It’s only been a few years since white supremacists were taking advantage of Taylor Swift’s silence on political topics to claim that she was secretly one of them, plus that time Swift’s lawyer tried to stop a blogger from suggesting that she should stop sitting on the sidelines and either embrace or denounce the racists in her fanbase, but Swift has actually publicly supported Democratic candidates since then and even detailed her lean to the left in Netflix’s Miss Americana documentary. Now, with America’s history of institutional racism being thrust into the spotlight because of the nation’s police departments’ inability to stop killing Black people, Swift has joined in on renewed calls for states to start tearing down statues commemorating famous racists.
Specifically, Swift is speaking out against statues of racist newspaper editor Edward Carmack and Confederate general/Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest in her home state of Tennessee, posting in a surprisingly killer Twitter thread that the two of them are “DESPICABLE figures in our state history and should be treated as such.” It’s a long one, but here are some highlights: