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Musician, actor, and style icon<\/a> Janet Jackson<\/strong> has been open about her views<\/a> in recent years, with her 2017 State of the World tour beginning with a video statement<\/a> of her politics. \u201cWe will not be silent. LGBTQ rights. Peace not war. Black Lives Matter. Immigrants are welcome. Liberty and justice for all,\u201d the screens at tour stadiums read. \u201cPrejudice: No! Ignorance: No! Bigotry: No! Illiteracy: No!\u201d the message continued.<\/p>\n Those values were at odds with the messages presented by then-president Donald Trump<\/strong><\/a>, whose own values appear to have grown<\/a> even further from<\/a> those tenets during his current campaign to retake the White House. It appears that Jackson\u2019s values might also have shifted, at least when it comes to her list of non-negotiables.<\/p>\n The 58-year-old singer\u2019s 1986 song, \u201cNasty,\u201d received an ironic bump<\/a> in 2016 when Trump used that word<\/a> against Democratic contender Hillary Clinton<\/strong> during that election cycle\u2019s presidential debate. That was a politics-meets-pop-culture moment<\/a> that almost seems quaint now, given Trump\u2019s reported fondness, these days, for referring to his Democratic opponent, vice-president Kamala Harris<\/strong>, as a \u201cbitch.\u201d<\/a> (Sadly for \u201cBitch<\/a>\u201d singer Meredith Brooks<\/strong><\/a>, the American public seems less inclined to view Trump\u2019s insults as a silly joke this time around.)<\/p>\n Janet Jackson fans will likely be relieved to learn that the megastar didn\u2019t use language that harsh to describe Harris. But her framing of a possible Harris presidency wasn\u2019t terribly supportive, either. In an interview published Saturday by the Guardian<\/a>, the \u201cPleasure Principle\u201d singer perpetuated one of the most ignorant falsehoods presented during this Idiocracy<\/em>-leaning<\/a> presidential election: the lie that Harris has been deceptive<\/a> about her race.<\/p>\n It\u2019s clear from reading the conversation that even reporter Nosheen Iqbal<\/strong> was nonplussed. According to the journalist (who also hosts the Guardian\u2019s Today in Focus<\/em><\/a> podcast), she only asked Jackson about Harris due to the social justice messages Jackson has presented in work going back to her groundbreaking Rhythm Nation<\/em> album in 1989. \u201cWell, you know what they supposedly said?\u201d Jackson responded. \u201cShe\u2019s not black. That\u2019s what I heard. That she\u2019s Indian.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a claim that echoes the one first made by Trump in July, when he participated in an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists<\/a>. At that event, Trump said of Harris that \u201cShe was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black,\u201d Trump falsely continued regarding the vice-president, who has never concealed her identity as the daughter of Donald J. Harris<\/strong>, her Black, Jamaican American father, and mother Shyamala Gopalan, who came to the U.S. from India in 1958.<\/p>\n \u201cSo I don\u2019t know, is she Indian or is she Black?\u201d Trump continued from the NABJ stage in July. \u201cShe was Indian all the way, and all of a sudden, she made a turn and she became a Black person.\u201d<\/p>\n Though nearly every journalistic outlet fact-checked Trump\u2019s remarks that day, it appears that the message didn\u2019t reach Jackson, who actually expanded on Trump\u2019s falsehoods when speaking with Iqbal. \u201cHer father\u2019s white. That\u2019s what I was told. I mean, I haven\u2019t watched the news in a few days,\u201d Jackson said when Iqbal corrected her. \u201cI was told that they discovered her father was white.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s unclear who the \u201cthey\u201d is that Jackson referred to, nor did she cite a source for the false claim about Harris\u2019s father. Representatives for Jackson have not responded to Vanity Fair<\/em>\u2019s request for clarification.<\/p>\n As Iqbal wrote, \u201cThe people who are most vocal in questioning the facts of Harris\u2019s identity tend to be hardcore QAnon-adjacent<\/a>, Trump-loving conspiracy theorists,\u201d but as she doesn\u2019t \u201cthink Jackson falls into that camp,\u201d one has to \u201cwonder what the algorithms are serving her.\u201d But just hours after the Guardian interview was published, Jackson returned to the headlines for another reason: her penthouse apartment is allegedly infested with black mold, a fungal growth that experts say<\/a> can cause neurological issues including memory loss, confusion, and cognitive impairments.<\/p>\n