WATCH: Musician dropped by record label for attending Trump rally

In what he described as his only option, Pink gave an interview to Tucker Carlson on Thursday night to share his account of the fallout. He said he had no other choice but to go on the show, as anyone else would be unlikely to run his story.

January 15, 2021

Pink's attendance at the rally came to light on social media when a photo of him and another musician, John Maus, along with filmmaker Alex Lee Moyer, was posted on Instagram. Fans freaked out, with one account claiming that because Pink and Maus had not directly "express[ed] their solidarity for the BLM movement" they must have "traditional and archaic views."

January 7, 2021

Ariel Pink (left), with filmmaker Alex Lee Moyer, John Maus (bottom)

Fans took issue with the presence of both of these musicians having attended the rally. While replies to the tweet varied from people basically saying, "um, so what, people can have different views," to "cancel them NOW," Pink's record label was unequivocal in their condemnation.

January 8, 2021

Condemnation for Pink was mixed with support for if not his views, his right to have them. This, of course, used to be a liberal position.

Pink's views on Trump are supportive, as he said in a recent interview, for which he was roundly condemned. Before he deleted his Twitter account, @arielxpink, he wrote on Jan. 7, "i was in dc to peacefully show my support for the president. i attended the rally on the white house lawn and went back to hotel and took a nap. case closed"

In response to a Twitter post that claimed Pink was "putting others at risk by being at such a massive gathering in which protesters are not socially distancing or wearing masks," Pink said this was hypocritical.

Pink write that "All the people at these events deserve what’s coming to them. They took the risk knowing full well what might happen. BLM protests over the past 6 months are not informed about the pandemic?"

That quickly devolved into a debate on masking, when another Twitter user quipped "Almost all BLM protesters are wearing masks."

On the Wrong Opinion podcast, Pink talked about his support for Trump being primarily about opposition to cancel culture, support for free speech rights, an opposition to globalism.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/nJBWFVKpRig?feature=oembed

Pink supported Trump's run for a second term, saying "I don't see how things can go on... I think that Trump being in office right now is the only reason we're up and running… We'll never see another one like him (Trump)."

He said that people have been "convinced into doing whatever is the opposite of what Trump is doing." He said that after years of being basically apolitical, he is "a new man," and his "eyes have been opened." Pink didn't support Trump in the 2016 election, or anyone. But that he "was pretty floored when the narrative about him never let up in the media, and it just got worse and worse and worse."

"I was noticing the just absolute consistent, unrelenting hate for the guy, and any magazine I read, any kind of news, he was being villainize, across the board. So I decided to listen to what was so terrible about him. And I listened to sound bites."

"I wanted to understand what people were reacting to, and what I realized was that there's nothing specific, there's no policy that he was making, there's no decisions he was making that were offensive to these people, they weren't even paying attention.

"The abuse on the part of the media, on the people, was just hitting them over the head with the idea that he's terrible, and people just reflect that torture... when the media is clamoring is all day long about how terrible he is, and people just basically... almost everybody I know, is completely sleepwalking, they don't see it."

"Do you think that they know they are complicit in a fraud?" He asked.

The host of Wrong Opinion said "No they think they are being virtuous."

Pink told Carlson that he'd been cancelled before, and a little internet sleuthing shows that he was wrapped up in some Me Too scandals.

Some of the responses to his cancelling suggested that artists' views and their work should not be so intrinsically linked, and that a label dropping an artist over their political views is "self defeating." This view, however, was substantially drowned out by those who think Pink basically got what was coming to him