POLITICO Magazine
It’s all about the GOP’s embrace of paranoid populism.
Travis Kelce (left) of the Kansas City Chiefs celebrates with Taylor Swift after defeating the Baltimore Ravens in the AFC Championship Game at M and T Bank Stadium on Jan. 28, 2024 in Baltimore, MD. | Patrick Smith/Getty Images
Opinion by Rich Lowry
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Rich Lowry is a contributing writer for POLITICO Magazine and the editor-in-chief of the National Review, a conservative news and opinion publication.
We have met the enemy, and it is Taylor Swift.
As you might have heard, an element of the online right has decided that the pop star’s famous romance with Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce is a plot to get President Joe Biden re-elected. If the two do not seem naturally connected, well then, you’re probably just being taken in by this “psyop.”
In response to an X post from influencer Jack Posobiec referring to a conspiracy theory involving George Soros manipulating Swift into becoming an activist Democrat, one-time presidential candidate and full-time panderer Vivek Ramaswamy dropped dark hints of what’s to come.
“I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month,” he posted. “And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.”
After a spate of media reports on the Swift theory, another influencer on X, Benny Johnson, pronounced it confirmed. “By now,” he wrote, “everyone knows Taylor Swift is a government psyop and this is exactly why Corporate Media is having a meltdown about it.”
Case closed.
Politics has always had its share of conspiracy theorists on both sides, but the right has become particularly susceptible to the tendency as it has become more populist. The Taylor Swift theory is not the first lunatic idea that has gotten traction on the right, nor will it be the last. Most of this discussion is on social media and much of it doesn’t matter very much, but there is a risk that the conservative movement will appear weird and alienated from the American mainstream — and turn off voters in the real world.
In this regard, the Taylor Swift obsession is particularly stupid and perverse.
She has her roots in country music. There’s nothing transgressive about her, nothing highly sexualized, and nothing very political, although she has endorsed a few basic center-left positions in recent years. She’s not having a breakdown like Britney Spears once did or acting outlandish like Lady Gaga. She’s not singing protest songs (except about her ex-boyfriends) or suffering wardrobe malfunctions.
Moreover, she’s not dating another pop star, or Pete Davidson. She’s dating a football player, for God’s sake.
The last time I checked conservatives celebrated football as the rough-and-tumble game of American gladiators. And here one of the toughest of them — a beast of a tight end — lands the biggest female pop star in the country, and they see the tentacles of powerful forces promoting the Biden 2024 campaign.
Conservative senators tell the right: Drop the Taylor Swift fixation, enjoy the Super Bowl
By Anthony Adragna |
The image of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift kissing on the field after his victory in the AFC Championship game is arguably the most iconic American photo since the Trump mugshot. For anyone whose worldview hasn’t become twisted by politics, it’s a picture of normality. It’s the cheerleader dating the high school quarterback. It’s traditional femininity meets traditional masculinity. It’s the pinnacle of success.
Once upon a time, conservatives would have celebrated it as pure Americana, and poured scorn on anyone who found a reason to say otherwise.
Needless to say, the idea that the powerbrokers are promoting Taylor Swift via her relationship with Kelce — and guaranteeing a Chiefs Super Bowl victory in the process — is preposterous. Swift doesn’t need to be more famous; she needs the NFL or Travis Kelce to promote her about as much as John Lennon needed Yoko Ono to make him popular. Swift has been a star since roughly 2007, and was packing stadium after stadium on a $1 billion concert tour before she became a Chiefs fan.
Anyone who thinks the Taylor Swift phenomenon is faked or “not organic,” as the obsessives on the right put it, has clearly never met a 10-year-old girl.
As for the notion that the NFL is fixing things to get the Chiefs (another) Super Bowl victory, it is absurd. What are we supposed to believe? That in a key moment against the Chiefs in the championship game, a crisis actor depicting Baltimore Ravens receiver Zay Flowers fumbled just outside the end zone in a perfectly choreographed simulacrum of a receiver reaching with the ball toward the goal-line and getting it punched out by a desperate defender?
The pro-Chiefs conspiracy would have to be incredibly elaborate: Dozens upon dozens of the most competitive people on the planet — football players who risk serious injury on every play — would have to agree to throw their games to the Chiefs and do it in a convincing fashion. Is there not one Republican in the NFL to blow the whistle on this dastardly scheme?
Besides, if the NFL wanted to conspire to get a team to the Super Bowl while giving it extra exposure via a world-famous pop star, presumably it would have picked a much more lucrative big-market city, not piddling Kansas City. It could have bequeathed this windfall on one of the Los Angeles, Texas or New York teams. (This scenario might be the only way the Jets will ever have hope.)
Finally, it’s not clear how much football the online conspiracy theorists watch, but Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes is a wizard who doesn’t need any artificial help.
Kelce, too, is no slouch. He had seven straight seasons of more than 1,000 yards receiving, until falling just short this year at 984 after missing a couple of games.
But he is an object of suspicion for the online right because he’s in a Covid vaccine ad for Pfizer. This supposedly makes him the tool of Big Pharma. If appearing in an ad for a company means he’s sold out, he’s also the tool of Big Insurance (State Farm), Big Grocery (Hy-Vee), and Big Something or Other Having to Do With Your Credit Rating (Experian).
Why is the right particularly susceptible to this way of thinking? It is a function, most importantly, of its populist turn.
Whether right or left, populism inevitably has a suspicious or paranoid edge given that it is, by definition, an outsider phenomenon. It has always been arrayed against the railroads, the banks, the military-industrial complex, the 1 percent, or in the case of today’s right, an amalgam of the media, corporate America and the Deep State.
These forces are, depending on your point of view, more or less noxious and they are indeed capable of shadowy machinations.
Regarding the populist right’s targets, it’s true that the media is biased and prone to group-think and hysteria. Corporate America can easily get pushed into adopting fashionable causes. And bureaucrats can have their own agendas.
But it’s one thing to be skeptical and on guard, and another to lose touch with common sense and reality. The internet and social media, of course, aren’t conducive to striking this balance; since they reward outlandishness and passionate intensity, they’ve made the fever swamp a source of fame and fortune.
The Epoch Times has built a media empire on conspiracies. Gateway Pundit is a top conservative website. Alex Jones has gone from embarrassing nutjob with a WWE affect to getting a strange new respect from figures on the right with large followings, including Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson.
Consider the aforementioned Vivek Ramaswamy. If his campaign had continued on to Super Tuesday he might have held a presser at the Texas book depository challenging reporters to explain to him how Lee Harvey Oswald possibly could have had the correct angle to shoot JFK — all as a way of “just asking questions,” of course.
What’s bizarre is that Ramaswamy probably had never uttered anything conspiratorial in his life prior to running for president. Typically, running for high office makes a candidate more serious, but Ramaswamy realized the power of the part of the conservative media ecosystem devoted to promoting conspiracy theories and decided to play to it. In addition, there’d be no downside because floating fringy theories wouldn’t get him shunned by the party establishment, since former President Donald Trump — himself prone to conspiratorial thinking — is the party establishment.
Ramaswamy and the others will likely prove prophetic. Yes, the Chiefs will probably win the Super Bowl and Taylor Swift will probably endorse Joe Biden. She did it in 2020, why not again? But if celebrity endorsements determine elections, Joe Biden will be unbeatable. He will have the A-listers and Donald Trump will have someone who starred in a 1980s sitcom who will get a speaking slot at the Republican convention.
This is the normal course of things, but coming up with strange theories about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce is not. It’s the equivalent of, in the 1950s context, seeing the work of the Trilateral Commission in the marriage of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio.
One might think these influencers have been manipulated by the Deep State into discrediting the right as part of a nefarious plot, but alas, they are doing it of their own volition.
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