Swift boating again

As I’ve said before, I’m not particularly a Taylor Swift fan, but I certainly am greatly enjoying the American right’s current meltdown over her:

This video’s particularly good, cos the commentator blasting the idiots losing their shit over Swift works for Fox, which has been obsessed with her in recent times. A sample:

As others have observed, Fox is so outraged by Tay Tay that they’ve been forced to admit CO2 emissions are a bad thing (and in any case she has apparently purchased carbon credits to offset hers). The real lunacy, though, has been the “speculation” about her being some sort of government asset; and I put that in quotes because I don’t think even the clowns at Fox seriously believe it themselves, but they’re desperate to make their idiot viewers do so:

Right-wing activists have indulged in baseless speculation that Swift’s romance with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce — a kind of ur-American couple of football star and wholesome pop icon — is a contrivance engineered by Democrats, or perhaps the NFL, to trick unsuspecting Americans into boosting Super Bowl ratings or voting for Biden in November.
A version of that theory aired on Fox News in mid-January, when host Jesse Watters floated the idea that Swift was a government asset engaged in psychological warfare. He suggested that the runaway success of her Eras concert tour was aided by the Defense Department. “Have you ever wondered why or how she blew up like this?” Watters asked viewers. (He allowed that he had no solid evidence: “If we did, we’d share it.”)

So what aided her success before all this? Her Wiki entry notes she’d sold 37 million records in the US by 2019, which is kind of well before her recent blowup on the right. And Time included her on their 100 most influential people list for the first time in 2010. She is indeed making truly preposterous sums of money off the Eras tour, but it’s not like she’s come out of nowhere to do it. Still, if this “speculation” is unserious (and Watters basically admitted as much), I think their terror at Swift’s potential influence is genuine; the idea that she might actually encourage people to vote for Biden, or indeed to vote at all. And I’m sure her being of the female persuasion only makes things worse for them. I’ll finish off with this image I spotted on Tumblr today that I think sums it all up: