Charlie and Jeff and Jonah Goldberg have already ably skewered the too-online conspiracy-theory dudes on the MAGA right (and yes, nearly all of them are male) who have talked themselves into arguing (and maybe even in some cases believing) that the dramatic surge in popular attention to pop star Taylor Swift, and her romance with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, are some sort of conspiratorially arranged “psyop” organized by Joe Biden’s White House, Big Pharma, and other shady figures too numerous to name. Never mind that Joe Biden couldn’t organize a sentence coming out of his own mouth. These people are doing an excellent job of permanently discrediting themselves.
It can seem as if the explosion of interest in Swift came out of nowhere, and this can seem all the more inexplicable because Swift has been releasing albums and getting played on the radio since 2006. Swift has been making music so long she first attracted attention on MySpace. Why now? It’s the failure to understand the answer to that question that helps feed a desire for conspiratorial explanations. It’s not actually all that mysterious. At the risk of crossing Michael and his eminently reasonable plea to just stop feeding the beast of the Taylor Swift Discourse, I have in the past tried to offer a rational framework for understanding interest in topics as diverse as the Roman Empire, Fifties nostalgia, immigration and demographic change, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, so I may as well try my hand at an explainer for the Swift boomlet of the past year for those of our readers who are not intimately familiar with Swift, her music, and her career.
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