Beyoncé's Year of Peace and Misunderstanding
In February, after Beyoncé gave a politically charged performance in the middle of Coldplay’s Super Bowl halftime show, someone set up a page online announcing than an anti-Beyoncé protest would be held outside of NFL headquarters in New York City. The media showed up; Beyoncé fans showed up; actual protestors, for the most part, did not show up. “Anti-Beyoncé rally is the worst-attended protest ever,” the New York Post wrote, reporting only five haters were on hand.
The no-shows seemed to suggest, at least to those cackling online about it, that a much-publicized Beyoncé backlash was just hype. But maybe the incident simply indicated that the people most likely to object to Beyoncé don’t live in New York City.
Conservative-leaning criticism followed the singer throughout the year. Police unions outside of some of her concerts. When the Country Music Awards, some viewers complained on social media that the show had elevated a “cop hater” who “supports thugs.” The right-wing web-video star Tomi Lahren made a routine of attacking the singer. And stumping in swing states, Donald Trump criticized Beyoncé and her husband, Jay Z, for using coarse language (the irony did not ). Trump may have been right to calculate a political benefit to in Ohio measuring the impact of celebrity endorsements found that Beyoncé’s support for a candidate tended to affect goodwill toward that candidate—to a greater extent than with any other famous person the pollsters asked about.
