| Celebrities are about as ignorant about the issue as regular people, but there's also millions of people vying for them to say stuff. So much so that it's literally a commodity that they sell. Furthermore, celebrities often get pushback for making political statements, even extremely milquetoast ones like "Israel shouldn't collectively punish Palestine for Hamas". Their job is to be liked by everyone, which means they can stand for nothing. That being said, I know of few people who actually support America's current surveillance apparatus. Liberals hate it because it's corrosive to liberal democracy; Trumpists hate it because it hurt them; and left-wingers hate it because they're the intended target. The phrasing I use for this kind of issue is "anti-partisan": the general voting population hates it, but politicians want it to continue because it's instrumental to other goals that the voting population would support. A key wrinkle is that most anti-partisanism would also disadvantage wealthy individuals if it got its way - i.e. right to repair harms OEMs' god-given right to force you to buy a new one - so wealth tends to rally around continuing the thing we don't want. Celebrities are sort of in the wealth orbit insamuch as social capital and being well known is a saleable commodity, so they also have a tendency to orbit around opposing antipartisan issues. In other words, they don't want the CIA to spy on them, but they also want a neoliberal economy to sell products into, which is growing increasingly unpopular, which requires having a CIA spy on extremists, which means they want the CIA to spy on someone else. None of this is consciously understood or planned, there's no CIA guy telling celebrities to shut up about the spying, it is merely a coincidence of class interests and incentives. |