Country singer Kelsea Ballerini, who opened the recent CMT Music Awards, where she later danced alongside drag artists as states across the country consider legally limiting drag show performances, doesn’t have any regrets about the spectacle on national television.
Sources with direct knowledge about the situation told TMZ that the backlash Ballerini is getting for her CMT Music Awards performance alongside four drag queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race has falling on deaf ears, because she doesn’t have a single regret about it.
if you go down, i’m going down too 🏳️🌈 // thank you to these iconic queens and @manilaluzon @kennedyddoftx @janjanjan @TheOliviaLux and @CMT for celebrating love, self expression, and performance.
📸 John Shearer @GettyImages pic.twitter.com/jZ3JTVI3ny
— Kelsea Ballerini (@KelseaBallerini) April 3, 2023
On Sunday, the CMT Awards pandered to the hard left and radical LGBT activists with its seemingly endless praise of drag queens and it’s biggest stars’ disingenuous attacks on laws meant to ban children at drag shows.
Meanwhile, Ballerini reportedly stands by her decision to feature the drag queens at the woke CMT Music Awards.
Production sources told TMZ that both CMT and CBS were supportive of the drag queen cameo appearance, and that it was planned. They were even involved with the rehearsals, the sources added.
One of the drag queens, Manila Luzon, even said it was actually Ballerini’s idea to involve them at the CMT Music Awards.
He added that the drag queens were very happy the network gave them a platform in front of a new type of audience, and even said that country music is changing, like the rest of the world.
Featuring the drag queens wasn’t the only controversial event to take place during the CMT Music Awards.
CMT also used its 2023 Music Awards to announce a new partnership with Sandy Hook Promise, a gun control group founded after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
The move comes after 28-year-old Audrey Hale, a queer individual who believed she was male, stalked the halls of Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, where she killed three children and three adults before she was successfully taken down by authorities.
While Hale was not a drag performer, authorities suggested that transgender propaganda played a role in her motive, admitting that “how she identifies” likely had something to do with her targeting the school.
Radical left-wing activists are now using the mass shooting carried out by a transgender to renew their calls for gun-control.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.