It didn’t take long for the clip to go viral: Megan Thee Stallion performing on Saturday Night Live, flanked by backup dancers wearing matching black and white bodysuits, their fists raised high in the air as a message urging viewers to “protect Black women” played behind them.
The performance included a brief break in the middle of her hit single “Savage” calling out Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, the special prosecutor in charge of investigating the killing of Breonna Taylor. During it, Megan played an audio clip from a recent speech by racial justice activist and organizer Tamika Mallory: “Daniel Cameron is no different than the sellout negroes that sold our people into slavery.”
In case you were wondering, yes, Daniel saw the clip. And yes, he got deep in his feelings about it, confiding those feelings to none other than Fox and Friends on Tuesday.
Asked by host Steve Doocy about Megan Thee Stallion’s SNL performance, Cameron—who didn’t seem to realize that the clip was actually Mallory speaking, not Megan herself—said:
“Well, let me just say, I agree that we need to love and protect our Black women, there’s no question about that. But the fact that someone would get on national television and make disparaging comments about me because I’m simply trying to do my job is disgusting.”
He went on to describe the “sellout” comment as one that he’s repeatedly experienced “because I’m a Black Republican, because I stand up for truth and justice as opposed to giving into a mob mentality.”
Hrmmm. Okay, Daniel.
“The fact that a celebrity that I’ve never met before wants to make those sorts of statements—they don’t hurt me,” Cameron continued—even though his previous comments sort of...implied otherwise.
If you were curious whether the GOP rising star planned on riding the conservative grievance express all the way back to the station, well, just you wait sirs and madams, we’re getting there.
“You see a lot of that from the left about being tolerant, but what you saw there is inconsistent with tolerance,” he said.
As the special prosecutor for the Taylor case, Cameron has been feeling the heat for months. His office’s investigation into the March 13 police shooting of Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician. was judged by many to be excruciatingly slow, prompting rounds of letter-writing campaigns and petitions.
Charges didn’t come until late September, when a grand jury charged former Louisville Metro Police officer Brett Hankison with three counts of “wanton endangerment” for recklessly firing 10 shots from outside Taylor’s apartment, causing potential danger to her neighbors. The charges enraged Taylor’s family and many who had been following the case closely.
Then, in a rare turn of events, a grand juror stepped forward last week requesting audio of the proceedings be released, along with permission to speak freely about the process. The anonymous juror said Cameron’s public comments about the process were misleading: Jurors had only received recommendations to charge Hankison and were not aware they could levy harsher charges against Hankison and the officers who shot Taylor, Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Det. Myles Cosgrove.
Cameron’s office released 15 out of 20 hours of audio from the proceedings last week, but this didn’t include the jury’s deliberations or prosecutors’ recommendations to the grand jury on charges. The attorney general also confirmed that he had not recommended any charges beyond “wanton endangerment” for Hankison, but said the grand jury could have returned any indictments it wanted (legal experts have noted that it is extremely unusual for grand juries to do so).
In any case, Cameron is tight about all the criticism, as evidenced by his Megan Thee Stallion comments and remarks he made about civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represents Taylor’s family and has called for Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear to appoint a new special prosecutor to the case.
“This is the Ben Crump model,” Cameron told Fox and Friends. “He goes into a city, creates a narrative, cherry-picks facts to establish, to prove that narrative, creates chaos in a community, misrepresents the facts, and then he leaves with his money, and then asks the community to pick up the pieces.”
“It is terribly offensive on his part to push such narratives, such falsehoods,” Cameron continued.