The ladies on The View are rushing to country music singer Zach Bryan‘s defense following backlash from MAGA conservatives to his new song, “Bad News,” in which he criticizes ICE and local police.
United States Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was the latest to drag Bryan’s lyrics, telling The Benny Show, “I hope he understands how completely disrespectful that song is not just to law enforcement, but to this country, to every single individual that has ever stood up and fought for our freedoms. He just compromised it all by putting out a product such as that,” per Entertainment Weekly.
What Noem failed to acknowledge, however, was that Bryan previously served in the U.S. Navy.
“Even people who voted for Trump and wanted to close the border and fix the system could agree that we’re living in a divided time and that, with ICE, all the videos we’re seeing of them coming into communities, that is scary,” Sara Haines said on The View this morning. “I don’t think that’s debatable.”
“Artists have always sung about the world around us and what they see,” she continued. “He’s not taking a side. He also served in our military.”
Alyssa Farah Griffin also chimed in to note that Bryan has never publicly taken a political side.
“He’s a Navy veteran and Kristi Noem didn’t seem to get that when she made that point,” Griffin said. “He’s never, in anything I’ve seen, publicly claimed a political identity. He didn’t endorse Donald Trump, he didn’t endorse a Democrat. He’s basically said he’s a Libertarian in the past. But we’re so quick in this polarized environment to be like, ‘You’re red or blue. You fit on all these issues and agree on all these things, or you agree on none of them.’”
She added, “This is an artist making music. I’m sensitive to the fact that we live in an environment where you’re seeing things that are horrifying happening by ICE, but you’re also seeing attacks on ICE agents and ICE facilities, which should always be roundly condemned.”
Griffin concluded that “not a word of what he says in these lyrics is inciteful [or] bashing.”
“It is social commentary on the moment that we live in, which is what music has always done,” she said.
The View airs on weekdays at 11/10c on ABC.