Paramore’s Hayley Williams has declared that anyone who votes for Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis is “dead” to her.
The 34-year-old lead singer of the alternative rock band shared her stance on stage at the Adjacent Music Festival in Atlantic City, New Jersey, over the weekend.
“I’ll be happy to tell you I’m very f***ing comfortable talking politics,” Williams told the crowd. “If you vote for Ron DeSantis, you’re f***ing dead to me. Is that comfortable enough for anyone?”
Footage from the performance shows the crowd cheering in response to the singer’s announcement.
Williams’s remarks come after she was accused of being too uncomfortable to speak about politics on tour.
DeSantis kicked off his 2024 presidential campaign with an event in De Moines, Iowa this week.
“I will be able to destroy leftism in this country and leave woke ideology on the dustbin of history,” the Florida governor announced in a Fox & Friends interview on Memorial Day.
“At the end of the day, I’ve shown in Florida an ability to win huge swaths of voters that Republicans typically can’t win — while also delivering the boldest agenda anywhere in the country.”
DeSantis also attacked rival Donald Trump by saying “he’s taking the side of Disney in our fight down here in Florida. I’m standing for parents, I’m standing for children.”
The Florida governor is currently polling in second place in surveys of the 2024 Republican field. With the exeption of former US president Donald Trump, he has consistently been the only Republican to register double-digit percentages in polls of voters’ choice for the party’s nominee.
It was reported this week that DeSantis’s new anti-LGBT+ laws have triggered a “mass migration” of the community out of the state, with several transgender people apparently taking to GoFundMe to aid their move.
On Twitter, former Florida state representative carlos Guillermo Smith, the first openly LGBT+ Latino to be elected to the state legislature, said that the bills are “revoking our freedoms and ruining people’s lives in his quest for political power”.
“We will NOT be erased,” he said. “We will RESIST. We will FIGHT BACK. We will proudly RAISE OUR FLAGS. We will WIN.”
Williams recently spoke out against two “regressive and unfathomably harmful” bills passed in her home state of Tennessee, which banned drag performances and gender-affirming care.
“We stand in solidarity with our LGBTQIA+ family and local LGBTQIA+ orgs in this fight, not only for inclusion for our friends and family in the queer community, but for radical acceptance and empowerment for each of them,” she wrote on Instagram.
“Drag is not a crime. Gender-affirming healthcare for all, including our youth, is a necessity.”
