A Republican senator is demanding out musician Billie Eilish return her Grammy because she criticized ICE.

Eilish has faced criticism from the right since this past weekend when she won the Grammy for Song of the Year for “Wildflower.” During her acceptance speech, she asserted that “no one is illegal on stolen land,” a reference to immigration policy.

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Now, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) is demanding she give up her Grammy as well as her home.

“There can be no Grammys on stolen land, I think,” Schmitt told YouTuber Nicholas Ballasy yesterday. “I think Billie Eilish ought to give the Grammy back and probably her mansion, which, I guess, is on stolen land, too. It’s ridiculous. It’s… These people are completely out of touch, and so, whatever. Yeah.”

Right-wing media spent part of the week criticizing Eilish as “a blithering idiot,” arguing that she should not be allowed to own her home in LA because it was built “where the Tongva tribes once lived.” Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Tongva Nation of the Greater Los Angeles Basin said: “We do value the instance when Public Figures provide visibility to the true history of this country.”

The backlash even made it into a Senate hearing when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) brought it up while questioning Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos about a possible merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, even though it didn’t have anything to do with the merger.

Sen. Schmitt has a history of opposing LGBTQ+ rights, getting a score of “0” on HRC’s Congressional Scorecard in the last session of Congress due to his solid opposition to LGBTQ+ rights. In 2019, when he was the Missouri attorney general, he joined a brief for the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not protect LGBTQ+ people from workplace discrimination despite its ban on discrimination on the basis of sex. The Supreme Court ultimately rejected his argument the next year in its Bostock v. Clayton Co. decision.

Last year, Schmitt attended a fringe right-wing conference that had panels with titles like “Overturn Obergefell” – the case that legalized marriage equality in all 50 states – and “The Bible and American Renewal.” Schmitt gave a speech where he denounced legal immigration and said, “America doesn’t belong to them — it belongs to us.”

“Our people tamed the continent, built a civilization from the wilderness,” he said at the time. So he probably does not believe that the Tongva Nation has a claim to the homes built on their ancestral land and was just saying that to attack Eilish.

Earlier this week, Schmitt too denounced Netflix as having “the wokest content in the history of the world” during a Senate hearing where other Republicans attacked Netflix for having some shows with LGBTQ+ characters.

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Former Sen. and current Alabama gubernatorial candidate Doug Jones (D) has vowed to replace members of the state’s library board who banned trans books from children’s and young adult sections in the state’s public libraries.

The board’s former chairman, John Wahl, who is currently running for Alabama lieutenant governor, has fired back, accusing Jones of wanting to expose young people to “sexually explicit” material and “perversion.”

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As AL.com reports, Jones recently posted a video on X in which he answered a question from one potential voter about what he would do as governor to support the state’s public libraries.

Jones, who is vying against five other Democratic candidates to become his party’s nominee, promised to be “a champion of public libraries, a champion of free speech, a champion of making sure libraries are free and [patrons] have access to a lot of information.” He went on to connect book-banning efforts to attacks on free speech and the freedom of the press nationwide, describing all three as “under siege.”

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In Alabama, the state Public Library Service board, under Wahl, responded to pressure from anti-LGBTQ+ groups Clean Up Alabama and Moms for Liberty by instituting a tiered system in 2024. Under the system, books featuring LGBTQ+ characters and themes are banned from children’s and teen sections of the state’s public libraries. The board has blocked state funding to the Fairhope Public Library after it refused to remove several books from its teen section.

In November, the board banned materials that discuss “transgender procedures, gender ideology, or the concept of more than two biological genders” from state public libraries’ children’s and young adult sections.

In his February 3 video, Jones said the first thing he would do concerning libraries as governor would be to “get rid of a few people on that library board” and replace them with “people with some common sense and not some crazy political agenda.”

“I understand that there are concerns about some books that may be inappropriate for young kids. That can be remedied without removing them. Those things can be fixed without trying to ban books,” he said. Public libraries, he continued, should be responsive to their communities, but policymakers must also realize “that not everybody in that community thinks exactly the same way.”

“We’ve got to have freedom of thought. We’ve got to have freedom of access to the information,” Jones said. “I guarantee you, if not on Day 1, pretty dang close to it, there are gonna be some vacancies on that Alabama Public Library System Board, for sure.”

Doug Unplugged https://t.co/w9KyCBKw5h

— Doug Jones (@DougJones) February 3, 2026

As AL.com reports, Wahl, who also served as chair of the Alabama Republican Party from 2021 until announcing his run for lieutenant governor last month, responded to Jones’s comments in a statement this week.

“Alabama families don’t want their kids exposed to this kind of trash, and anyone who has actually reviewed these books understands exactly why,” Wahl said. “This just shows the far-left, Biden-loving, liberal elitist mentality Doug Jones stands for. He actually believes that exposing young children to transgender story hour and pushing books filled with sexually explicit passages and graphic images is normal. It’s not. It’s perversion.”

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