SATANIC TAYLOR SWIFT
Is the world's biggest pop star in league with the Devil – or maybe the Illuminati?
With her continuing and massively popular Eras tour, its accompanying blockbuster film and an intense album release schedule, Taylor Swift is inarguably today’s biggest pop star, and quite possibly the biggest there has ever been. A billionaire from the proceeds of all this, by rights she ought to be at the “pet chimp and personal theme park” level of eccentricity by now, but against all odds she projects a slightly bland image of grounded sensibleness and has an inclination towards socially conscious low-key generosity in the George Michael mould. This, along with her ubiquity, makes her an ideal canvas upon which others can project their fantasies, not least that Swift is a pawn of the Illuminati (see Conspirasphere, p.11), along with Lana Del Rey, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Kesha and the late David Bowie. There are also conspiracy theories about Swift secretly authoring a cat-based spy comedy film, being a covert 4Chan bulletin board user who crowdsourced her cat’s name from it (Swift likes cats) and a closeted lesbian, secretly promoting Covid vaccines and fixing the Superbowl for political reasons; but one of the most persistent is that Swift is an agent of Satan.
Shane Lynch, a former member of Boyzone, an Irish boy band briefly popular in the 1990s, and, following a period immersed in the occult, now a born-again Christian, has claimed that Swift is a follower of Satan who performs Satanic rituals as part of her shows. He says: “You watch one of her shows and she has two or three different demonic rituals to do with the pentagrams on the ground, to do with all sorts of stuff on her stage.” Lynch sees her as the leading exponent of what he believes is a worrying trend. “A lot of the artists out there, a lot of their stage shows are Satanic rituals live in front of 20,000 people without them realising and recognising,” he says. “You’ll see a lot of hoods up and masks on and fire ceremonies”. He also condemns Sam Smith and Beyoncé as “so demonic it’s unbelievable”. Lynch asserts that when he was in the music industry, albums routinely had Satanic prayers
“Their stage shows are Satanic rituals in front of 20,000 people”
said over them to ensure success, and that he witnessed this. He shuns entire genres, particularly hip-hop and grime, for their Satanic associations, explaining that “there is a lot of hidden Satanic [sic] and a lot of evil within them, including down to the beats. It’s very real.”
In this, Lynch is not saying anything particularly new. Swift has been repeatedly accused of making Satanic horn gestures from the stage – in fact she is making the American sign language symbol for “I love you”, which is a horns gesture with the thumb extended and has nothing to do with the Satanic gesture beloved of metal fans. (You can, though, buy an unofficial Metal-style Taylor Swift inverted pentagram T-shirt in several designs.) Last November, US conservative commentator Hank Kunneman accused Swift of turning her concerts into Satanic rituals, primarily because of her use of the “horns” gesture, and went on to insinuate she had links to vaccine manufacture Pfizer for good measure. Diocese of Nashville exorcist Father Dan Reehil has also expressed his concerns about the “Satanic” nature of Swift’s shows, saying he believes her performance of the song Willow mimics witchcraft as it involves earth, fire, black capes and orbs. “The problem with the concert is that whether Taylor knew she was trying to imitate witches or in fact was doing some kind of a cult ceremony during the show is sort of irrelevant to the demons,” he said, advising people to skip her concerts, adding “these little girls who you know literally sort of worship her who are now putting themselves in a position where they could be attacked by demonic forces.”
Swift has not always helped with countering such wild speculations. At one point, talking about her Eras tour to audiences on X (Twitter), she said: “I’ve been watching videos of you guys in the theatres dancing and prancing and recreating choreography, creating inside jokes, casting spells, getting engaged, and just generally creating the exact type of joyful chaos we’re known for,” which had her right-wing critics claiming this was Swift explicitly endorsing Satanic witchcraft. Her appearance at this year’s Super Bowl, where the latest of Swift’s high-profile boyfriends, American footballer Travis Kelce, led the Kansas City Chiefs to victory, also fuelled
the speculation. During the game Swift again reportedly made horn gestures and was accompanied by the rapper Ice Spice, who was wearing an inverted cross necklace and a black top with batwing sleeves, into which conspiracy-watchers read sinister meanings.
Indeed, the idea that Swift is an agent of Satan has deep roots; as far back as 2013, Joseph Jackson, 28, was arrested at a Swift show in Pittsburgh for unveiling a poster saying “Taylor Swift is with Satan”, and from early in her career there have been suggestions that she is connected to Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. It is alleged that Swift is LaVey’s secret granddaughter, an idea that hinges on her apparent likeness to Zeena Schreck, LaVey’s daughter, a visual artist, musician and actor currently based in Berlin. Schreck was a prominent spokesperson for the Church in the 1980s, although she later left and became a high priestess of the Temple of Set and a leader in the Sethian Liberation Movement. To many on the evangelical right, this similarity is immensely telling, even though there is no evidence that Schreck gave birth to a daughter in 1989, the year Swift was born, and Swift’s origins – she was born in Pittsburgh to parents who worked in the financial industries – are well documented. However, the conspiracy-minded account for this by suggesting that the real Swift was, at some point, replaced by a clone of Schreck to further the great Satanic agenda. Either that, or Swift is, in fact, transgender, and was originally Schreck’s son, despite him being more than 10 years older than Swift’s reported age.
Some see Swift’s recent actions as moving the Satanic plot towards its intended climax. After Kelce’s team won the Super Bowl, allegations on X (Twitter), attributed to an unnamed “televangelist from Arkansas”, claimed that Swift’s supposed forthcoming marriage to the beefy sportsman had been orchestrated so that she could give birth to the Antichrist and usher in the apocalypse. This has been met with considerable scepticism, with one replier commenting: “Must she do everything? And during a world tour?” Indeed, the Super Bowl seems to have become the nexus of all realities for Swift conspiracies; as mentioned previously, the conspiratorially minded have suggested that her relationship with Kelce was used to fix the game so the Chiefs won, allegedly to set the stage for Swift and Kelce to announce that they are backing President Biden for the 2024 election. This, in turn is supposed to be the outcome of a psyop engineered by the far left/Satanic/woke/ Democrat powers that control the Pentagon. These, allegedly, have been controlling Swift all along, manipulating her career to ensure she reached a level of success from which she can wield hypnotic power over the susceptible American masses to do their bidding and unfairly deny Donald Trump his rightful place as president.
Throughout most of her career Swift remained silent about her political affiliations, leading many on the right to tacitly assume that as a white woman who began as a country singer, she was likely to support Trump. They were infuriated when she went on to support Biden for president in 2020, so are motivated to cast aspersions on her for political reasons, particularly given that opinion polls show that a significant proportion of the US electorate would be swayed in their voting intentions by Swift endorsing a candidate for the 2024 election. samaaa.tv, 9 Nov 2023; churchpop.com, 27 Nov 2023; theguardian.com, 31 Jan; salon. com, 2 Feb; snopes.com, 12 Feb; belfasttelegraph.co.uk, 25 Feb; hypoerallergic.com, 29 Feb 2024.