellow purple banana because it was too shocking, so they said blow up the White House. Give me a break! She now understands she’s at risk”.

Yeah, if only she’d just said ‘yellow purple banana’, none of this would have happened.