MAGA isn’t just angry — it’s weird

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-19 vaccine. By MAGA’s calculation, between them, the couple express 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 and 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 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 rightwing schadenfreude. But now that they’ve surged into a berth in the Super Bowl, it has all been revealed as part of The Plan.

Again, it’s all just so dumb and strange. But dumb and strange is par for the course with MAGA. If we imagined conspiracy theories as movies, we’d say Taylor Swift: Psyop was brought to you by the same studio that produced cult classics such as Pizzagate and The Seth Rich Conspiracy, not to mention the tentpole franchises QAnon and Stop the Steal.

All of these conspiracy theories are deeply strange. Who can forget that the effort to steal the election included claims that bamboo in the ballots suggested evidence of Chinese interference? Or that Italian military satellites had somehow disrupted the count? Or that a woman’s bizarre dreams and visions had revealed misdeeds by Dominion Voting Systems?

The MAGA right’s relentless villainization of Democrats (called “Demon-crats” in some parts of the religious right) has created a substantial population of people who believe that the left is miraculously powerful, operates without any moral restraint and is dedicated to destroying their way of life. And if you believe your opponents are capable of anything — in every sense of the phrase — it’s a short trip to believing almost anything about them.

The political strain that MAGA’s conspiracy theories has placed on our democratic system has been amply documented. Less documented is MAGA’s cultural threat to American pluralism. On some days, it can seem as if MAGA is engaged in a kind of cultural secessionism in which it turns against popular mainstream products and institutions — Bud Light, Target, the military — and tries to create alternatives. There has been MAGA coffee, MAGA banking, MAGA beer and MAGA rap, for example.

By themselves, parallel economies can be an element of pluralism rather than a threat to it. Creating a business that both sells a product and advances a particular set of political or religious values is nothing new, on the right or the left.

But combine parallel economies with boycott culture, and you have something else entirely. It’s a cultural manifestation of an old legal temptation — free speech for me but not for thee. For Swift, it’s shut up and sing. But for Jason Aldean and Aaron Rodgers, the calculation is entirely different. MAGA’s believers want them on that stage. They need them on that podcast.

And so we’re caught in a vicious cycle. Unrelenting hostility opens up the mind and heart to the worst stories about your opponents, no matter how incredible. Once convinced, you double down on your hatred: Can you believe what they’re doing now? And then the cycle repeats with another story, just as wild, if not wilder.

This era of American politics will end, one way or the other. And when it does, historians are likely to debate whether its defining characteristic was stupidity or malice. I’ve gone back and forth in my own mind, but I now realize that the two traits have almost fully merged. Malice is creating stupidity, and stupidity is creating malice.

If there’s any silver lining in this dark cloud, it’s that perhaps MAGA has finally revealed itself too fully. One can dream, but perhaps targeting the world’s most popular pop star can at last help expose what the nation’s political observers have long known: MAGA isn’t just deeply angry, it’s become deeply weird.

David French is a columnist for The New York Times.