Even Taylor Swift is Done with Christian Conservatives' Shit
Taking on the "Judgmental Creeps" Is Going Mainstream
Have right-wingers not learned? Don’t come for Taylor Swift unless you want to be a villain in her songs.
But that didn’t stop them from claiming she ruined the NFL just by watching her Kansas City Chiefs boyfriend play. It didn’t stop them from designing elaborate conspiracy theories about her. It didn’t stop them from attacking everything from her relationships to the way she dresses to her cat. It didn’t stop them from accusing her of performing witchcraft during her Eras Tour.
Side note: Witches is a metaphor Swift often uses in her songwriting, singing “They’re burning all the witches even if you aren’t one. So light me up” in I Did Something Bad on her 2017 album, Reputation.
Swift did not hold back her ire on her newest album, The Tortured Poets Department, which released midnight Friday. Christian conservatives joined ex-lovers and a female supervillain named “Aimee” (*cough* Kim Kardashian *cough*) as the wrongdoers who inspired her writing.
Her lyrics were more explicit than ever, with an entire song titled Guilty as Sin dedicated to masturbation (cover your ears, kids!). Other lyrics reference Christian themes like “your good Lord don’t need to lift a finger”, “at all costs, keep your good name”, and “What if I roll this stone away”. But the most obvious edict against the religious right showed up in the song, But Daddy I Love Him:
I just learned these people only raise you
To cage you
Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best
Clutchin' their pearls, sighing, "What a mess"
I just learned these people try and save you
'Cause they hate you
And later:
God save the most judgmental creeps
Who say they want what’s best for me
Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never see
What does this have to do with taking down Project 2025? Well, for starters, the world Swift has created with her lyrics — a world of earnest artistic freedom, gender equality, and female empowerment — goes away the moment Project 2025 goes into effect. Under conservative rule, capitalism rules us and the Republican government rules capitalism.
If Project 2025 goes into effect, that ‘fuck the patriarchy’ keychain gets banned because patriarchy is the law of the land. Conservatives see female autonomy as a threat. In Project 2025, they try to control everything from our bodies to our finances. On Page 6, they write, “The Dobbs decision was just the beginning.” They will rescind Biden’s “Protecting Women’s Health at Home and Abroad” initiative.
Later, they write they will “deploy existing federal powers to protect innocent life.” This is a thinly veiled promise to use our US military against its own citizens to ensure no woman will EVER be able to control their own bodies as long as they are in power.
And they plan to be in power forever if Trump is elected again. They will wipe out our checks and balances system and effectively destroy our Constitution.
If Trump is elected again, conservatives won’t only be stepping on queer people’s gowns, like Swift sings about in You Need to Calm Down. They will be stomping on and effectively erasing their existence. They plan to remove all references to to the following terms: sexual orientation, gender identity, DEI, gender, gender equality, and gender awareness. They will accuse anyone who is transgender of sexualizing children and use their new rules about pornography to lock them in prison.
I assume that like the rest of us, Taylor Swift is tired of being a target in their crosshairs, so she’s changed the narrative and let everyone know exactly what she thinks of their attempts to control her.
After all, who’s afraid of little old Taylor Swift?
They should be.
The secret conservatives don’t want you to know is that they’re terrified of Taylor Swift using her star power to swing the election in favor of Democrats. She has outsized influence over her fan base. Even before her billion-dollar grossing Eras Tour, 53 percent of American adults claimed they were fans with 16 percent describing themselves as “avid fans.”
Swift has spent most of her career being subtle about her politics, explaining her desire to use her voice for the first time in the 2018 election because of the existential threat Tennessee’s incumbent Sen. Marsha Blackburn posed to women. Swift told her reluctant father she felt compelled to speak out against against Blackburn because she didn’t support the Violence Against Women Act. Blackburn won anyway. In the 2020 election, Swift endorsed Joe Biden. Politicos hope she will be even more vocal this election cycle.
But don’t use this as an excuse to rest on her laurels. As John Pavlovitz says in his incandescent book Worth Fighting For, “Far too many people are still inexplicably waiting for saviors and superheroes to save them.”
Those heroes are us.
Onward Democracy Defenders!