Singer Cyndi Lauper reached once again for a Hitler comparison — her go-to criticism of former President Trump — to decry Republican state lawmakers’ efforts to address radical transgender ideology.
The 69-year-old songstress, who scored mega-hits in the 1980s with “Time After Time” and “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” told ITK the spate of state laws being passed in red states, including ones aimed at ending chemical and surgical treatments of children who claim to be transgender and laws keeping biological males out of girls’ sports, was reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
“Equality for everybody, or nobody’s really equal,” she said, according to The Hill, adding, “This is how Hitler started … just weeding everybody out.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea what they’re doing but, you know, you just have to keep fighting for civil rights,” she continued. “I guess that’s the way it is in this country. Started out like that, didn’t it?”
Lauper comparing Republicans to Nazis is not new. In 2016 she said of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, “The things that he says are appalling to me and shocking. I was so shocked when he started to talk about the LGBT community. … That guy is selling inflammatory things that I have never in my whole entire life heard … except, you know, Hitler.”
During the 2016 campaign, Lauper again sounded off about Republicans, saying of Trump’s candidacy, “The Republicans who let him in— which I don’t know what the heck that party is nothing to me anymore; you got all these extremists … even the ones they think are moderate are extremists. … I gotta be honest; they’re haters.”
Earlier in 2016, Lauper supported the boycott of North Carolina over the state’s Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, which mandated that schools and state and local government facilities containing single-gender washrooms only allow people of the corresponding sex on their birth certificate to use those bathrooms.
Lauper demanded for the show she played in Raleigh that there be a non-gender-specific bathroom, and the venue decided to make it permanent.
In 2019, Lauper stated of President Trump, “Maybe he doesn’t even realize that he preaches hate. I feel really bad for Americans, because instead of bringing us together, he’s pulled us apart and that doesn’t make sense.”
“My sister was gay, my best friends were gay, so I figured I had to be gay,” Lauper said in 2008. “So I did everything they did. I tried kissing girls. But it didn’t feel right for me and eventually I was forced to come out as a heterosexual.”