Despite becoming the first Super Bowl performer to include a lyric about “transgendered life,” Lady Gaga kept her halftime show free of overt politics or anti-Donald Trump statements. So Fox News needed to something else to be aggrieved about Monday morning. Enter the “sisterhood” of Hamilton.
Before the big game on Sunday, three of the original actresses from the hit Broadway musical took the field to perform “America the Beautiful.” When they got to the lyric, “And crown thy good, with brotherhood,” they added, “And sisterhood,” prompting cheers from the crowd and putting a smile on Atlanta Falcons coach Dan Quinn’s face.
It was an innocuous, inclusive statement that couldn’t possibly be seen as controversial, right?
Well, on Fox & Friends this morning, co-host Ainsley Earhardt drew a link between the “lecture” Hamilton’s cast gave to Vice President Mike Pence and the message Pence, who was in the crowd in Houston, heard from them before the Super Bowl. Back in November, then President-Elect Trump demanded an apology from the cast for urging his administration to “work on behalf” of everyone in a “diverse America.”
Tucker Carlson, who recently took over Megyn Kelly’s primetime slot on Fox News, was quick to jump on the three women for adding two words to the patriotic anthem.
“When this happened, my three daughters came in the room with tears in their eyes said, ‘We finally feel empowered as Americans!’” Carlson joked, at the expense of his children. “There is sort of an endless series of symbolic issues like this, and you sort of wonder, what is the point?”
“I’m as pro-sisterhood as anybody, more than most women, probably, actually,” he added, laughably. “But what’s the point? The point is to make the person who says it feel virtuous, and I guess maybe it’s comforting to them, but what does it add up to? Not a lot. And the rest of us just like to be entertained and hear the songs I grew up with without political statements in them, but we don’t get to do that anymore.”
Earlier in the same program, Earhardt said the “sisterhood” line didn’t “really bother” her. But her co-host Brian Kilmeade, still on location in Houston, concurred with Carlson that it was unnecessary
“Ainsley, if you are hanging out with your posse, Kimberly and everybody else,” Kilmeade said, referring to Fox’s Kimberly Guilfoyle, “I might say, ‘Hey, what are you guys up to?’ It doesn’t mean I think you are guys. It’s an expression. When I think brotherhood, I think the same thing.”
It’s tough, when you don’t have Beyoncé “dressed up in a tribute to the Black Panthers” going into a “Malcolm X formation,” as Kilmeade said of last year’s halftime show, you have to be outraged about something else. This year, it was the concept of “sisterhood.”