She wears parachute pants and a blouse covered all over with little red hearts underneath a knitted Uncle Sam sweater. But that’s not why Joy Villa stands out at CPAC — a political conference best described as the Tea Party’s version of Comic-Con, complete with elderly conservatives in old-timey revolutionary garb and pimply college kids in ill-fitting K-Mart suits.
Villa is immediately recognizable because she is the only one at CPAC with a single on Billboard’s Top 100, and more importantly she is a pro-Trump celebrity.
The Trump base adopted her after she wore a “Make America Great Again” dress at the 2017 Grammy Awards. Social conservatives were smitten at the next year’s Grammy’s when she donned a gown painted with a baby in utero. “I wear my political opinions on my dresses,” she explains with a laugh.
But while plenty of conservative groupies ask to snap selfies at CPAC — some have even pushed her to run for office — not everyone on the Right is so complimentary. At Red State, Jim Jamitis called the artist a “fraud.” At the Federalist, Bethany Mandel panned the controversial costume as “a pro-life performance.” It’s not just that Villa is a political opportunist, they argue, Villa is a religious hypocrite because she is a pro-life Scientologist:
Scientology is famous for many things, or it should be at least, and one of them is its reputation for allegedly forcing its members to obtain abortions when they work for its management arm the Sea Org…Those in the Sea Org work long hours for little pay; and introducing a baby into the lives of its members would greatly decrease their productivity and worth; and thus, having a baby while a member (signed onto a 10,000-year contract) is banned. Those who find themselves pregnant are reportedly given a choice: abortion or departure from one’s job, family and home. Even those who choose the latter are still allegedly coerced into getting an abortion.
Villa bristles at the idea she is a pro-life opportunist (if that was the case, she perfectly planned her unplanned pregnancy when she was 19). And Villa insists instead that her faith informs her activism: “I just want to talk to those women and say, ‘Listen, I love you. God loves you. God has a plan for you and this baby.”
But when I ask about Scientology, Sea Org, and allegations of forced abortions, Villa gets fidgety for the first time in the interview.
“I’m going to stop you right there,” she says midquestion. “No comment on that, but I will say that that’s horribly wrong and untrue. Anyone who is trying to take down another religion in the name of whatever cause is being destructive, and we have the freedom of religion for a reason. It’s totally false.”
