Joan Baez is holding true to her activist roots.
The people legend and lifelong social justice champion addressed the dire state of American politics whereas showing on the premiere episode of the brand new Netflix discuss present “Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney” on Wednesday night time.
Earlier than going right into a story about what a “funny person” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was, Baez took a second to set the anecdote into at this time’s “context.”
“You said I could say anything I want out here,” the “Diamonds and Rust” singer instructed Mulaney. “We’re all here to be silly and have fun, and as long as we recognize the fact that our democracy is going up in flames. We’re being run by a bunch of really incompetent billionaires.”
Whereas Baez didn’t point out any explicit mega-moguls by title, it’s nearly sure her remark was a callout to President Donald Trump and his high-profile supporters like Elon Musk. The unelected White Home insider has been on the helm of federal budget-slashing efforts underneath the so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity.
In one other anecdote, Baez recounted her temporary however dangerous expertise proudly owning a automotive made by Musk’s electrical car firm Tesla.
“I hated that thing,” she mentioned. “But I thought I was supposed to like it. So I drove off in it.”
Simply 45 minutes later, Baez mentioned, she “smashed it into an oak tree on my property.”
“I was thinking, ‘That’s a sign,’” she mused.
The musician has by no means been shy about talking fact to energy.
Throughout her time within the San Francisco folks scene, her music grew to become a staple of the Nineteen Sixties protest actions. She was arrested throughout demonstrations in opposition to the Vietnam Warfare and was a staunch ally to the Civil Rights Motion from its begin.
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“Nonviolent action was what I was born for. I knew that I belonged there,” she mentioned within the 2023 documentary “Joan Baez: I Am a Noise.”
In more moderen years, she’s continued her advocacy as a supporter of environmental justice, jail reform, anti-imperialism and LGBTQ+ rights.
