Hiya Genius: It's the Last Taylor Swift Column!
“Nice work. Now let’s get on that One World Government thing.”
Dear Wags,
Generally, there are two words in the brand style book we are bidden to avoid. They are Taylor and Swift. Now, Taylor Swift is hugely talented and makes millions of people happy. What we resist is endless, relentlessly dull coverage of Taylor Swift. Or rather, Taylor Swift as the default algorithm juicer for desperadoes. Swift has reached that curious pinnacle of female fame where she is hailed and condemned as a sorceress with vast powers she never asked for. We’re told, unironically, that she’s both a queer avatar and a Deep State quisling. That somehow makes her candy for Brown University semiotics majors and MAGA’s bête noire. If nothing else, such reach confirms her as one of our last genuine stars.
A disclosure: I’ve met Taylor Swift. (We pause so that you may burst into flames.) Our first encounter was at the premiere of the movie Cats. The gist of our Swiftian exchange was that Taylor loves cats. In particular, she loves her kitties Meredith Grey, Olivia Benson, and Benjamin Button (cat names are absurd). Alas, she’s also fond of the jellicle variety in Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical. Nobody’s perfect! Whatever mystical powers are ascribed to Taylor Swift, they couldn’t save that debacle. It’s a cliché to describe a famous person as disarmingly normal, but I stand by my reporting. Taylor Alison Swift was not some fearsome punisher of bad boyfriends but a genial human being, gamely navigating a weird life.
Why this mild figure triggers perfect strangers is confounding. It goes back a stretch. Swift rose to stardom as a very young pop country singer. She appealed to a conventional crowd composed largely of other young girls and their moms. Her lack of edginess pissed off a few cranks. These snots were on the opposite side of the political spectrum from those who vilify Swift today. She was so vanilla! So Middle American! So blah! As everybody on the planet knows, Kanye West ambushed Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 VMA awards to call her undeserving. This foundational episode of the Swift saga established her as a martyr of niceness to obnoxious bullies. Conservatives, as they existed then, tended to be on her team.
Few then could have guessed West would become a folk hero to the tinfoil fringe while Swift would be aligned (at least in the minds of Fox News hosts) with the despicable liberal establishment. Perhaps West’s lizard brain grasped what’s now obvious: To attack Swift is to put oneself in a headline alongside Swift. And that headline will get clicks.
Swift now stars in a horror movie that long predates her. Conservative resentment of the entertainment industry is an originating feature of the Culture War. Briefly: In the golden age of the studio system, Hollywood was at least as conservative as it was liberal. The breakdown of the old order in the 1960s led to the rise of a generation of New Left stars (Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty, Paul Barbra Streisand, etc.) who shifted the paradigm and became animating hate-totems in some quarters. But this loathing was at least superficially grounded in a values debate. Murphy Brown did have a baby out of wedlock, after all. Still, the most successful show business types in politics were conservatives (Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger). MAGA, more anarchic than conservative, dispenses with a rationale and leans into bitterness. It’s also a movement fueled by worship of a thin-skinned celebrity.
Trump, who appreciates nothing if not fame, understands the media value of a feud, but he’s not engaged in much Swift-bashing. This is more of a grassroots thing. The perennial narrative about entertainment and politics is that Democrats get all the cool kids, while Republicans are lucky to scrounge up a few castoffs from Dancing with the Stars. If you’ve covered a GOP convention where the biggest Hollywood names were Rick Schroeder and Chuck Norris, you know the sour grapes are real. Ted Nugent is not Beyoncé.
Which brings us back to Swift. What we have witnessed a spasm of anticipatory loathing on the part of some MAGA types. Without doing much, she’s symbolizes the enemy. People of all ideologies are free to find celebrities contemptible, but while Swift is the biggest pop star in the world, she’s not especially political.
She endorsed Joe Biden without much fanfare in 2020 and the Democratic senatorial challenger to Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn in 2018. Wisely, Blackburn hasn’t joined in the latest wave of Swift attacks: “Taylor Swift is really a popular, very talented young woman,” she said. “She has built quite an empire. I am so, so thrilled that she has chosen to base that in Nashville.” How about when Swift called her Donald Trump in a Wig? “I just shake it off,” Blackburn said. Oof.
Despite Swift’s vaunted influence, Blackburn handily won reëlection in reliably red Tennessee. Swift will encourage young people to vote and endorse Biden (his campaign is counting on it), but she’s not going to swing a presidential election. If celebrity endorsements were a silver bullet, we’d be talking about Presidents John Kerry and George McGovern.
So, why on earth are loonies obsessed with Swift and her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce? Why would anybody suggest that Kelce, a jock from Ohio, is a shill for George Soros because he did a vaccine ad? What drug induced Vikram Ramaswamy to say the Super Bowl is rigged in favor of the Chiefs (who are playing the team from San Francisco!) in a plot to aid Biden? Imagining these very mainstream figures are part of a “psy-ops” strategy to take over the world for Davos vampires is cinematically unhinged.
This is a novel form of derangement. There’s no coherent critique of showbiz values, only fear and loathing. Swift never posed with an anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi, quoted Frantz Fanon, or went keffiyeh shopping with Susan Sarandon. Misogyny plays a part, but she’s hard to paint as a grasping virago. Her woke agenda is in the delusional minds of a few graduate students. Madonna said more provocative things in five minutes than Swift has in her entire career.
What’s odd about this apoplexy is how weirdly anti-American it is. Swift is a self-made billionaire. She and Kelce are the sort of wholesome success stories we used to celebrate. Football is football. We’ve reached a point where the knee-jerk impulse to lash out at institutions becomes self-harm.
According to a March 2023 Morning Consult poll, 53 percent of U.S. adults say they are Swift fans. Among them, the majority are white middle class female suburbanites. Fifty-five percent are Democrats but the rest are split between Republicans and Independents. This is hardly a revolutionary constituency. Until lately, one might have described such folk as the persuadable electorate. But those agitated by Swift are so online they’ve lost the ability to talk to anybody outside the bunker. Instead, they are sending coded messages to one another. She’s just another clue in one long, incoherent conspiracy theory.
Swift Hatred is a small part of a different kind of radical catechism. It’s hardly Reagan’s aspirational Republicanism but a loser’s vivid ideology of envy, which presumes bad faith on the part of anyone muddily defined as one of the elite. A power structure run by pod people must be trashed, all further details pending. That way of thinking echoes the attitudes of the antediluvian Left, which reviled American popular culture as toxic.
She may be the subject of bad puns in Senate hearings, but Taylor Swift does not have her well manicured hands on the levers of power; for now that’s still the job of people we elect. We should take heart in a Newsweek poll showing Americans across partisan lines agree that famous as she is, Swift gets far too much attention. Perhaps they are waking up to what really matters.
Yours Ever,
Thomas Stockmann
Mr & Mrs. Smith (Prime Video). Wag Donald Glover has produced a loopy, Gloveresque take on this yarn story about married spies (1941 Hitchcock movie, 1996 TV show, 2005 Brad and Angelina moment). In this update, John (Glover) and Jane (Maya Erskine) are assigned to play husband and wife as part of espionage capers. There is bang-bang and kiss-kiss, and then a lot of bicker-bicker. It’s an arty, discursive take on a high octane genre. Still, the stars are winning. In moments, their badinage reminds us of the old ‘60s comedy I Spy. — Kelly Robinson
Genius: MLK/X (National Geographic). The fourth installment of Nat Geo’s Genius anthology series ought to be called Geniuses, since it compares the lives and philosophies of Malcolm X (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and Malcolm X (Aaron Pierre). A tick-the-boxes historical treatment can come across like a book report, but it’s lifted by energetic performances from the cast, which includes Weruche Opia and Jayme Lawson as Coretta Scott King and Betty Shabazz. — Rebeca Morgan
