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There is still a fair bit of that on the right; “Taylor Swift marrying Travis Kelce will save the white race” memes are going strong, although you and Hanania are correct that they’re currently being outcompeted on the DR by the edgier contrarian takes. I myself have half-joked that if Swift and Kelce get married and have at least a couple of beautiful, tall, talented white children, it could serve as a genuinely impactful cultural signal to other white Millennial women. If anyone could make having blue-eyed excellent babies cool again - and prove that such a thing is actually still possible even for women in their 30s like Swift - it’s those two.
However, Swift and Kelce themselves have certainly gone out of their way to make themselves poor vessels for right-wing hopes. Kelce acts black, in a very low-brow way, and my understanding is that Swift is the first white woman he has publicly dated; before that he was the center of a reality show where a bunch of ratchet (mostly black) women competed for his attention. The carping about his appearance in an ad campaign for the Pfizer Covid vaccine is cringeworthy and represents the DR at its most pointlessly oppositional and conspiratorial; that being said, it does suggest that Kelce might be willing and eager to act as a mouthpiece for whatever culturally-approved shibboleths he feels like he needs to parrot. He is apolitical in a way that makes him useful to forces larger than himself, and he appears to have no deeply-held principles which would countervail against attempts to leverage his cultural influence for political ill.
Swift, meanwhile, expresses political views that are totally typical and standard-issue for white women of her age and social class. This doesn’t reflect particularly poorly on her, so much as it just reflects poorly on women in general and of the ever-widening ideological gulf between men and women. I have no contrarian stance toward Swift; she’s a gorgeous, extremely talented woman, with considerable intelligence and impressive levels of personal agency, and she has a pleasant and dorky (and very very white) personality which I find very endearing. She’s a shameless theater kid; she appeared in the ill-fated Cats film, with zero concern for whatever damage it could have done to her career, even going as far as to co-write a new song for it with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, all because she had always loved the musical and wanted to dance around in a catsuit. (And say whatever you will about that film, but as far as that specific scene is concerned… furries, I kinda get it now.)
She is, though, also a serial monogamist who has slept with an order of magnitude more men than even the average slutty urban Millennial woman ever will. The extent to which this reflects poorly on her character is debatable. Perhaps her odd and sheltered upbringing doomed her to be susceptible to the entertainment industry’s temptations in a way that she wouldn’t have been if she’d had a more normal teenage years. From a conservative perspective, it’s undeniable that this makes her at best an imperfect role model for girls. Much of Swift’s lyrical content is still quite wholesome and aspirational toward conservative ideals of fidelity and young love, but it’s impossible not to notice the contrast between those sentiments and the way she’s actually lived her life.
However, a Swift-Kelce marriage - and especially some beautiful blue-eyed Swift-Kelce babies - could still be a momentous cultural whitepill for normal white people. Kelce’s black-centric cultural interests and Swift’s endless string of disreputable boyfriends are not heritable traits; their children, brought up with a stable wealthy upbringing and able to learn from the youthful mistakes of their parents, could unironically be ubermensch paragons of American bourgeois excellence. I’m rooting for the Swift-Kelce romance (although there’s still time for her to change her mind and decide that she’d rather go for the type of guy who leaves fawning racially-aware comments about her on rationalist-adjacent internet message boards) and I think Taylor can still be our Aryan Princess whether she wants to be or not.
The twitter-right so badly wants to bring her under the fold. Not going to happen, I'm afraid. She is a 'cat person' which is not a good sign either for those hoping she will repopulate the Aryan race.
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I think the important thing is that it’s the message, not the person, that’s most relevant when it comes to pop culture. There have been ‘red tribe’ movies or shows about grizzled macho white marine super soldiers or whatever and invariably the lead actor is a progressive and the screenplay is written by some nebbish guy in Hollywood but everyone understands, implicitly, that it’s a ‘conservative’ movie. Yellowstone is another example, it’s created by a progressive and is if anything a wholesome™️ tale of plucky farmers and natives up against evil white capitalist business republicans, but it doesn’t matter, the vibe is red.
Taylor Swift’s image is a wholesome blonde blue-eyed Americana cheerleader prom dress ‘50s diner vibe, played completely straight (unlike, say, Lana, for whom it’s ironic and a little postmodern). That’s the image she sells to hundreds of millions of people around the world, of that image of America. Her personal politics or lifestyle aren’t relevant in the way they would sometimes be if she was a politician.
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