I’ve realized two things very recently. One, it’s very easy for people to mock up fake tweets and attribute those “screencapped tweets” to celebrities. Two, that there are a lot white folks who are really salty that they can’t be openly racist, sexist and homophobic anymore, and those folks are waging a war against “political correctness.” Blake Shelton is one of those people, recently praising Donald Trump for showing white heterosexual men that they don’t have to be “so afraid” of being openly bigoted towards other people. But here’s the question: was Blake Shelton openly tweeting a bunch of racist, sexist and homophobic crap back in, say, 2011? That’s what people claimed over the weekend, as allegedly screencapped tweets from Blake started making their way around media outlets – you can see of the alleged tweets here.
While Blake is a big tweeter – he really is, he spends a lot of time talking to his fans on Twitter – some of the tweets don’t really sound like Blake, or 2011-version Blake. My first thought was “Huh, I wonder if someone mocked those up.” But then when I was researching this story, I found this incident from 2011 (the same timeframe) where Blake really did tweet some homophobic crap and then he had to issue an apology and clarification. So, obviously, people were watching his Twitter back then and jumping on everything he said – so why are these seemingly old tweets just coming to light now? In any case, Blake wants to shut down the stories. And so does NBC and The Voice.
NBC’s “The Voice” is straining over a scandal involving Blake Shelton’s alleged racist, homophobic and just-plain-creepy tweets. After social-media mavens managed to dig up the offending messages — which were posted between 2010 and 2011, before Shelton became a household name — we’re told that publicists for the NBC talent show called at least one major media outlet and threatened to cut off access to the show’s stars, and tapings, if it continued to cover the kerfuffle.
Sure enough, while links to stories about the fan backlash and his family’s reaction can still be found on a certain entertainment news site, by Tuesday they led to blank pages. The Twitter uproar began Saturday when Shelton’s tweets — which went under the radar when they were posted, since Shelton had yet to join hit “The Voice” and was still a niche, country musician — were re-posted online.
In the cache of messages were offensive remarks including, “wish the [bleep]head in the next room would either shut up or learn some English so I would at least know what he’s planning to bomb,” and, “standing in line at a coffee shop in LA talking with the man in front of me. He orders a skinny caramel latte. I couldn’t tell he was gay!!!”
In another, Shelton said he was “flying home to sleep with two young blonde and black haired bitches,” and bizarrely, when referring to then-16-year-old actress Dakota Fanning, he wrote “Soo .?.?. I just figured out a great excuse for my sick fantasy about Dakota Fanning. I thought she was Amanda Seyfried.”
Said a Page Six source, “His people think this will blow over, but as the scandal unfolded reps for ‘The Voice’ called at least one site and asked them not to run [coverage] in exchange for continued access to the show,” which might include perks like interview opportunities with stars Christina Aguilera and Adam Levine, as well as tickets to tapings. Reps for “The Voice” didn’t get back to us, and a rep for Shelton declined to comment.
[From Page Six]
The fact that Blake hasn’t just come out and said, “these tweets aren’t real” makes me suspicious. But he might just be getting advice from NBC corporate trying to “manage” the crisis. And while I don’t think much of Blake overall, I just find it hard to believe that he would tweet some of that sh-t. He wasn’t just a “niche” country star in 2010-11. He was one of the biggest country stars in the country, and in 2011, he joined The Voice because he was so well-known and well-liked. I guess I just don’t know what to believe. But threatening media outlets probably isn’t the best solution?
Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet.
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