Taylor Swift is publicly so apolitical that she has only denounced the white supremacist embrace of her via her lawyer (as the many websites who have written about it know, via our cease and desists). But today, on the eve of March for Our Lives, she has taken a stand to support gun reform. While that stance is fairly no-duh for non-gun-nut regular people, for a celebrity so uncontroversial she had to manufacture a “bad reputation,” it’s pretty big.
But then, anyone who can look in the face of the crying survivors of the Parkland massacre and deny them is baseline heartless; Swift, whose primary audience consists of teens and tweens, likely sees something of her fans in them (and some of them likely are her fans). And while March for Our Lives seems like the safest of all the political hot-button issues to support, for Swift—who clearly also counts plenty of conservatives among her fans—saying she’s “made a donation” to “support gun reform” is as bold as she’s ever been.