A week after Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. Presidential election, The Blessed Madonna has Tuesday (Nov. 12) published an essay on her newly launched Substack in response.
The Kentucky-born, London-based producer (real name: Marea Stamper) writes that she is “yoked to the brink of collapse with contempt for millions of my fellow Americans, myself included possibly. When Project 2025 spelled out the plan to cement power in the hands of white, straight men, while kneecapping every inch of progress made in our country over the last fifty years, I believed them, just as I believed Trump in 2016. I believe they intend to do what they have promised. But still, I feel like someone kicked the air out of me.”
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The Blessed Madonna, who released her debut album Godspeed in October, is one of the few politically vocal electronic artists in the scene and is one of a handful of producers to publicly comment on the election results, with Massive Attack and Moby also sharing their thoughts following the Nov. 5 election. Read her complete statement below.
At night, I flip through my phone and try to make a timeline, something that will put this in a linear form that I can understand.
417 weeks ago, I was boarding a plane and a bunch guys in camo and MAGA gear got on. I posted a picture and I tagged United Airlines and said, these men are wearing clothing associated with a hate group and I feel uncomfortable. I was absolutely serious. But the comments poured in calling me judgemental, overreactive, snide, unhelpful. “You don’t know these guys at all! Terrible form. You would go nuts if someone did that to you.” As if that MAGA hat isn’t the stand in for a white hood. As if we did not see those men scaling the wall of the Capitol four years later.
It doesn’t matter how many pictures I look at or timestamps I check though. It’s all a knot of repeating scenarios. I tell my mother it will be ok. I tell myself it will be ok. Someone does something that makes me lose faith in humanity. Someone does something that restores it, for a while. It all just swings back and forth, ticking like a metronome which does not tell time, but keeps it in a holding pattern.
This week the metronome’s pendulum has swung mostly to shame. I indulged in the kind of optimism that no mother who has ever had to give her black or brown son “the talk” about police brutality will ever have the luxury to enjoy. I am yoked to the brink of collapse with contempt for millions of my fellow Americans, myself included possibly. When Project 2025 spelled out the plan to cement power in the hands of white, straight men, while kneecapping every inch of progress made in our country over the last fifty years, I believed them, just as I believed Trump in 2016. I believe they intend to do what they have promised. But still, I feel like someone kicked the air out of me. Women have cast their vote for men who would let them bleed to death in a hospital parking lot from a miscarriage, should they need an abortion?
I am so angry, I feel as if I drank poison and am waiting for the other guys to die.
This is who we are. This is America.
Don’t say it’s not.
We have done this now not twice, but millions of times in millions of ways. We have have done it at the border. We have done it in for-profit prisons and for nothing executions. We have done it in forever wars and proxy wars and culture wars. We have sold our schools and public hospitals off for parts and left human beings in the wreckage.
And We The People have chosen as a country to buy what that vile man is selling, the real American dream: white supremacy. And he will sell it to you whether you can redeem or not. And he has sold it to you, though in the end, it will redeem no one and nothing. And so tonight, what I lack in optimism, is replaced with rage, which itself I believe can be a kind of love. It is not a gentle or comforting kind of love, but the love that lives behind bared teeth and says: motherf—ker, one of us is about to die trying.
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