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‘You Need to Calm Down’ may be Taylor Swift’s most political move yet

Posted at 8:08 AM, Jun 17, 2019
and last updated 2019-06-17 10:09:23-04

By Chloe Melas, CNN

Taylor Swift’s “You Need To Calm Down” is a pop anthem for equality and understanding.

The singer debuted a new video for the song on “Good Morning America” Monday in the midst of LGBTQ Pride Month and included a call to action.

“Let’s show our pride by demanding that, on a national level, our laws truly treat all our citizens equally,” reads an on-screen message at end of the video. “Please sign my petition for Senate support of the Equality Act on Change.org.”

The Equality Act, if passed, would amend the Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

The video features numerous celebrities who identify as LGBTQ, including Ellen DeGeneres, Billy Porter, RuPaul, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Adam Lambert, Todrick Hall, Hayley Kiyoko, Adam Rippon, Chester Lockhart, Dexter Mayfield, Hannah Hart, Antoni Porowski, Jonathan Van Ness and Tan France to name a few.

Some are met by chanting protestors holding anti-gay signs.

Taylor Swift gives surprise Pride Month performance at the Stonewall Inn

The “You Need To Calm Down” video comes just days after Swift gave a surprise performance at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, an LGBTQ rights landmark.

Swift has become more vocal about her politics over the past year. For the first time in her career, she endorsed not one but two political candidates, Tennessee Democrats Phil Bredesen and Jim Cooper, while they were running for the US Senate and House of Representatives in 2018.

Swift admitted that she’d been “reluctant” to express her political views in the past and credited a shift, “due to several events in my life and in the world in the past two years, I feel very differently about that now.”