Taylor Swift and the paranoid style
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It turns out the whole Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce romance is just another Democrat conspiracy to defraud White America of its birthright, which for those of you scoring at home is complete dominion over the United States:
“I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month,” Vivek Ramaswamy, the unsuccessful 2024 presidential candidate who has spread conspiracy theories about the January 6 insurrection and the legitimacy of the 2020 election, posted Monday on X. “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.”
Ramaswamy was responding to a post from Jack Posobiec, the far-right conspiracy theorist, who shared a version of the theory during an interview with Roseanne Barr, the famous actress who in recent years has descended into the far-right online fever swamp. Posobiec said he believes the Democratic Party and other powers are “gearing up for an operation to use Taylor Swift in the election against” Donald Trump. Barr agreed, saying that Swift is “definitely somebody who has consented to speak the way the establishment wants to be spoken of” and that using her influence will be how they “try to get on top of the next election.”
Of course, it would not be surprising for Swift to endorse Biden as she did in 2020. After all, celebrity endorsements are run-of-the-mill in presidential campaigns and Swift has over the years waded more deeply into political waters, encouraging her fans to turn out and vote.
But suggesting that Swift, one of the most powerful entertainment figures on Earth, is quietly being manipulated by sinister forces in a grand conspiracy staged by the establishment is ridiculous. And yet, that is precisely the type of rhetoric that has permeated the country’s ever-more polluted information environment.
“Taylor Swift is an op,” Benny Johnson, a right-wing media personality who boasts millions of followers across different social media platforms, wrote on X. “It’s all fake. You’re being played.”
“The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open,” added Laura Loomer, a self-described Islamophobe who has been embraced and promoted by Trump. “It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion GOTV Campaign.”
“The NFL is totally RIGGED for the Kansas City Chiefs, Taylor Swift, Mr. Pfizer (Travis Kelce),” agreed Mike Crispi, a Salem Media host. “All to spread DEMOCRAT PROPAGANDA. Calling it now: KC wins, goes to Super Bowl, Swift comes out at the halftime show and ‘endorses’ Joe Biden with Kelce at midfield.”
But wait, there’s more. Apparently, there’s a raging Twitter fight going on between these right wing conspiracists, and another group of right wing conspiracists, led by Race Realist Steve Sailer, who believe that the Kansas City Chiefs star quarterback Patrick Mahomes is a genetically engineered GigaChad, who is so good at quarterbacking because, per Sailer, he has inherited throwing accuracy and analytical smarts from his mother’s “white genes,” and running ability/overall athleticism and “physical creativity” from his father’s “black genes.”
For you non-sportsball people, Sailer’s ravings are just an extension of the longtime conventional wisdom among NFL coaches and management that human evolution did not produce any black NFL quarterbacks until very recently, because as was well known the blacks could only run, not throw accurately, plus Those People didn’t have the brainpower to make the sort of split second decisions that NBA point guards NFL quarterbacks have to make.
BTW a morbidly amusing atavism of this species of Race Science can still be found at the very popular college football recruiting site Rivals.com, which still divides quarterback prospects into two categories: “pro-style” and “dual-threat,” meaning a prospect who is more of a runner than a thrower. Routinely, all the top “pro-style” prospects are white and all the top “dual-threat” prospects are black. To go down this particular rabbit hole just a bit further, a few years ago ESPN screamfest king Stephen A. Smith was arguing for selecting Ohio State quarterback Dwayne Haskins at the top of the NFL draft despite the fact that Haskins was “more of a runner” than a passer, although in fact Haskins couldn’t run at all, as anybody who had ever watched him play could attest. This obviously didn’t include Smith, who did however know that Haskins was black, so obviously he was a great runner, because Science.
Anyway to their extremely partial credit, the Swift is a Democrat Plant conspiracists are making all sorts of fun of Sailer’s It’s Just Science theory of genetically engineered quarterbacks, pointing out that Mahomes’s black father was a major league baseball pitcher, which is a job where being able to throw a ball both hard and accurately has some salience.
All these people are, it hardly needs to be said but apparently it does, completely insane. They also very much represent the base of the contemporary Republican party, because they are Donald Trump’s most fanatical supporters, and the Republican party is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Trump Enterprises.