One of President Jair Bolsonaro’s top officials, the head of Brazil’s National Arts Foundation Dante Mantovani says rock music leads to satanism and abortions. The right-wing conspiracy posits that the social theorist Theodore Adorno, who was influenced by Karl Marx, wrote the entire Beatles’ song catalog to destroy Western civilization. It is completely unfounded and totally fabricated.

Mantovani shared a video on his personal YouTube page explaining how rock music leads to abortions which leads to Satanism. The 11-minute video accuses Elvis Presley and John Lennon of being affiliated with the devil. 

Mantovani says rock music destroyed American values in the 1960s.

“Rock music leads to drugs, which leads to sex, which leads to abortions,” Mantovani said. “At the same time, the abortion industry feeds into something much more serious which is Satanism.” 

On December 2nd, Bolsanaro appointed Mantovani to oversee Funarte, an organization founded in 1975. Once under the Ministry of Culture, after Bolsonaro’s administration eliminated that agency, it is now under the subdivision of the Ministry of Citizenship according to CNN. The purpose of Funarte is to, “promote and incentivize the production, practice, development and diffusion of the arts throughout the country.”

Mantovani lambasted artists like John Lennon and Elvis Presley for introducing behaviors like “hip-shaking” that leads to satanism.  “Lennon openly said, more than once, that he made a pact with the devil — with Satan, in order to be famous and successful,” he says. “In the 1950’s this so-called Elvis Presley emerges with rock music that makes everyone bounce and shake their hips. This is when certain behaviors start being introduced — Elvis Presley, for instance, died of an overdose.”

This isn’t the first time Mantovani has disparaged rock music.

Mantovani seems to believe that there is too much rhythm in rock music which causes people to beat each other. 

“What happens with rock is that the rhythm is always very repetitive. When a musical genre is more based on rhythm it speaks more to the body than the soul,” Mantovani says in a video from 2018 named “Is Rock Music?” “That’s why you see in rock shows people jumping, sometimes hitting each other — in punk rock there is the tradition of people beating each other and then leaving as old friends.” 

The issue with Mantovani’s bizarre views is that they could influence polices. He will oversee initiatives for music events and he is responsible for allocating government funds to music and the arts. In the past, artists have been able to receive up to 60 million Brazilian reals ($14 million) in funding from the government, although Bolsonaro has recently slashed that number. 

The government official also blames the American CIA for spreading the psychedelic drug LSD at Woodstock 1969. 

“Woodstock, that festival from the 1960s that gather a bunch of people, where hippies took drugs and LSD — there are certain theories that suggest that the large scale distribution of the drug was actually carried out by the CIA,” he says in the video. 

Of course, Mantovani is willing to make exceptions for his personal favorites: Metallica and Angra. 

Mantovani claims Metallica and Angra are the exceptions to the rule because they’re good to listen to “when you’re driving in traffic” or “feeling a bit tired.” Angra bassist Felipe Andreoli responded on Instagram, saying he was embarrassed to even be affiliated with the head of Funarte. 

“So much ignorance, so much disinformation, SO EMBARRASSED to have my band associated in any way with this guy. I’m not going to waste my time attacking his comments because, those of us who live off of and know about rock music know that he is delirious,” CNN translated. “It scares me to see such a retrograde, fanatical person in such an important position for our country’s culture.”

Newsweek believes the conspiracy theory, that Adorno wrote the Beatles’ music with Marxist undertones, began to spread amongst the right in Brazil this September, a month before Mantovani made his video. Olavo de Carvalho a mentor of Bolsonaro and a right-wing extremist who once said Pepsi used stem cells from aborted fetuses as sweetener, spread the Beatles conspiracy. However, the conspiracy itself is fairly old.

“The theory seems to have originated with The Committee of 300, a book by supposed ex-MI6 agent John Coleman,” according to Rock Nerd. “This reveals how Adorno, in fact, masterminded the whole British Invasion of the 1960s, although apparently for that the Tavistock Institute (which Adorno had nothing to do with outside the works of conspiracists) was the work of Jesuits rather than Jews. Or perhaps, if you ask Henry Makow, the Illuminati.” 

Newsweek suggests it is unsurprising Mantovani would espouse such strange rhetoric when many in Bolsonaro’s administration seem to be obsessed with rigid, so-called traditional values. 

In her short, but vastly successful career Cardi B has accomplished many a firsts. Back in January of 2018, Cardi B became the first woman to have five top 10 singles on both the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart at the same time. Then, in July 2018, with the debut of her fourth single “I Like It,” the rapper became the first female rapper to achieve multiple chart-toppers when she rose and clinched the number one spot on the Hot 100. Later that same year in October, with the release of Invasion of Privacy, she became the first female artist to have all of her songs from one single album certified gold or higher in the United States. This month, Cardi B’s debut on the cover of Vogue U.S. marks another first for the Dominican Trinidadian rapper. 

On Monday, Vogue sneak peaked a digital preview of its January 2020 cover series. The cover marks the first time a rapper graced the cover of the Vogue U.S.

Vogue is bringing the heat for January with not one but four — and then some — marvelous cover stars. The smallest of them all is Cardi B’s one-year-old daughter, Kulture Cephus, whose modeling skills are proving to rival even her famous mom. The spread is just about all that Twitter is talking about, and we can’t get enough.

For her feature, La Caldi spoke about managing her temper and finding peace in her own appreciation for her work.

The rapper, who has managed to go viral on more than one occasion for her devastating and savage clap backs and rants on Twitter and Instagram in the recent past, says she’s actually a pretty “calm” person these days

“I’m the type of person now who like, if we talk about things and settle things, I will do that,” the rapper explained to Vogue while also sharing that she has become better at ignoring accusations about her former career as a dancer. “I just hate when people be like, oh, you used to be a stripper, so you’re a prostitute, you used to fuck guys. I never used to fuck guys. The thing about it is, when you’re known as a stripper that fucks guys for money, everybody hates you because you’re fucking up the game. You’re making guys expect more than what you should be giving, and the next bitch pays for it. I don’t have to give guys no ass. You want something from me? I want something from you. I want your money, you want my time. So I’m just gonna give you time. Once you start expecting more, my phone number’s disconnected. Bye.”

Touching more about her experiences with her attitude and outlook on life and how to handle, Cardi B admits in her interview that she had to climb herself out of a sinkhole to get to this point- and that her climb has been pretty steep.

Fans, of the rapper already know that Cardi B turned to stripping during a low point in her life. She’d been kicked out of her family home because she was fighting with her sister and moved in with her boyfriend at the time and his mother. “My boyfriend kept cheating on me. He and I used to get into arguments, hitting each other a lot. Girls like to say, ‘I will beat a nigga’s ass.’ I used to have that mentality,” she explained. “I used to hit my first boyfriend until he started hitting me back and it just got out of control. But I started stripping, and I made enough money to move out.”

Still, the rapper was quick to reveal that, though she’s been able to control her outrage more recently, she still has extremely negative and strong opinions about our president.

Cardi, who in recent months has expressed her staunch support for presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, says that she understands Trump more than most.   “I feel like not any of these Democrats have a really strong support base—I’m gonna say a fan base, because it’s almost like a fan base, what Trump has,” she told the outlet. “Because he was an entertainer, Trump knows how to get them to keep on talking about him. All these little antics that he do, like get into arguments with Chrissy Teigen, it’s just techniques to get attention. And I get that. You like a certain artist that do crazy shit. But this person is in charge of our country. This person is in charge of our well-being. When it comes to my president, I want my president to be, like, extremely holy. That is the person I want to look up to. I don’t want my president to have any hatred toward a certain type of people. I don’t want my president to be arguing with freaking celebrities or caring what people think of him. I want my president to tell me an answer on shit that.”