The singer has become such a massive pop culture phenomenon that her every action now receives scrutiny even from the mainstream media, where once it would have been just the preserve of the tabloids and the paparazzi. She has had such an impact that even I, someone who is totally out of touch with popular culture and have never heard a single song of hers, know something about her and have now mentioned her in posts on two consecutive days.
As far as I can tell, Swift is not a political activist. She does not use social media to talk about politics or Biden or serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) nor does she do political fundraisers. She did endorse Joe Biden in 2020 and posed with a plate of Biden-Harris cookies. She has also supported a voter registration drive last year but that is a politically neutral activity, though for Republicans increasing voter turnout is seen as a nefarious act. That is about it. But even those fairly innocuous acts seem to have driven members of the MAGA cult round the bend. They seem to think that Swift is some kind of Democratic deep-state operative and that the whole media focus around Swift and her relationship with a football player is part of a sinister plan to … well, it is not exactly clear what the plan seeks to achieve and how.
A. B. Stoddard documents in detail what she calls the Taylor Derangement Syndrome. It is hard to summarize the sheer scale of the lunacy but here is a sample.
They’re not just warning that Swift is out to brainwash America’s youth into liberalism or theorizing that she and Travis Kelce are in a fake relationship. Now they’re telling us that the Super Bowl is going to be fixed. Got that? Just as in Donald Trump’s Big Lie, evildoers are conspiring against Trump and his supporters—but this time they are going to steal a football game instead of a presidential election.
…You see, our ineffective, dysfunctional government is going to fix the Super Bowl so that it will mean more when Swift and Kelce get engaged, which will then make it mean more when they endorse Biden.
Or something.
…Kelce is considered one of the best tight ends in football history and has won two Super Bowls with the Chiefs, but he is a Bad Person in the MAGAverse. He made Pfizer-sponsored advertisements encouraging COVID vaccination. He starred in a Bud Light ad.
Posobiec, commenting on a video of Kelce, wrote: “Kelce is as trash as his regime-appointed girlfriend. What a beta.” But it’s not just Swift and Kelce he has groused about—he’s also has deep thoughts about Swift and . . . Barbie: “These are mascots for the establishment. High level ops used as info warfare tools of statecraft for the regime.”
…So MAGA is working to discredit Swift within its ranks. A couple of weeks ago Jesse Watters warned the Fox News audience that Swift might be a “Pentagon asset” or “a front for a covert political agenda.”
…The next two weeks will be busy for the online right, and on Super Bowl Sunday many of them will melt down. Swift reportedly plans to be in Las Vegas to cheer on Kelce after concerts in Tokyo from February 7 to 10. She will have to cross the International Date Line during her more than eleven-hour flight over the Pacific Ocean to gain a day in the air and make it to kickoff on February 11. Be prepared for Trumpers to see videos of her in both places and, after hearing about George Soros and Jewish space lasers, they will be convinced the Swift who shows at the game is a body double, or the one singing at the concert is a hologram, and that both are pedophiles.
It’s going to be awesome.
So what drives this level of lunacy about someone who has had a minimal amount of political involvement? What they might be scared about is that Swift has 450 million followers on X, Instagram, and Facebook and that if she endorses Biden-Harris, her followers will all vote for them and other Democratic candidates. The people in MAGA world are like a political cult who follow the whims of their Dear leader, and they seem to think that Swift’s followers are also a cult and will do her bidding, when they may simply like her music and have no interest in her politics.
SSAT has not weighed in on this as yet. But even he, rage-filled and impulsive as he is, may realize that attacking someone who is so wildly popular may not be the smartest move, even if she does at some point endorse Biden-Harris. All he has done so far is childishly claim that “he is “more popular” than Swift, saying that he has more committed fans than she does.”
The late night talk show hosts also weighed in on this latest absurdity.
Here’s Jimmy Kimmel.
Here’s Seth Meyers.
I happened to be stuck on a long drive with my niece (15), her friend, and an iPhone full of their music. After the girls fell asleep, it was just me, the long drive, and their music. The only song I liked happened to be Taylor Swift. I’m a classic rock kinda guy, myself, but her song was okay. It’s not enough to make me vote her way if I wasn’t going to anyways, but the song was okay.
Even though she has not, as of yet, endorsed Biden, we hear so much about her supposed upcoming endorsement from the MAGA crowd that its almost as if she already has. They’re all basically saying “Hey everyone, Taylor Swift want’s you to vote for Biden.” Thanks for endorsing Biden for her!
As someone who lived in Tennessee until very recently, I would rather have Ms Swift as the senator than Ms Marsha Blackburn.
It’s always fun to pick apart a conspiracy by imagining the shadowy perpetrators at the planning meeting:
A: “So, we need to get everyone to vote for Biden. We already have vast power over culture and the media, so we could artificially create a super celebrity…”
B: “Yes! Let’s make Biden a super star! Then every one will vote for him!”
A: “Ah… no. Actually let’s make Taylor Swift even more popular than she already is. That way, she can endorse Biden. Perhaps at some large televised event, like the Super Bowl.”
B: “The Super Bowl, perfect! She can do the halftime show. She’s already very popular so getting her the gig will be easy. She’ll have the mic and all the cameras on her for the endorsment.”
A: “Ah… no. Let’s have her date a football player, rig all the games to make sure his team wins the Super Bowl, and then Taylor Swift can endorse Biden from the audience when she is…. interviewed for some reason?”
B: “Great plan! Let’s do it!”
She’s a successful woman.
She’s what I call a quiet activist. She leads by doing, not by leading protest marches or political factions.
-- Sued a guy for $1 for sticking his hand up her skirt.
-- Bonuses for her crew that are larger than most people make in a year.
-- The voter registration thing
-- Remastering all her work when the original studio tried to fuck her over.
Those I know of, and I pay very little attention to what celebrities are doing. Each one of those is enough to get an authoritarian frothing.
(I’m wondering how their handlers are intending to get Kid Rock, Jon Voight, or Ted Nugent to date a football star for the notoriety)
@3: Or, say, a German Shepherd…
Mano, did you intend to write “Smith” in the title?
[Oops! That was a typo, probably due to autocorrect. I have corrected it. Thanks! -- Mano]
Stoddard, via the link above: … the Eras Tour, which could ultimately produce nearly $5 billion in economic activity, may have been responsible for the United States averting a recession.
It seems TS Derangement may occur on both sides of the culture wars.
I read this morning about a white supremacist once referring to her as an “Aryan Goddess.” She’s supposed to be one of them, but finds them loathsome.
TS is so famous as a politician that she got a headline in Euronews:
https://www.euronews.com/culture/2024/01/31/what-is-joe-bidens-taylor-swift-plan-and-why-is-maga-on-the-warpath
(On SSAT: “He’s probably still very sore that he was not named TIME magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year -- an honour that went to… You know or guessed it.”)
Poor woman. It used to be that, when people were unhealthfully obsessed about you, it was only constant and unrelenting hounding by “journalists” (I once saw a “news” article obsessing for an entire page about the relative lengths of Kate Middleton’s third and fourth fingers.)
That’s bad enough. But these days, you’re also the star of multiple unhinged people’s fever dreams. Swift’s drinking children’s blood in the basement of a pizza parlor is surely next.
(And, her boyfriend? How did he get into these unhinged peoples’ heads?)
[Kelce] made Pfizer-sponsored advertisements encouraging COVID vaccination.
Yeah, well, I got all my COVID shots from Moderna. Take THAT, woke sportsball dude!
@Raging Bee #13
Dolly Parton is a deep state psy ops plant, too. ; )
Wull, it makes sense.
You have a major political party which since long has been a subversive org, and its supporters are, appropriately, a bunch of dribbling, swivel-eyed paranoiacs. Any kind of stimulus can be a trigger, and any happening, however random, will unleash torrents of nut-flavored drivel. And this kind of stuff, with local variants, seems to be present in a lot of other nations too: a desperate but not serious situation.
So glad to see the progress in political discourse, I am.
General:
A lot of it is generic ‘outrage marketing’: get the rubes riled up and get the rage flowing towards the right target and the money flowing in. You can’t really talk about this sort of thing without mentioning the grift aspect.
But with Swift in particular, not only is she a high-profile target not on their side politically (which would be enough in itself) but Swift herself is an interesting legal case study of breaking corporate lock-in. She’s been re-arranging, re-recording, and re-releasing a lot of her old albums. Her original recording label was refusing to let her have access to her own back catalogue and the master tapes of the recordings of the songs she herself had written… so she got someone else to do new arrangements of the songs and then basically recorded ‘covers’ of her own songs. Because she owns the music and lyrics and the arrangement and production were done by somebody not associated with the original label, they have absolutely no claim on it.
Swift found a way to tell one of the major labels to go stuff themselves, make it stick, and still make money. Sure, it required already being rich and famous to start with, but you’d better believe that the big labels hate that someone has very publicly demonstrated that huge sums of money can be made without being shackled to an exclusive recording contract. So there is a whole lot of corporate media support for figuring out how to downplay all this and let the labels maintain their gatekeeper status. There’s going to be a lot of dark money involved in this.
Matt G@10:
That’s a common thing, and ties into a lot of the belief of the extremists that the ‘silent majority’ actually agrees with them. Back during the ‘Sad Puppy’ events in SF fandom, author John Scalzi was a particular source of hatred in large part because he was white, male, cis, rural, relatively (old-school) conservative, and wrote military Science Fiction; therefore, he should have been ‘one of them’. When he refused to go along with the hatred and used his talents as a published writer and humorist to mock them instead, the feelings of ‘betrayal’ were intense. He became a bit of a hate sink for the whole mess, a state he was fine with, because he could handle it and keeping the dangerous people focused on him meant they had less energy to harass the people who weren’t in positions to handle it.
garnetstar@12:
He’s a fairly major football star? Football is pretty much a religion in much of the U.S. How long did the media pay attention to the first football player who refused to stand to attention for the American National Anthem (as well as the League pretty much making sure he never got to seriously play again)?
Also, the loony right (sorry for the redundancy there) hates Taylor Swift for the same reasons they hated the Dixie Chicks: she’s white and quite good-looking (and knows how to rock her look), she’s a damn good singer and songwriter, and she’s got one foot in Country and the other in standard white Pop-Rock — which means she has a solid mainstream audience in the same demographics the Republicans rely on as their “base” (what Sarah Palin called “The Real America”). That makes her a much bigger threat to Republican demagogues and con-artists than any other artist in any other less-mainstream genre. She’s about to get the same treatment they gave the Dixie Chicks, so I really hope she, her managers and handlers, her family and friends, are prepared for it.
She has also supported a voter registration drive last year but that is a politically neutral activity…
No it isn’t — it’s detrimental to Republicans and they’ve explicitly admitted it. Voter registration has not been at all “politically neutral” here since the Civil Rights Movement.
PS: I notice the headline to this OP was originally “Taylor Smith drives the MAGA world bonkers.” I realized it was a typo, but not before thinking “Whoever this other Taylor is, good on ya mate!”
You’ve written two posts about her in two days, so why not stop humblebragging about your disdain/lack of knowledge of pop music and listen to a song or two? My favorite is “Style”.
What little I’ve heard of Taylor Swift has been metal covers, and hey, she can write some decent tunes!
#4 Overlapping
A sketch with exactly that in mind:
WMDKitty:
I myself have not heard anything she has sung, but as per Wikipedia: “Genres: Pop country folk rock alternative”.
So, right there she is superior to the crap singers.
Anyway, I’ve seen such as her come and go over the decades.
Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, um, Pink, … ah, Gaga Lady, and whatnot. But a whole bunch of them.
All super-famous in their day, some started very young. The 0.01% of singers.
I hear she’s become a billionaire these days, but I suppose inflation didn’t hurt that.
—
I can’t help but note that if someone sings a cover song, by definition it is not a song they themselves wrote.
Anyway, she sure has been in the news a lot recently, apparently she is popular worldwide and has gotten very very rich out of it. Good on her. I can’t imagine that all the free publicity she’s getting amongst the MAGAs and therefore those people’s acquaintances and family will exactly bother her or her bottom line.
#21 Holms: That sketch was exactly what I had in mind!
marner: I do agree that this “humblebragging about [one’s] disdain/lack of knowledge of pop music” is getting rather ridiculous lately. It may be plausible for someone who lives in Sri Lanka not to have heard (much) of Taylor Swift, but not for anyone living in an English-speaking country. Like, I often turn on the radio in my car, so I end up hearing [currently popular pop/rock star] enough times to decide whether or not I like him/her/them. I outgrew my “I only listen to classical, Yes, Jefferson Airplane and Jethro Tull” phase decades ago.
marner:
Quite interesting you see that as bragging; someone is a tad defensive, no?
I’m sure that as far as popular music goes, it’s quite popular.
Why would I waste my time listening to it, though?
What, just so I can no longer “brag” that I don’t bother with such as her? Now that would indeed be petty.
Anyway, it should be clear to you that the two posts in two days are because she is featuring heavily in the news cycle and he comments on current affairs. Here, the opening sentence:
“The singer has become such a massive pop culture phenomenon that her every action now receives scrutiny even from the mainstream media, where once it would have been just the preserve of the tabloids and the paparazzi.”
—
RB:
I live in Australia, where we do speak English, yet I don’t listen to the radio. So implausible!
Again, be aware that accusing others of bragging because they don’t share one of your recreational predilections comes across as rather defensive. Which I find not at all implausible.
It is curious that people think that I am being disingenuous when I say that I have not heard Swift’s music. I am sure I am not that unusual, especially for people of my age. I have not heard the music of almost any current singer (except perhaps when I am in a public place that is playing music and even then I do not pay any attention). Why? Because I do not listen much to the radio. When I am in the car or at home and turn on the radio, it is to listen to specific news programs or talk shows on NPR or the BBC, which is why I have heard OF Swift but not her. I am interested in her as a political phenomenon but am not particularly interested in listening to her songs.
This is not a knock on her. I am sure that she must be a fine singer to have acquired such a large following. It is just that popular music is not something that I any longer have time for or an interest in. It is a phase of my life I left behind decades ago, somewhere around the 1970s.
[Plus it functions as a disclaimer to the effect that, since one is neither a fan nor a detractor nor familiar with their work, one thereby avoids being biased about them; surely such transparency is a good thing!]
/It is curious that people think that I am being disingenuous when I say that I have not heard Swift’s music. I am sure I am not that unusual, especially for people of my age. I have not heard the music of almost any current singer (except perhaps when I am in a public place that is playing music and even then I do not pay any attention).
I am probably about your age and, I, suspect, slightly tone deaf. Most music, to me, is a mixture of random noise. interspersed in much modern as “music as wild screaming and mindless repartitions of two or three lines of an inane chant”.
I may have heard Taylor Swift but I probably turned of the radio as soon as any “music” came on. I might even like some of her work but I have no intention of listening to the dreck one may have to before we get to it.
Yeah, I’ve never heard a Taylor Swift song either, although I do like pop music. I’m a huge fan of Madonna, for instance.
I’ve just been pretty busy lately, no time for recreational music. Also, my car radio, the only radio I have, doesn’t work.
Most music, to me, is a mixture of random noise. interspersed in much modern as “music as wild screaming and mindless repartitions of two or three lines of an inane chant”.
Sounds like some really bad Norse-Heathen death-metal — where can I find some?!
[OT]
If ever there was a genre that sprouted uncountable subgenres, it’s metal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathcore
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Viking_metal_bands
(Obs, a niche that TSwift has not yet captured)
@31: Not yet…but I could definitely see her branching into Viking-Metal, if only for one “experimental” CD…and maybe with Bjork for another — what sort of genre-bending monster would those two spawn?
I, living in the UK, have never knowingly heard any song by her. Is it really unimaginable to you that there could be people (like me) who don’t listen to radio or TV stations that play pop music? And, I know this stretches credibility to breaking point, just aren’t all that interested in music? Where else would I be likely to hear her singing? I guess some shops play her music, but even if I was in one when they did so, that doesn’t mean I would know it was her.