Taylor Swift and MAGA weirdness
Hatred makes people gullible and foolish. That’s a key lesson of the MAGA right’s deeply strange turn against Taylor Swift and her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs star tight end Travis Kelce. In fact, that’s a key lesson from this entire sorry era in American political and cultural life.
There’s nothing new about partisan anger at celebrities. And Swift has dabbled in politics. In 2018, she endorsed the Democratic candidate for Senate in Tennessee, Phil Bredesen, over Republican Marsha Blackburn, and in 2020, she endorsed Joe Biden for president. Kelce, for his part, appeared in ads for the Pfizer COVID vaccine. By MAGA’s calculation, between them, the couple expressed the most infernal combination of affiliations – Democrats and vaccines.
Moreover, “shut up and sing” (or, in Kelce’s case, shut up and catch) has been such a consistent theme in right-wing cancel culture that it was the title both of Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s 2003 book of a 2006 documentary about the Dixie Chicks (now just the Chicks). But Republican opposition to celebrity engagement has always been highly selective. Even as he condemned Swift, one prominent MAGA figure recently boasted that his “side” still had Kid Rock, Ted Nugent and Jon Voight. And it was the GOP, after all, that elected both a movie star (Ronald Reagan) and a reality TV celebrity (Donald Trump) to the presidency.
But although traditional partisan pettiness can explain the knee-jerk negative reaction to Swift, it can’t come close to explaining the incredible weirdness of the recent theory emanating from people with some of the largest platforms in MAGA America. According to them, Swift’s extraordinary popularity isn’t the organic outcome of a talented and appealing superstar’s bond with her fans. No, according to them, Swift’s rise is an “op” or a “psyop” engineered by the deep state in order to benefit Joe Biden.
A central part of the plot, of course, is Swift’s fake, deep-state-invented relationship with Kelce. Thus, when the Chiefs struggled earlier in the season, it was a source of right-wing schadenfreude. But now that they’ve surged into a berth in the Super Bowl, it has all been revealed as part of The Plan.
To be continued