Taylor Swift: Nazi sympathizer, freshly-minted racist, MAGA trad wife. Or so proponents of a recent conspiracy theory would have it. For years, the most successful female recording and performing artist of her generation (and therefore of all time) has used “easter eggs” as part of her marketing. Hidden messages in music videos and lyric sheets, oblique references in social media posts, and puzzles as merchandise marketing gimmicks have all contributed to a parasocial sense of intimacy and insider knowledge for her millions of ardent fans.
With the release of The Life of a Showgirl, these treats seem to have backfired on Swift. A deluge of TikToks claim dog whistles and hidden symbols reveal a far-right turn for a progressive artist that previously stood for feminism, reproductive freedom, gay and trans rights, BLM, and gun control.
Maybe it’s her “cancelled” friends, the influence of Travis Kelce, or traditional, conservative “family values” finally coming home to roost as she celebrates the desire to settle down with her soon-to-be-husband, make a home, and have some kids.
Julian peels apart the layers of this highly charged political conspiracy theory and looks at what it may represent.
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Taylor Smith is handing the conservative agenda on a silver platter to the masses.
It obviously is.
And if you can't realize that, you're a victim of the media literacy crisis.
So I do feel obligated to come on here and say she is MAGA.
Or at least MAGA adjacent.
Has Taylor Swift gone MAGA and betrayed her self-identified feminism and progressive allyship?
Is she dogwhistling Nazi sympathies and a white supremacist fetish?
Even worse, has she entered her trad wife era?
An album about like an idealized form of like what is a typical American family, ideally, of like living in a suburb, being in a monogamous relationship, today.
We'll take a look at a pop culture conspiracy theory that flared up on social media during October and was even taken seriously by some prominent pundits.
Now listen, perhaps like me, you don't care that much about Taylor Swift or her music, and this may seem like a lightweight topic, but bear with me because there are some fascinating layers here that I want to unpack with you.
I'm Julian Walker, and this is a conspiratuality brief titled The Taylor Swift Goes MAGA Conspiracy.
As always, you can find Matthew, Derek, and I together on Instagram at ConspiritualityPod.
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Our story starts with a necklace.
It's a piece of merchandising from Taylor Swift's new album, The Life of a Showgirl, and it got a swarm of attention and analysis on TikTok.
And I am sick.
What the f is this?
What the f is this?
Okay, so this is the necklace promoting the song.
There's a lyric where they say that they're dancing and the lightning strikes, so hence the lightning.
And then we've got an opal light, I guess, in the center.
Okay, so here's my finger problem immediately.
So these lightning bolts are not normal lightning bolts.
They are specifically SS lightning bolts.
Okay, it is not ambiguous.
That is exactly what it is.
And then if you'll look, there are eight of them.
Why does that matter?
Because H is the eighth letter in the alphabet.
Many circles, gangs will put 8-8, meaning Hitler.
They'll put it in their bios.
They'll tattoo it on their bodies.
They'll put it on their motorcycles, their leather jackets.
I'm not reaching.
The 8-8 thing is extremely common.
That is extremely commonly known.
I mean, that is an SS lightning bolt.
You've never incorporated lightning bolts in your work before?
Okay, and then we come down here and that's an iron cross.
That's a finger iron cross.
And I think if the necklace itself was just a plain chain, then this would be fine.
But it's not.
And it is the sum of its parts, right?
As with other examples of apophenia, there's a certain amount of internal consistency in what I'm going to characterize here as a kind of conspiracy theory.
Yes, the Nazi SS used lightning bolt symbols, styled actually to look like ancient pagan runes.
And yes, those SS lightning bolts are a popular tattoo choice amongst white supremacists.
Yes, this necklace has lightning bolts on the chain and then terminates in a cross of sorts that hangs in the center, but not really.
I mean, you can look it up.
It's more of a shining star with a stone in the middle, a bit like an ornament you might put at the top of a Christmas tree.
The lightning bolts are also pointy at the ends, which is different.
And they're not paired up in twos.
So the SS similarity really is a reach.
Nonetheless, why, Taylor?
Why this necklace?
If she's not dog whistling her allegiance to Nazism, why the lightning bolt symbolism?
Well, we'll get to that.
But for now, here's another TikTok user digging back into Swift's 2022 album called Midnights.
You see, it turns out that part of the marketing for this album included four different collectible covers for the vinyl edition.
After buying all four, yes, it is called genius marketing, and yes, her fans eat it up, they then fit together.
The covers fit together like a puzzle, which can be displayed on the wall by also purchasing a clock piece that holds them all together in the center.
But wait, there's more.
She released four versions of the exact same album, okay?
Meant to be put together like a puzzle, meant to be put together like a puzzle.
A lot of thought went into this.
Part of the one is on this album, and the two is on this album to make 12.
Half of the three, half of the three, half of the six, half of the six, half of the nine, half the.
It was meant to be put together.
Apparently, her fans love this kind of shit.
They're willing to pay her for multiple times for the same fucking albums just so that they could do this.
And then they can buy this clock piece to put in between them and put it on the wall.
So it was intended.
This was intended.
Straight out of the box, not on a wall.
This is what they look like arranged.
Okay.
Very intentional.
And this is the other side of them.
Weird design.
Okay, so wow, mind blown.
The album covers are specifically designed to fit together as a puzzle that looks a certain way from the front.
And then the back of each cover, if I'm understanding this correctly, has this design feature where the images are slightly smaller and there's a white border then around them.
But if you arrange the covers out of order so they don't look right from the front, and then you flip all of them over to look at the back, those white borders will form up into a swastika.
You know, this reminds me of something.
Backward masking.
Never heard of it?
Well, in the 1980s, when I was a teenager, one aspect of the satanic panic phenomenon, which was huge in the US and the UK, held that satanic ritual abuse of children and human sacrifice was actually incredibly widespread.
And that heavy metal and rock music had been especially written and recorded so that the lyrics actually had these satanic messages encoded backwards.
You remember this?
And this would supposedly have an evil effect on the listeners, so that I guess maybe they'd be driven toward satanic rituals.
This one time, I went to a charismatic evangelical church with a schoolmate.
He was actually the class president.
Nice guy.
I came home with a cassette tape program that his family bought for me in the gift store on the way out of the church that was all about backward masking in popular music.
Now, if you look this up on YouTube, and we've actually covered all of this in a deep dive bonus episode on the satanic panic, actually a whole series we did on this early on in the podcast.
If you look this up on YouTube, you'll find TV appearances of folks who will use special tape machines to show the audience they're presenting to.
For example, that if you listen carefully, especially after you've been primed by them telling you what to listen for, you'll hear messages like, here's to my sweet Satan, Or he will give those with him 666 in certain lyrics from Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven when you play them backwards.
So my favorite of these, as I listen now, is actually that last line you heard, which is interpreted as saying backwards, there was a little tool shed where he made us suffer sad Satan.
It's really grotesque, actually.
Now, I was captivated by this as a kid.
I mean, it was uncanny.
Sure, these are garbled and distorted versions of the phrases, but that only made it more weird and ominous, right?
And then there's this characteristic thought when engaging in apophenia, which is where you perceive patterns that are not really there as if they're having some kind of intentional meaning.
And the thought is, how else do you explain it?
And this was my first introduction to the stickiness, the dopaminergic pleasure, the sense of uncovering a secret that's at the heart of why many of us love apophenia.
Thankfully, my parents poked holes in the whole thing when I came to them with my little tape player and had them listen to parts of the church lecture on my little cassette recorder.
The thing is, it's just backwards sound that has no meaning.
And you can find patterns that seem to mean something the same way that people see faces in clouds, or an image of Jesus on a piece of burned toast, or some hidden language and spiritual code in numerology or the patterns in the stars.
But I can only imagine how, for evangelical Christians of that time, and especially for their children, this conspiracy theory validated an entire metaphysical cosmology.
The world is fallen and full of sin, but via their born-again faith, they are able to fight in a war against demonic forces.
And those forces use pop culture to secretly manipulate and control young people on behalf of Satan.
It's right there in the backwards messages on the albums that they listen to incessantly, made by debauched, gender-bending, drug-abusing, hypersexualized counterculture stars intent on hypnotizing kids into following the dark lord as part of their deal with the devil for wealth and fame.
Okay, that's enough of a detour there.
Let's loop back around.
Sure, the negative space on the out-of-order flipped-over album covers deliberately forming a swastika is deep into apophenic territory.
But we started with that necklace, right?
And really, how else does one explain the eight lightning bolts and what looks like an iron cross?
Plus, as soon as the controversy about the necklace became widespread, it was quietly removed from Taylor's merch store.
Busted, right?
But notice how, with both the album covers and the necklace, that the supposed Nazi symbolism is meant to be hidden to everyone else, but perhaps dog whistled to those in the know as a covert signal of support.
The fact that the necklace has been removed then also seems to support this evil intent.
But the explanation is actually a lot simpler.
It's no secret that the necklace is a companion piece to a song on Taylor Swift's new album titled Opalite.
And here are some lyrics from the chorus.
You were dancing through the lightning strikes, sleepless in the onyx night, but now the sky is opalite.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
My Lord never made no one like you before.
You had to make your own sunshine, but now the sky is opalite.
The song is about her fiancé, NFL football star Travis Kelse, whose birthstone is opalite.
Swift apparently has had her own expensive necklace and ring made for herself using this iridescent stone to symbolize their love.
It's really just a standard love song.
At first, she talks about herself as the one who her mother described as dancing through the lightning strikes of painful relationship experiences, and then she transitions in another verse into talking about Travis as having had a similar experience of dancing through those kinds of lightning strikes until they then met one another, and instead of the dark night, the sky is lit up like the iridescent opalite that is his birthstone.
So the merchandise necklace has lightning on the chain along with the central bright star that lights up the night.
In the song, the dark black stone onyx represents the dark night full of scary lightning and it contrasts with the opalite of their newfound love.
It's pretty straightforward.
By the way, the TikToker from earlier was correctly counting eight lightning bolts on the sales image of the necklace where you buy it on the website.
But that doesn't show the whole chain.
And as it turns out, the actual item, you can find photos of it from people who bought it, has 12 lightning bolts.
Wait a minute, 12?
That must have some other deep meaning.
Oh, wait, this is her 12th album.
Well, that explains the necklace, right?
But what about the fact that Travis had a history of mostly dating black women before Taylor?
Like, is the blackness of the Onyx stone really a racial reference?
With their white-on-white love now returning order to the universe?
I mean, I guess it could be, especially if you feverishly extrapolated from the mistaken perception of eight lightning bolts that she was hiling Hitler on her necklace.
This is usually the case with the types of thought processes that we see with conspiracy theories and metaphysical beliefs alike.
The whole construct falls apart when you start testing any one of its faulty premises.
That doesn't mean there are no neo-Nazis or white supremacists or that fascism is not on the rise in America.
It also doesn't mean that there are no valid critiques one can make about privilege and perhaps tone deafness, as we'll see in a moment, of some billionaire, pretty white women like Taylor.
But it does mean that none of this really counts as evidence for secret loyalty pledges to Nazism, and that's important.
As for the life of a showgirl, there's a broad consensus forming that it's a pretty bad album, perhaps even Taylor Swift's worse.
Nonetheless, it's selling faster and more copies than anything else she's ever done.
She has on the album an entire cringeworthy song about her new man's large and highly effective penis, I kid you not, called wood.
And it uses every middle school double entendre you can think of to tell the world, and I would imagine perhaps her own past lovers, just how life-changingly well Taylor Swift is being laid by her new man.
I mean, good for her.
There's another song in which she uses half-baked Shakespearean references to paint herself as Ophelia in Hamlet, who's been saved by Travis from deadly melancholy, but oddly she's in a tower in this song, a bit like Rapunzel.
Let's go back in time a little bit now.
In the past, Swift's extraordinary level of influence led to many voices calling on her to be more politically active.
She had her first hit song at the tender age of 16 after having moved to Nashville, Tennessee from Reading, Pennsylvania.
And as her career blossomed over the next 12 years, she was careful not to voice her likely still developing political opinions in public.
But all of that changed in October of 2018 when Taylor endorsed two Democratic candidates for the midterm elections in Tennessee.
In the 2020 Netflix documentary about her called Miss Americana, there's some behind-the-scenes footage that has been clipped and widely distributed of Swift in a kind of family meeting where she's arguing with her father about her plan to speak out against the 2018 Tennessee Senate campaign of Marsha Blackburn.
I'm saying right now that this is something that I know is right, and you guys, I need to be on the right side of history.
And if he doesn't win, then at least I at least I tried.
So here's the problem.
I just want to read you what I wrote and I'm going to try to start.
I just really want you to know that this is important to me.
I totally have an issue.
Yes, I've read the entire thing.
And the bottom line right now, I'm terrified.
I'm the guy that went out and bought armored cars.
I worry for her safety as much as anybody does.
Maybe more.
It really is a big deal.
She votes against fair pay for women.
She votes against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which is just basically protecting us from domestic abuse and stalking, stalking.
She votes.
She thinks that if you're a gay couple, or even if you look like a gay couple, you should be allowed to be kicked out of a restaurant.
It's really basic human rights and it's right and wrong at this point.
And I can't see another commercial and see her disguising these policies behind the words Tennessee values.
Those aren't Tennessee Christian values.
I live in Tennessee.
I am Christian.
That's not what we stand for.
I need to do this.
I need you to just, I need you to forgive me for doing it because I'm doing it.
So that's the footage.
And I remember the first time I saw it, I really felt good about the fact that she ended it the way she did by saying that to her dad.
I'm actually just asking you for forgiveness because this is what I am going to do, meaning she was going to speak out against Marcia Blackburn and she was going to endorse these other candidates from the Democratic Party.
There's also some footage floating around of her reaction while on an airplane to her candidates losing and Marsha Blackburn actually winning.
I can't believe it.
I can't believe it.
I can't believe she gets to be protected.
She's a female senator in Tennessee and she's Trump and a wig.
She represents no female interests.
She won by being a female, applying to the kind of female males want us to be in a horrendous 1950s world.
So in any reasonable universe, this gives us at least a clue about her political views.
And then on top of that, there are all the interviews in which she's described herself as a feminist, which she defines in a very basic 1970s kind of way about equality and fairness.
She makes a point of standing up to interviewers who she feels are being sexist in their questions to her, like you wouldn't ask a man that.
Why is it always this with me?
Of course, I write songs about my relationships, etc.
Here are some more examples.
You're always going to have people going, did she write all her own songs?
Talking about your personal life, talking about your dating life.
There's a different vocabulary for men and women in the music industry, right?
I need an example.
Okay.
A man does something.
It's strategic.
A woman does the same thing.
It's calculated.
A man is allowed to react.
A woman can only overreact.
The fact that you put, you know, your real emotions into it and that that's valuable and that's good and that's real.
And then you're going to have people who are going to say, oh, you know, like she's just writes songs about her ex-boyfriends.
And I think, frankly, that's a very sexist angle to take.
No one says that about Ed Sheeran.
No one says it about Bruno Mars.
They're all writing songs about their exes, their current girlfriends, their love life, and no one raises a red flag there.
And then the last clip I want to share with you on this topic has one of these public moments in which her desire to support gay and trans kids is evident.
It's very brave to be vulnerable about your feelings in any sense, in any situation, but it's even more brave to be honest about your feelings and who you love when you know that that might be met with adversity from society.
So this month and every month, I want to send out my love and respect to everybody who has been brave enough to be honest about how they feel, to live their lives as they are, as they feel, as they identify.
And this is a month where I think we need to celebrate how far we've come.
We also need to acknowledge how far we still have left to go.
And I want to send my love and respect out to everybody who, in their journey in their life, hasn't yet felt comfortable enough to come out.
And may you do that in your own time.
And may we end up in a world where everyone can live and love equally and no one has to be afraid to be vulnerable to God.
So it's pretty clear that she's left-leaning.
And since then, she's been vocal about being pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro-gun control.
She was a founding signatory on the Time's Up movement.
She's donated to Black Lives Matter, spoken out against Trump.
She called for Juneteenth to be a national holiday and for all Confederate statues to be removed from Tennessee.
She endorsed Biden and then she endorsed Harris.
And one of her posts that urged her fans to register to vote resulted in 64,000 new registrations within 24 hours.
I believe that was in 2020.
And then an Instagram post after the 2024 debate encouraging voter registration actually led to over 400,000 click-throughs from the post to the website and a 400% increase in how many people actually registered to vote compared to what would normally happen over the next two days.
So all of that brings us to the last two songs on this new album that I'll mention now.
One is called Wishlist and it's spelled with dollar signs for the S's.
And the other is called Eldest Daughter.
And they're both also being held up as evidence of Taylor Swift supposedly going MAGA.
So let's look at those.
Wishlist, like most of her songs, I think is pretty straightforward, as best I can tell.
It's about how other people want other things, like they want the rich and famous partying lifestyle.
She talks about helicopters and necklaces and, you know, the whole thing.
Or they want the freedom to live off the grid and have dogs instead of kids.
Or they want acting accolades or sports successes, big contracts.
But that for her, she's now ready to boss up, settle down, and have kids.
She says she's dreaming of a basketball hoop in the driveway.
And the pre-chorus repeats each time that they should want what they want.
They deserve to have what they want.
I hope they get what they want.
And then in a clever but clunky and perhaps tone-deaf line in the chorus, she says, and this is what's caused all the trouble, have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you.
Have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you.
And this is the basis for an interpretation that says the most famous, wealthy, and influential female pop star in the world has now turned from independent, strong feminist to embracing and endorsing being a trad wife.
And what's more, if the whole block looks like her husband, that means she wants to live in a whites-only neighborhood.
Now add to this the lyrics from Eldest Daughter, which I have to admit are the most poetic of the songs I've looked at.
It's a song about letting her guard down, returning to a kind of core, innocent child self that laughs and plays and wants to connect with her new love beyond an earlier facade of acting fierce and strong.
It's also about finally having a trustworthy partner after feeling betrayed and hurt in the past.
But the line, I am not the baddest bitch, and this is not savage, which follows after the line, every eldest daughter was the first lamb to the slaughter.
So we dressed up like wolves and we looked fire.
But I'm not the baddest bitch and this is not savage.
So rather than being seen as about the softening that happens when she feels safe, is being interpreted by some as a racist dig at Travis Kelsey's former black girlfriends.
Now I could see how she could be accused of perhaps being a little tone-deaf in terms of some of the language, but I don't see it, especially in the context of the song.
I'd be remiss if I failed to mention that on this album, there's also a song called Canceled.
And in the chorus, she says, it's a good thing I like my friends canceled.
And it has this absolutely cringe lyric, Did You Girl Boss Too Close to the Sun?
So this is, to me, like a lukewarm attempt at pushing back against unfair online swarming.
And some have speculated that it's about her friendship with Blake Lively, who's gone through a lot of online controversy recently.
Others have said maybe it's about some of the NFL players' wives that she now spends time with, who actually are MAGA.
And given the discourse about cancel culture in anti-woke circles and her new friends, I can certainly see how this song would raise some eyebrows.
Like, oh, she's talking about people being canceled, and she likes people who are canceled.
And, you know, if you read the whole song, it's very much about online culture and how people get torn down.
And it is what it is.
I don't think leaping to political conclusions based on a throwaway song is warranted, but I understand why people may have the interpretations and the concerns that they have.
Now, obviously, her choice of a professional football player fiancé has mainstream and yes, even conservative traditional resonances, but Travis Kelse is not Aaron Rodgers.
He's participated in COVID vaccine campaigns.
He's taken a knee in support of Black Lives Matter during the national anthem when that was going on.
He chose to appear in a Bud Light commercial during the anti-trans backlash.
He's participated in charity and fundraising events promoting social justice.
Now, I know that doesn't make him Jay Guevara or Vladimir Lenin or Fred Hampton, but his politics are pretty clear in terms of the public postures he's willing to take.
So here we are.
I'll have more to say in a moment about the underlying mechanics I see at play here.
But first, let's talk just a little about Taylor Swift's place in the world as a pop star.
You probably know that Taylor Swift is the most wealthy and successful female musician on the planet right now, and therefore, of all time.
In the wake of her massive global eras tour, her net worth may be close to $2 billion.
Jay-Z is in fact the only artist wealthier than she is right now.
But Swift is no Beyoncé.
She's not Amy Winehouse.
She's not Adele when it comes to vocal performance.
Many critique her lack of range and often one-note melody or two-note melodies.
She doesn't have Lady Gaga's blend of pop and dance music instincts wrapped up in searing emotional intensity and sometimes camp theatrical artistic flair.
I think of Lady Gaga as a real heavyweight.
And if you've ever heard her just sit at the piano and sing with Elton John or Tony Bennett, there's a lot going on there.
She's no Joni Mitchell or Dolly Parton when it comes to songwriting.
So unlike those lyricists or women like Stevie Nix or Nina Simone, her songs will not enter the almost immortal canon listened to, covered, learned, and studied in the coming decades by serious music students.
I mean, I know there are courses already that study her body of work in terms of its cultural relevance, and I think that's great.
But as a serious student of music, I'm confident saying the things I just said, that's not really her contribution.
And no shade.
But here are the top three Taylor Swift lyrics as passionately ranked by a pair of journalists in USA Today, last year.
This is number three.
You can plan for a change in weather and time, but I never planned on you changing your mind.
And then number two, digging all the way through the catalog of Taylor Swift's lyrics, you made a rebel of a careless man's careful daughter, you are the best thing that's ever been mine.
And the one selected at number one by USA Today, this is in December of last year, you call me up again just to break me like a promise, so casually cruel in the name of being honest.
Now, I'm not doing this to parody Taylor Swift or to put her down at all.
I'm just saying that the actual lyrical content of her songs don't lend themselves to a huge amount of interpretation.
There's not a ton of depth there.
And she's also not Joan Baez, like really writing political commentary.
Rather, the songs capture an experience or a feeling.
And I have no doubt that true fans yell these lines at the live shows with tears in their eyes.
I've seen footage of this and it's beautiful.
But honestly, as poetry, most of it wouldn't win any high school prizes.
However, like Madonna's profile for Gen Xers and older millennials, Taylor rises as a cultural icon above deeper songwriters, above more accomplished musicians, above better singers.
Like Madonna, she's been able to reinvent herself several times, in her case, spanning the country folk and pop genres to some extent.
And she's become seen as representing female empowerment and emotional honesty via very personal, confessional songs, quite often about relationship turmoil, but also about the travails of fame and personal growth and identity.
The loyalty of her audience is often described as hinging on how much they relate to her stories, how much they feel a kind of healing permission in her emotional expression, and that they are inspired by her ability to find resilience, empowerment, and success through the stories she's sharing with them.
And of course, she's tall and beautiful and charismatic.
She puts on a fantastic show.
And all of that helps with the whole pop stardom and parasocial appeal.
And here's the thing.
Taylor Swift's very skillfully cultivated all of this, especially the parasocial piece.
From MySpace to Twitter to Instagram to TikTok, to fan meetups and then online Easter eggs as part of album releases, she's given her fans gamified ways of feeling close to her.
And she's profited immensely from having them buy multiple versions of single albums, for example, she's done this more than once.
Or limited edition merch like the 2020 folklore album's Cardigan that was available for just 48 hours.
The paranoid turn in how her lyrics now are being interpreted rides on an architecture that she built by, for example, having the name of her next album pop up on a billboard during a music video, or having Travis Kelsey's jersey number, 87, appear on the hotel room door in a video, or the way she used snake symbolism in videos and for merch after Kim Kardashian had called her a snake.
On earlier albums, she even had certain letters capitalized in the lyric sheets, and then when you put those capitalized letters together, they spelled out wholesome messages, like, for example, the name of an artist who had inspired one of her songs.
There's a lot more.
There's oblique references in tweets, winks and nods in the video imagery that relates to past boyfriends for those who are in the know.
All of this has contributed to that parasocial vibe amongst her super fans.
And remember, this is an artist with 281 million followers on Instagram alone.
So if even 1% of those are super fans, that's a lot of people.
And they pursue a feeling of closeness with her by engaging in these decoding exercises and who then interact with her songs from a place of intimate seeming, layered meaning and emotion.
But now, that's backfiring in a way that was perhaps inevitable.
But notice something here.
This time, it's political.
And at the risk of sounding cliché or ruffling some feathers, it's a particular kind of politics.
Despite her public endorsements, her avowed political positions, despite her willingness to risk her father's anger or to risk losing fans in the heartland by being anti-Trump, by supporting Black Lives Matter and abortion, gay, and trans rights, despite enacting and advocating her best understanding of feminism, though we could have academic and political critiques of its depth and breadth, Swift has now fallen under suspicion of secretly being MAGA.
There's a kind of political discourse at play here that promotes psychoanalytic and even paranoid modes of cultural analysis and interpretation.
And I'm sorry, but I'm going to say it.
It's a kind of purity testing.
This happens on both the left and the right, but the left has a unique version of it.
Think of Robin D'Angelo's book, White Fragility, right?
It became a massive bestseller and turned her into a political celebrity during the BLM protests of 2020.
Now, there may be some good things about the book or its ideas, and certainly I think it's a good thing for white people to reflect on racism, especially during a cultural moment like that.
But the toxic thing about that book is the central idea that, as D'Angelo herself says, white progressives cause the most daily harm to people of color.
White progressives cause the most daily harm to people of color.
Yep, it's not the white supremacist, far right.
It's not the KKK, it's not the casual everyday racist, not the politician legislating institutional racism.
White progressives are the biggest problem.
They're the absolute worst.
It's the idea that the white person who thinks they are not racist is much worse than the racist who knows that they are.
You see what I mean about it being psychoanalytic?
Racism in this narrative becomes mysterious, unconscious.
It's like this ever-present quality, which no matter what someone believes or thinks, no matter their donation history, activism, or advocacy, no matter their conscious values, it never really goes away.
And so if you say you are not racist, well then you're in denial.
And if someone tells you you're being racist and you don't think you are, that's because of your white fragility right there.
The only way to not be racist is to always say that you are racist inevitably because you're a white person, but you're trying to get better.
It's like racism is alcoholism or drug addiction or the religious state of being a sinner by nature.
Why do I go into this?
Because here we see that no matter Swift's political profile and statements, no matter who she supported, she could on this explanation still unconsciously secretly be a racist or MA or even a Nazi.
And the signs and symbols and dog whistles can guide us to paint an alternate shadow realm portrait of her that, like the almost perceptible outline of the Virgin Mary and the cracking and flaking paint on the side of a building, reveals the real hidden metaphysical truth.
For much of her career, Swift has inspired female fans by planting her flag in being a strong, independent young woman who doesn't need a man to be wildly successful and creative and self-loving.
But now that she's 35 and celebrating being in love and joyfully fantasizing about having kids and a home, what a betrayal.
This is MAGA-coded.
She's giving trad wife vibes.
Is she, though?
Really?
Is it that binary?
Fairly soon after all of this had begun swirling on the internet, Anand Girdadas, you may remember him.
He's a journalist.
He's often in discussions on MSNBC.
He's an author.
He wrote a book called The Persuaders about progressive politics.
He wrote a piece which is, you know, one of your standard pieces you might put under the heading of why the left loses.
And I want to quote a little bit here from him.
He says, you cannot be a progressive with an open mind and heart if you haven't been earnestly asking, why do so many everyday Americans not see themselves in our cause?
Why can Trump get away with so much without everyday people caring more?
One possible answer among many is because of things like this.
This is a mentality that simply needs to go.
Fascism is an actual and terrifying thing.
Alienating everyone who wants a husband and kids and to watch football is the worst politics imaginable.
I agree with this interpretation and what he's really saying.
At the same time, I understand that for a lot of marginalized people who saw themselves in Taylor Swift's stories, or if they didn't see themselves, they saw someone that they could idealize who was reaching out a hand to them, who felt like she was telling their stories and overtly acknowledging them and standing up for them.
And I understand what we might characterize as a kind of trauma response of feeling betrayed or abandoned or having an understandable reaction to something that seems like it might indicate that betrayal or that abandonment or her switching sides.
And I think something that we've sometimes touched on on the podcast here is that the tendency towards that kind of paranoid form of apophenia can be understood as a sort of psychological coping mechanism or a way of trying to find a high degree of attunement to be able to read the signs so as to not be in danger.
So I want to have a lot of empathy and respect for that.
But there were also some fairly well-established pundits and commentators who picked up the story and ran with it and gave it a lot of airtime that Taylor Swift is maybe starting to give trad wife vibes or is aligning herself with MAGA.
And I think that's really a mistake.
When you take the biggest selling, most popular artist in the world who has repeatedly made a stand for Democrat aligned political positions and subject them to this kind of narrow,
demanding criteria for qualifying as being on the left and buy into sort of these paranoid psychoanalytic interpretations of what they may be quote-unquote dog whistling.
It's really quite self-defeating in the sense that it makes the tent smaller and smaller instead of larger and larger.
Taylor Swift may have been somewhat tone deaf in some of what she did on this album, and she may not be a perfect exemplar of progressive politics and activism, but her level of influence is undeniable.
