The Hidden Political Price Of Fame In America

When Dolly Parton died, the entire country went into mourning — Left and Right, virtually everyone. 

There’s a reason for that. Dolly Parton coded country. She coded Christian. She coded optimism. She coded entertainment. 

She did not code political. And she refused to engage in that way. 

This made her perhaps the most popular figure in America. 

We are never going to get another Dolly Parton because Hollywood will not allow it.

Jelly Roll just proved it.

Jimmy Kimmel has taken a couple of weeks off, and his substitute hosts are somehow even worse than Jimmy Kimmel. I didn’t know that was possible, but apparently it is. 

First there was Rosie O’Donnell, who returned from Ireland to wear hideous outfits and sing about the president’s penis. 

And then Jelly Roll showed up. 

You know him as the country singer who has shed a lot of pounds. He showed up to host Jimmy Kimmel’s show, and there he decided to do the obligatory mea culpa for his prior cultural conservatism by ripping into the president of the United States. He stated:

Well, Mr. President, from one fat pig to another, take it from me that physical fitness is very important. And trust me, you’ll be happy to see your penis again.

He came back and did another show the next night, and he defended his Trump jokes:

Let’s be honest for a second. Any U.S. president should be able to handle a few jokes, right? Yes, they should also be able to handle gas prices, health care, and the occasional international conflict. … Look, y’all, I get it that some people are mad at me for goofing on Trump, but if you wanted me to make jokes about Kamala Harris, you should have voted for her.

What is Jelly Roll doing? The answer is that in Hollywood, you no longer can just be Johnny Carson — where you make jokes about all the different sides — and you can no longer be Dolly Parton, where you make jokes about neither of the sides.

You just can’t do that anymore. You must repeat the left-wing nostrums. There comes a point in your career when you have to make a choice: Are you going to double down on the base? Are you going to keep dancing with the gal that brung ya? 

Or are you going to swivel hard into the cultural leftism and try to expand that base? This has been happening in the music industry for probably two to three decades, and it’s one of the reasons our cultural milieu has been completely fragmented.

That’s why there are no big stars anymore. It’s why no one can open a movie. It’s why there are very few crossover stars, even in the musical arena at this point. 

Jelly Roll is a great example of this. Remember, Jelly Roll didn’t just code conservative. He was very openly Christian and pretty conservative. His history resembles Parton’s in the sense that he’s a rags-to-riches story.

He was born Jason Bradley DeFord in Nashville in 1984 and ended up in jail before he even graduated high school. He was imprisoned at age 14. He welcomed his first child while he was still behind bars. Then, after he got out of jail and had his daughter, he decided to pursue his GED and try his hand at the music business. 

In 2003, he started out in hip-hop, pivoted to country and rock, and ended up on the Grand Ole Opry stage in November 2021. He turned into a national phenomenon. 

Along the way, he didn’t just code Country and code down-home; he also coded very hard Christian. In 2026, he won the Best Contemporary Country album. He said:

First of all, Jesus, I hear you and I’m listening. Lord, I am listening, Lord. Second of all, I want to thank my beautiful wife. I would have never changed my life without you. I’d end up dead or in jail. I’d have killed myself if it wasn’t for you and Jesus. I thank you for that. …

That’s why I wrote this album. I didn’t think I had a chance, y’all. There was days that I thought the darkest things. I was a horrible human. There was a moment in my life that all I had was a Bible this big, and a radio the same size and a six-by-eight-foot cell. And I believed that those two things could change my life. I believed that music had the power to change my life, and God had the power to change my life. And I want to tell y’all right now, Jesus is for everybody. Jesus is not owned by one political party. Jesus is not owned by no music label. Jesus is Jesus and anybody can have a relationship with him.

This is how Jelly Roll coded: very, very, very faith-based. That was his image; he certainly didn’t code Left. There is tape of him greeting President Trump and Elon Musk at an event where they got along just fine. 

And then things changed. He’s been dropping a lot of pounds. He has been saying that he loves his new body. 

He got divorced in July from the woman whom he was paying homage to at the Country Music Awards. An insider said, “The reality is that he will always love her, but that doesn’t mean he wants to stay married. He’s in a very different place than he was when they met … Jelly feels healthy, focused and in control of his future.”

What’s going on here?

What’s going on is that there’s enormous cultural pressure for people who reach a certain level of stardom to then have “crossover stardom.”

And the way you get crossover stardom is to start signaling Left. 

You can’t just live in a culturally conservative space, even if you’re not overtly political. That’s not good enough. You must speak out on issues. You must. You’ll be forced to. 

This is why there will never be a Dolly Parton again, because 1) society will not allow there to be a Dolly Parton again, and because 2) our public figures don’t have the strength of character to avoid this.

A great example of this is Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift is the most successful example of somebody who went from a Dolly Parton-type figure to somebody who’s overtly political. For years and years and years, there was speculation on the Right that Taylor Swift was secretly conservative because she started off in country and the gospel area.

When she was 22, she said, “Listen, people don’t want to hear my politics. I just figure I’m a 22-year-old singer. And, you know, I don’t know if people really want to hear my political views. I think they just kind of want to hear me sing songs about breakups and feelings.”

This sounds like something Dolly Parton would say. 

But within a few years, she realized this wasn’t where the money was. This wasn’t what would allow her to achieve crossover stardom. So she did a documentary for Netflix in which she pretty openly started pushing left-wing social values because her silence was too deafening. She needed to have that crossover appeal to the Left. It made her far richer. 

But that is the price of admission. The price of admission in today’s day and age is, you must repeat, particularly on social issues, the nostrums that the Left is pushing. You must. 

Taylor Swift, back in 2020, talked about how Christian values support abortion. She did the same thing in 2020 when she was pushing LGBTQ+- politics.

It was really important for her to speak like that, because the cultural Left in Hollywood will only allow you to become a gigantic crossover star if you say things that the Left wants you to say.

Katy Perry originally started singing Christian music; she was known by her birth name, Katy Hudson, at the time. Then it turned out she couldn’t sell copies. 

So she adopted the stage name Katy Perry. And then her first big hit was about experimenting with lesbianism, and then she became an Obama surrogate, and now she’s dating Justin Trudeau.

In other words, this is not rare. What you’re watching with Jelly Roll is how you do things in Hollywood. You cannot even mildly code conservative. You must be overtly liberal. 

If you’re Sydney Sweeney and you’re not overtly conservative, just kind of apolitical, but you code a little conservative because you’re a pretty white girl and you have a little bit of a country feel to you and because you once registered Republican, this means that you are a target in Hollywood.

If you are Chris Pratt and you’re a huge star and you’ve never said anything remotely offensive, but you’re openly Christian, and you don’t go to an LGBTQ+- church, then X will come after you incessantly for years on end. If you’re Gal Gadot and you just happen to be Israeli and pro-Israel, you will get blacklisted in Hollywood.

That’s how it works. If you’re Mark Ruffalo and pretty overtly anti-Semitic, you’ll never stop working. 

If you are on the Left, you will likely never stop working. 

But that doesn’t mean this is going to work for Jelly Roll. There’s a mixed record in the country arena for this. The Dixie Chicks were a huge band. And then, in 2003, Natalie Maines decided to go after George W. Bush in London while she was on stage. The Dixie Chicks had this huge cultural moment and then disappeared. 

Maren Morris had a breakout single that was literally called “My Church.” She ended up ostracized after public fights with Jason Aldean’s wife over the kids. She went after Morgan Wallen, and then she came out as bisexual. Has that been a big boon for her career? Probably not. 

Hollywood’s dynamic used to be obvious: The entertainment industry was about protecting your stars, singers, songwriters, movie stars, and athletes. The goal of our entertainment industry was to create marketable stars who were separate from their politics. You didn’t know much about the stars. All you knew was what you saw on the screen.

This is why Dolly Parton was very famous and very rich and very good at what she did. All you saw of Dolly Parton was what she wanted you to see. 

This is why American stars were transferable throughout the world. This is why the most famous people on planet Earth were all American stars. You didn’t know much about their politics at all; you just knew that they were stars. 

That’s when America was the dominant cultural force on the planet, because it was cool people doing cool things, and they avoided politics. 

And then everything had to be weaponized. The star power had to be weaponized. The entertainment industry had to be weaponized. We had to know every view of all of our stars, and the stars just weren’t stars anymore.

There won’t be any more Dolly Partons, because the entertainment industry will not allow there to be any more Dolly Partons. 

You must say the words. You must.

If you refuse to say the words, then they will treat you as though you are persona non grata. 

Jelly Roll made his decision. 

We’ll see how it works out for him.