Full confession time: I don’t listen to Taylor Swift. Not her music, and certainly not her new political woke stance.

However, my teenage daughter is a “Swiftie” so unfortunately, I am being made to care about Taylor Swift and her new brand of “politically woke Taylor.” Mostly because that same teenager is looking at new woke Taylor Swift and asking, “why does she have to do this?”

The answer is, of course, that Taylor Swift doesn’t HAVE to do anything. The woman is rich and pretty and wields an enormous amount of cultural power over a lot of people. So, why is Ms. Swift going so woke on everyone?

Like so much else in teenagerhood and young adulthood, it’s peer pressure. Basically, the left told Taylor Swift “if you’re not with us, you’re with THEM,” and thus Taylor got obediently in line with the woke-scolds of Hollywood and the cultural left. Her entire new Rolling Stone interview, along with her new album, is her waving the white flag to any sense of political neutrality or independence that she had once carved out for herself. Condemning white supremacy might be the flavor of the month (everyone’s doing it!), but flag-waving for Democrats?

There’s literally nothing worse than white supremacy. It’s repulsive. There should be no place for it. Really, I keep trying to learn as much as I can about politics, and it’s become something I’m now obsessed with, whereas before, I was living in this sort of political ambivalence, because the person I voted for had always won. We were in such an amazing time when Obama was president because foreign nations respected us. We were so excited to have this dignified person in the White House. My first election was voting for him when he made it into office, and then voting to re-elect him. I think a lot of people are like me, where they just didn’t really know that this could happen. But I’m just focused on the 2020 election. I’m really focused on it. I’m really focused on how I can help and not hinder. Because I also don’t want it to backfire again, because I do feel that the celebrity involvement with Hillary’s campaign was used against her in a lot of ways.”

I do think, as a party, we need to be more of a team. With Republicans, if you’re wearing that red hat, you’re one of them. And if we’re going to do anything to change what’s happening, we need to stick together. We need to stop dissecting why someone’s on our side or if they’re on our side in the right way or if they phrased it correctly. We need to not have the right kind of Democrat and the wrong kind of Democrat. We need to just be like, “You’re a Democrat? Sick. Get in the car. We’re going to the mall.”

You know, for someone who says that she sees the political landscape as high school cliques, she’s not fighting that tribalism at all. Swift has clearly delineated which clique she belongs to, and is virtue-signaling to all the “cool kids” to hop in her “car” to go where she wants, and is pushing all of this in her newest album.

As a responsible parent, what do I tell my highly conservative teenager (who also happens to qualify as a “woman of color,” whatever) about Taylor Swift?

First, this is peer pressure at its most insidious. Want to be cool like Taylor Swift? Be a Democrat! Say all the right catchphrases! Pay lip service to all your LGBTQ friends and put a whole lot of them in your music video just to prove how much of a woke ally you are!

Second, “there’s literally nothing worse than white supremacy” is such a first-world woke position. I can think of a hundred other things that rank above the evils of white supremacy in America today. And yes, there is real evil in white supremacy. But the left has made a concerted effort to turn a MAGA hat into a Nazi swastika, and as a result, lessened the evil of the swastika. This is pop culture history, where everything bad is because of white supremacy – slavery, the Holocaust, the Japanese American internment, et al. What does Taylor Swift know about the millions who died under Mao, Stalin, or Pol Pot? What does Taylor Swift know about the continued repression and starvation of the civilians of North Korea? How did white supremacy cause that?

Finally, I have a bad feeling that it’s going to take at least a full generation for history to come to grips with the failures of the Obama presidency. Obama himself was a pop culture figure that the left deified. History is going to end up poking so many holes in that image, but it’s going to take decades for it to happen. It will take a generation that doesn’t remember him as president to look more critically at the reality of the racial tensions and the foreign policy failures in order to swipe the halo off the man’s head.

Andrew Breitbart never said a truer thing when he said that “politics is downstream from culture.” Taylor Swift is just late to this game, and is now being super-woke to make up for her previous neutrality. The left will make her pay penance forever, and she doesn’t even know it yet.

Featured image: Taylor Swift CDs, personal photo taken by Deanna Fisher