Last June, Taylor Swift was on the verge of releasing the re-recorded version of her 2010 album Speak Now, which contains “Dear John,” the song assumed (but not acknowledged) to be about the relationship she had with fellow musician John Mayer when she was 19 and he was 32. It’s a searing ballad about cruelty and manipulation – a song initially received by her legions of “Swifties” as a call to arms in E major.
But on stage during the Minneapolis stop of her Eras tour, Ms. Swift asked her fans for a detente.
“I’m not putting this album out so that you can go and should feel the need to defend me on the internet against someone you think I might have written a song about 14 billion years ago,” she said.
It marked a change for the pop star, who hasn’t shied away from sticking her fans on her exes and adversaries in the past. She now embodies the type of syrupy-sweet wholesomeness that parents of celebrity-obsessed tweens could only hope their kids would look up to: the all-American cheerleader dating the football player, but the type of cheerleader who tells her friends not to bully her ex-boyfriend.
Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour is saving movie theatres, and infuriating Hollywood studios
Ms. Swift doesn’t sing about war, or drugs, or explicit sex, and she doesn’t perform lewd gestures onstage like other pop stars. Instead, she writes songs about heartbreak and spends time with her boyfriend’s mom, and her fans trade friendship bracelets when they go see her perform live.
In short, she is everything the American right, in particular, should want to see in a cultural icon. And yet many have come to see her as an enemy, thanks in part to a bizarre conspiracy theory that she is working to rig the 2024 election for President Joe Biden.
The theory, espoused by a handful of Kool-Aid-peddling charlatans, including former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, is that Ms. Swift and her boyfriend, tight end Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs, are Pentagon assets engaged in a psychological operation. That psy-op supposedly involves fixing the Super Bowl so that the pair have all eyes on them when, in love and victory, they emerge to endorse Mr. Biden, swinging the election in his favour.
The theory is, frankly, nuts – and to America’s great shame, the Pentagon has come out and said as much. But it is not at odds with the cultural milieu that has swallowed vast segments of the U.S. population. Plenty of Americans still genuinely believe that the last election was rigged, that there’s a tracking chip in the COVID-19 vaccine, and that the Sandy Hook mass shooting was a false flag. So why wouldn’t attention-seeking Donald Trump-loving pageboys try to sell the idea that Ms. Swift is part of a psy-op? Nuts is normal.
But what is peculiar about this new-found hate-on for Taylor Swift is how it maligns the ideas and institutions that the American right wing once revered and celebrated: heterosexual monogamous relationships, wholesome and clean pop music, the NFL, the Pentagon, beer-drinking football players. Mr. Trump did good work of rousing suspicion among the American right about the country’s national security and intelligence communities, as well as animus toward the NFL for its tolerance of the activism of Colin Kaepernick; his pledges are dutifully carrying on where he left off.
The NFL belongs with Taylor Swift, for now, but how long until they’re just another picture to burn?
Perhaps it’s personal as well: Taylor Swift represents the type of white suburban millennial women that Republicans need, but have lost. The 2022 midterm elections showed young women breaking hard for the Democrats, likely in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and Republican attempts to craft new legislation on abortion. There might also be some resentment among America’s extreme right, which years ago tried to “claim” Ms. Swift as their own (the Daily Stormer called her an “Aryan goddess”), only to see her disavow their ideas and throw her support behind Democrats.
Ms. Swift might very well end up endorsing Mr. Biden anyway; she publicly backed him in 2020, after all. But the power of a Swift endorsement isn’t absolute; Phil Bredesen lost the Senate race in Tennessee to Marsha Blackburn in 2018, despite Ms. Swift’s support. Indeed, that’s what makes this whole fever dream so self-defeating for America’s right: it is casting itself as even more ridiculous and out-of-touch than before, around something that is probably already a fait accompli. And it is inadvertently thumbing its nose at the values and institutions it purports to support in the process.
Ms. Swift, who won Album of the Year for a record fourth time at the Grammys Sunday night, will likely be no worse for the wear. But America’s Trump-supporting conspiracy theorists, resigned to listening to off-key political anthems on YouTube, certainly will be.
The American right’s hate-on for Taylor Swift is self-defeating
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05.02.2024
Last June, Taylor Swift was on the verge of releasing the re-recorded version of her 2010 album Speak Now, which contains “Dear John,” the song assumed (but not acknowledged) to be about the relationship she had with fellow musician John Mayer when she was 19 and he was 32. It’s a searing ballad about cruelty and manipulation – a song initially received by her legions of “Swifties” as a call to arms in E major.
But on stage during the Minneapolis stop of her Eras tour, Ms. Swift asked her fans for a detente.
“I’m not putting this album out so that you can go and should feel the need to defend me on the internet against someone you think I might have written a song about 14 billion years ago,” she said.
It marked a change for the pop star, who hasn’t shied away from sticking her fans on her exes and adversaries in the past. She now embodies the type of syrupy-sweet wholesomeness that parents of celebrity-obsessed tweens could only hope their kids would look up to: the all-American cheerleader dating the football player, but the type of cheerleader who tells her friends not to bully her ex-boyfriend.
Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour is saving movie theatres, and infuriating Hollywood studios
Ms. Swift........
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