The Cult of Stan Culture (with Amanda Montell)

I want to read off to you some of the notes that I took while I was getting death threats.

I'm scared that by the end of this episode, they're going to have doxxed me and all of my ex-boyfriends.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity.

I have been the subject of many harassment campaigns from Andrew Tate's Teenage Incels to J.K.

Rowling's fanatical turfs to Elon Musk's Musk Rats to Libs of TikTok's bloodthirsty homophobes.

You name it, I've had it.

If there was a punch card for harassment campaigns, I would be getting my free drink by now.

Thank you.

I thought that was funny.

What drink would it be?

The like very berry hibiscus because I'm a faggot.

So I was surprised when, after all of that, the coordinated cruelty of a certain fandom could shock me just by its scale.

I'm not talking about super fans of an aspiring American dictator or delusional conspiracy theorists on the hunt for an imaginary pedophile ring being run out of the basement of a pizza shop.

No.

I'm talking about fans of country darling turned pop superstar, Taylor Swift.

Rule number one of online mobs is that you should not feed into them when they're on your tail.

So I know that by doing this, I am kicking a hornet's nest.

Nonetheless, here we are.

Today, we are going to be putting the cult in stand culture, asking questions like, why have some pop music super fans adopted the online harassment tactics of the far right?

What can it tell us about the state of pop culture, the internet, and a worsening epidemic of loneliness?

You could think of this episode as a companion to our last episode, which was about Chapel Rhone and parasociality, except this time, instead of interrogating the relationship fans have with their favorite celebrities, we'll be exploring the relationship fans form with one another and the lengths they will go together to assert the dominance of a pop star quietly reaping the profits.

To do that, we are joined today by Amanda Montel, host of the prolific podcast, Sounds Like a Cult, and author of multiple books, including Cultish, The Language of Fanaticism, and her new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking.

Amanda, welcome to the show.

Hi, thank you so much for having me.

We were just discussing before we started recording about like how uncanny it can feel, but also really validating and satisfying when someone whose internet presence you are so intimately familiar with comes out as also being a follower of yours.

It's an honor to be here, Matt.

Well, I mean, I've asked, I've called you here to therapize me through my trauma of being the target of the Swifties for the last two weeks.

So I hope you're ready.

I really, I valued what you were saying earlier about how, you know, the conventional wisdom when you've been dogpiled is to cut off the mob's fuel supply, right?

But the royal family's trademark PR strategy of never complain, never explain is sort of at odds with what I understand to be increasing cultural values on the internet of authenticity and transparency.

Never complaining, never explaining doesn't appear very authentic.

But how could a person ever portray true transparency and authenticity on the internet when everyone is going to interpret your statements differently?

Everyone is going to bring their own biases and backgrounds to your points of view.

So it's really hard to know what to do.

And ultimately, I like really respect that you're just kind of going with your gut.

And I feel I may be naively confident that we'll be able to have this conversation in a way that I hope won't further fuel the fire.

Okay, we should first establish how we got here, shall we?

Yeah, let's do that.

A little bit of background for why exactly we're making this episode, because after last one, I was like, I'm done talking about celebrities and parasociality and all of that.

I was like, I've closed this chapter.

I've gotten my piece out.

That was before last week.

So.

If you haven't been following page six or the New York Post or something, Taylor Swift has a friend named Brittany Mahomes.

Brittany Mahomes is the wife of Austin Mahomes, the quarterback.

Don't you love when I talk about sports?

I don't have the terminology either.

I'm just like, they were doing like a

ball rehearsal.

What is that called?

It was intermission at the ball show.

Brittany Mahomes is the wife of Austin Mahomes, who is the quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs, which is the same team that Taylor Swift's boyfriend, Travis Kelsey, plays for.

So Brittany and Taylor are essentially, you know, football wives.

Hi,

post-production editing Matt here.

Patrick Mahomes is the football player.

Austin Mahone is the singer.

I am sorry.

Brittany got into a whole thing a few weeks ago where online she was liking some some pro-Donald Trump content, which got people on her ass.

And then she basically doubled down, which was the way she chose to do this was really funny.

I want to send you what she posted on her Instagram story amidst the backlash for her publicly supporting Donald Trump.

Can I send you this?

Please.

So her response went like this.

To be a hater as an adult, you have to have some deep-rooted issues you refuse to heal from childhood.

There's no reason your brain is fully developed and you hate to see others doing well.

A little inscrutable.

I know what she's saying.

It was, I don't know, it could use a copy editor a little bit next time, but that was, that was her response, which like at first blush and with no context, I'm like, yeah, no, honestly, like, if you're coming from a really unresourced place,

you might be more likely to spread venom on the internet.

I, with, with no context, fine.

I just love the idea of like

everyone who's criticizing me for like supporting

an aspiring fascist dictator is a hater.

Is a hater.

This is the end game of like of like, fuck the haters.

I don't need to prove anything to anyone.

I'm a girl bot.

It's like, okay, yeah, all the haters and the losers.

This is also clearly like the bastardization of therapy speak that we're seeing propagate everywhere these days.

And yeah, just when you have the context, that being fascism,

you know, stripping of rights, et cetera, this starts to seem a little insidious.

If you don't like Donald Trump, you need to heal your inner childhood wounds.

Yeah.

I mean, what an unbelievably 2024 statement, right?

Unbelievably.

But so Donald Trump ultimately publicly thanks Brittany Mahomes.

on Truth Social.

He posts, I want to thank beautiful Britney Mahomes for so strongly defending me and the fact that MAGA is the greatest and most powerful political movement in the history of our now failing country.

It's also side note, I can never just stay on task, but it's so interesting how every time he like talks about a woman he likes, he always calls her beautiful.

Tell me about it.

Or even a woman that he doesn't like.

I mean,

watching him try to make sense of and work his way around Kamala Harris and her appearance and her speech and her identity and her in the in the debate, I found it really striking that he managed to like insult her in a gendered capacity, but also compliment her for seemingly sharing some MAGA principles in the same breath.

She really throws him for a loop.

Women throw Donald Trump for a loop.

All this is happening amidst growing calls for Taylor Swift to say something about the election.

Taylor Swift has famously over the years branded herself a feminist.

She's branded herself a sort of figure unafraid to take political stances she deems correct and progressive, regardless of the blowback that she might receive.

And amidst people's ongoing calls for her to basically endorse Kamala Harris for the election, which at this point she had not done, she is photographed at a Chiefs game in the crowd hugging Brittany Mahomes.

This photograph of Taylor Swift hugging Brittany Mahomes got a ton of blowback from Swifties who had been hoping to see at this point some political statement by Taylor Swift, whether that be an endorsement of Kamala Harris, a comment or perhaps sharing fundraisers for Palestine, any sort of comment about the rising tide of bigotry against queer people and trans people in the United States.

At this point, she'd done none of that.

And this felt like the most politically substantive thing that she had done in a very long time.

And so people were pissed.

I

was one of those people.

I want to clarify at this point my own personal feelings about Taylor Swift.

I, first of all, have been a big fan of Taylor Swift's music since Fearless.

That was, I believe, her second album.

As most people my age, you know, I'm 25, like we grew up with her.

I was in elementary school when she started to get really popular around the fearless era.

And now I am a working adult, allegedly working.

And she only continues to become more famous, which is a pretty unbelievable and unprecedented career trajectory.

But while I've mostly continued to love Taylor Swift's music, I have ethical questions, as I think many people do, around her accumulation of capital, both financial, political, social.

And I think it's gotten to a point where she is so famous and so influential that, and we're all free to debate about this, I do think, especially if she's going to brand herself a sort of progressive political figure, which she's done a number of times in her documentary, Miss Americana, in her gay-themed music video for You Need to Calm Down.

I think if she's going to posit herself that way and in doing so, endear herself to largely marginalized, especially queer audiences, she does need to step up to the plate a little bit when so much is at stake.

And again, at the time of this photograph of her hugging Brittany Mahomes, she had not done that.

Yeah.

I'm personally a lot more interested in the fan behaviors and dynamics and how those have evolved and what they say about this particular time in history, what they say about the general zeitgeist and psychological state of particularly American fans these days than I am in Taylor Swift herself.

I regard Taylor Swift as a person who

I could speculate all day long about who she might be in her private life.

Clearly, she values expansionism in a sense, you know, like she's not someone who decided, you know what, I have enough.

I'm going to quit while I'm ahead and kind of, you know, like retire on a cloud.

No, she, she likes to persevere.

And I don't necessarily really care to speculate too much about her personal life.

I don't really pay attention to her music, forgive me, but I am fascinated by the parasocial dynamics that she has participated in probably more than the average pop star

with her fans.

Yeah, I'm interested in the sociocultural context of her fan behaviors, but my personal relationship to Taylor Swift kind of doesn't exist.

I listened to the Red album when I was in college

living in Brooklyn, and I enjoyed it.

I think the song Treacherous is underrated.

You can probably also sense that like

years,

years and years of commenting on Taylor Swift's fan community have rendered me perhaps like overly cautious about expressing my personal opinions of her because I'm really motivated to take the temperature down on some of this discourse so we can really get into it.

And if I like share too much of like my chitty chatty brunch opinions on a public forum, I feel like it might distract from some of the meat of what I want to bring to a public forum, if that makes sense.

Totally, totally.

So I think we can safely say neither of us are swifties, nor are we anti-Swifty.

We are observing each side like a tennis match.

Like a tennis match from the movie Challengers.

We were looking at a lot of people and we're saying, kiss.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

So the photograph comes out.

I tweet, perhaps naively, I don't expect a billionaire to lead the revolution or anything.

I'm just confused as to why one would make a movie about standing up for what's right at any cost, only to literally never stand for anything again.

Those were some fiery words coming out of me, and that was before I understood the wrath of the Swifties.

Now, would I say the same thing again now?

Probably, but

I certainly learned a lesson here, and I'm still figuring out which lesson that was.

So that tweet gets about a quarter of a million likes.

And the initial response was some people agreed with me, some people disagreed with me, but that's Twitter.

It wasn't until Taylor Swift did endorse Kamala Harris one day after I sent my tweet, and, you know, for the most part, people who were happy that she had done that moved on to other things, that the Swifties returned to my doorstep with a vengeance.

Now is when I would like to read a collage of messages and mentions I received over a two-day period.

All right, here we go, kids.

Strap in.

Trigger warning also for everything.

Trigger, if you have a trigger, you know, warning.

Respectfully, here is a present rope emoji.

She didn't speak up because a faggot told her so.

Okay, wait.

Also, sorry, something that's funny to mention is a lot of times because they know that writing faggot will sometimes, not always, thanks Elon Musk, but sometimes flag Twitter's community guidelines.

So a lot of them do, they write faggot as like FA and then the goat emoji, which I actually think is hysterical.

Next message you hideous beast when you die because of AIDS we will be celebrating next message you're a grown man with dick and balls grow up

I mean that's true I do have those things all right thank you all right all right here's here's a string of tweets from five different people once again you have made yourself look unintelligent I hate an annoying senseless twink next

Oh, so now you switch sides, you faggot.

Next.

Damn, you really can't pick a side

other than bitch and moan, can you?

Next.

Count your fucking days, you stupid motherfucker.

Next, shut the fuck up.

Next.

It's always the horrible FA goat emoji.

I really do.

I appreciate the creativity.

Next, where's the apology, you faggot?

This time spelled FA990T.

People like you make me wish for Trump's victory so he can take away your rights.

Good luck rummaging through garbage bins with those shitty ass nails that you probably put in some other FA9's asshole.

Next, hope you die like dice emoji of AIDS, you filthy FA goat emoji.

Next, you did nothing but run your dumb twink mouth.

Focus on your nails, not politics.

This came from an adult gay man.

Like what?

With photos attached to his profile.

That was shocking.

Next, but I thought she was a coward 48 hours ago.

She will make more impact than your F goat,

that would just be like Fagot,

ever can in this election.

And then finally, at this point, you're mentioning Taylor for the Twitter paycheck, which is funny because I am not subscribed to Twitter Blue.

I do not give Elon Musk any of my own money, and I am not making a cent from my tweets on Twitter, no matter how viral they go.

So I am not mentioning Taylor for a paycheck, but thank you at Pepsi Romantics.

Amanda, what's your hot take?

I mean, I'm just like so sorry.

Oh, I'm f come on.

No, I know it's not because

for most people, like receiving a message like that would send you into fight or flight, you know, it really, it can feel really threatening and really dangerous.

Even if those people would never dream of interacting with you in person like that, and I have to believe that most of them wouldn't, it feels really scary.

And I deal with internet confrontation that I feel is unjustified.

I'm still not good at it.

And I still feel like I'm pretty sort of doily skinned.

Well, it reminds me of that hat or t-shirt or whatever, or perhaps a meme that just says, like, don't you dare come for me.

I will cry.

My response is more like that t-shirt that says, don't bully me, I'll come.

I will say, you know, I did a little bit of analysis in real time as this was happening on Twitter.

And someone wrote to me saying, I know that analyzing this from sort of a bird's eye view perspective can help deal with the pain while it's happening and distance yourself from the pain.

And I realize that with this podcast, that's a little bit of what I'm doing, you know, analyzing why these people told me to die of AIDS and how they'll celebrate it.

It is a little bit easier to metabolize that through the lens of like analysis.

I totally agree.

That's the only thing that's gotten me through moments when I felt really misunderstood or like I was going through something incredibly painful and unnecessary having to do with the internet, developing a sense of curiosity about why, about why they're acting this way, why my brain is responding in this manner.

It really, it really does help.

Amanda, before we interrogate what happened here, I want to talk a little bit about Stan Twitter and Stan culture, which some listeners might be intimately familiar with, but others might have no idea what I am talking about.

And so I feel like to get everyone on the same page, let's discuss a little bit of history.

First of all, what is a stan?

Could you describe to your best ability what a stan is?

Yeah.

A lot of the literature, and there is formal academic literature on this topic, tends to define stans as a coalition of particularly obsessive, zealous acolytes of usually pop stars.

So they usually exist with regard to musicians, particularly in the pop space.

Some attribute the origins of this term stan to Eminem, who had a 2000 song titled Stan, which told the story of a sort of obsessed super fan who lost his mind when his idol wouldn't answer his fan letters.

And then conspicuously, the word stan is also a perfect portmanteau of stalker and fan.

So that kind of demonstrates the intensity of this type of fandom, which has grown even more zealous and even more diffuse over the past few decades, which we can discuss as well.

With regard to stand Twitter, I want to reference a really fascinating paper that I found connecting stan Twitter and reactionary fandoms with cancel culture, because I saw that one of the topics that you wanted to discuss today was, you know, hyper-reactionary, zealous fandoms appropriating some of the mob mentality and methods of far-right groups and using them for you know different aims, different means with a different aesthetic, a different flavor.

And I found it really interesting that someone named Haley Roos at the at Muhlenberg College wrote a paper, her honors thesis actually,

about how techniques of cancel culture have been bastardized by stand communities.

So Haley Roos talks about how cancel culture began on black Twitter.

And the original intention and mode of interaction of cancel culture, some listeners might already know this, was to sort of, you know, take your consumer behavior into your own hands when you found that a public figure or a celebrity is behaving in a problematic fashion, is acting in a way that is racist, misogynistic, homophobic.

You can sort of call in, call out, abstain from consuming their products, resist putting money in their coffers.

And that was a form of social justice empowerment.

But Haley Roos goes on to say, and I'm going to quote her here, the social justice logic and activism behind cancel culture has been appropriated by Stan Twitter.

Stans noticed the power that cancel culture had to end careers, twisted the activism into harassment, and restructured cancel culture as an excuse to censor anyone who questions, competes with, or critiques their idols.

And one of the reasons why cancel culture now is perceived as bullying or honestly something really amorphous that means something different to different people, but oftentimes can be really venomous, is because of this bastardization by Stan Twitter of some of these social justice tools.

Wow, you've gotten some foreshadowing into the rest of my outline.

Sorry, I hope I didn't like spill the beans or anything.

No, you didn't because I actually come at it from a different place.

Quick break from the show to shout out the girls at NordVPN for sponsoring this episode.

I write and make a podcast for a living, so I work for and by myself, which I love.

I don't have a real office because, first of all, office space in New York is expensive.

First of all, everything in New York is expensive.

But I actually like being an office nomad, if you will.

You know, working from various coffee shops allows me to, cheesy though it sounds, explore all the nooks and crannies of this giant city.

The problem though is that I am always using a ton of different public Wi-Fi networks, and public Wi-Fi networks are famously not so secure.

They're very insecure networks.

They need a little ego boost.

No, what a Wi-Fi network not being secure means is it's not encrypted, meaning that things like your web history or any passwords or credit card numbers that you put in while you're using that public Wi-Fi network is much more easily hackable to cyber criminals.

NordVPN helps keep me safe from that.

Nord encrypts your internet connection so that nobody, not the internet service provider, nor the business, nor a potential hacker, can access your information while you're on a public network.

The die-hard Swifty hacking into the Bushwick coffee shop Wi-Fi will not get me this time.

Right now, Nord is offering listeners of a BitFruity a huge discount on their service and an additional four months free on any two-year plan.

You can check it out and grab that big discount at nordvpn.com slash fruity.

That'll also be in the episode description.

It's nordvpn.com slash fruity.

Now, back to the show.

I want to do a teeny tiny bit of stan history because standem is not new, right?

Like super fans of different musicians have existed and have acted out for a long time.

You might recall John Lennon was killed by a Beatles fan who was increasingly jealous of the Beatles' fame and wanted it for himself.

Selena Quintanilla was killed by the president of her own fan club.

Joe Coscarelli wrote this interesting piece in the New York Times where he explained that Fandom before the internet was generally relegated to concerts and like isolated in-person meetups between fans.

It was competitive not in like, my fandom should be better than your fandom and we can get more streams on our song than you can on your artist's song, but it was more of just about like within the fandom, like I've been to 10 concerts and you've only been to eight.

Kind of innocuous shit like that.

And he points out that American Idol was really like a symbolic turning point in the culture where fans could vote for their favorite artist to succeed or fail.

And then that the availability of streaming analytics on places like Spotify or Apple Music turned music fandom into this inner community community competition.

I'm gonna get Miley Cyrus' song to outstream the Lady Gaga songs that like

the Miley Stans can like beat out the little monsters or whatever.

In 2010s, we see the real introduction online of what would become stand culture.

Justin Bieber had his Believers, Nicki Minaj has the Barbs, Ariana Grande has Arianators, Beyonce has the Beehive, Taylor Swift has Swifties,

and it turns into this sort of like evangelical Twitter-based movement.

What's interesting too is that you you mentioned that Stan comes from the 2000 song by Eminem called Stan.

And the thing about Stan was it was a cautionary tale.

Stan was a super fan of Eminem who grew so angry with the fact that Eminem wasn't returning his letters that he locked his pregnant wife in the trunk of his car and drove off a bridge.

Stan is a pejorative when Eminem uses it, but it's been sort of twisted into like, I stan you so hard.

It's now like a competition of who can be the biggest stan.

Stan Twitter today has hundreds of thousands of stan accounts, almost all anonymously run, usually with profile pictures of their favorite pop stars.

Joe Coscarelli, again, explained it best.

He wrote, On what is known as Stan Twitter, these devotees compare number ones in streaming statistics like sports fans do,

voice crack, like sports fans do to battling out, battling, battling.

I can't talk about fucking sports.

Like sports fans do batting averages, championship wins, and shooting percentages.

They pledge allegiance to their favorites, like the most rabid political partisans or religious followers.

They organize to win awards, show polls, boost sales, and raise money like grassroots activists.

And they band together to pester or harass or even dox those who may dare to slight the stars they have chosen to align themselves with.

Last thing I want to say about Stan Twitter is

their two main news sources on Stan Twitter.

Their CNN and New York Times are called Pop Crave and Pop Bass, with 1.8 million and 1.6 million followers, respectively.

These are two huge Twitter accounts that basically just report on the comings and goings of different celebrities, whether they release music or appeared in a paparazzi photo.

You may have heard the lingo Taylor Swift Stuns in New Photo.

But But these accounts have gotten so big that they're now getting invited to the DNC.

Both Pop Crave and Pop Bass were on the ground at the DNC think

Kamala stuns in New Photo.

I also want to mention, you can be a huge fan or scholar.

You can have an extreme admiration for a celebrity without being a stan.

You know, people who write books or make documentaries about people like Michael Jackson or Madonna or, you know, drag queens who base their entire career around impersonating a specific celebrity like Cher.

That's not necessarily standom.

The thing I think where fandom tips into standom is when your interest or adoration for an artist becomes a parasocial obsession.

Totally.

That's totally fair.

And it actually, it prompts me to want to cite some research that attempted to quantify certain categories of celebrity worship or fandom to paint a clearer picture.

The first chapter in my newest book, which is called The Age of Magical Overthinking, is called, Are You My Mother Taylor Swift?

And I guess that's one of the reasons why I'm here today, because since, you know, long before this election season,

as you mentioned, you know, Taylor Swift's level of influence and level of capital only continue to skyrocket.

I was really inspired to ask the question of like, what culturally and psychologically is responsible for these extreme cycles of celebrity worship and dethronement that we're seeing right now?

And I came to some answers that felt pretty satisfying and a bit of foreshadowing here is that in a way they have to do with

our relationship to religion and worship in the United States, the conflation of celebrity with religious authority, political authority, business authority.

They also have to do with emotional resources that are being fulfilled or not in our personal lives, communities, families.

But I want to talk about that spectrum of standom.

First of all, I want to say that celebrity worship has materially increased over the past few decades.

So in 2019, there was this one Japanese study that found that about 30% of adolescents aspire to emulate a media figure, like their favorite singer or athlete.

Another study published a couple of years later in the North American Journal of Psychology found that celebrity worship had increased dramatically since two decades prior.

I'm sure you've seen statistics talking about how like vast majorities of young people middle school age aspire to be YouTubers more than astronauts or

teachers.

So to your point, fandom falls along a spectrum.

Not every fan is a stan.

And the spectrum can go from healthy admiration to pathological mania.

There are absolutely benefits to

worshiping, I guess, maybe a celebrity in a well-calibrated way.

In that chapter of the book, I quoted a reporter named Danielle Colin Tomi, who wrote a piece for Bustle, where she talked about how Tumblr opened up her eyes to nuanced opinions from an array of people in a space that wasn't intimidating to her.

Her fandoms were vehicles to talk about feminism, race, and LGBTQ representation in a format that felt approachable.

It was a way of sort of talking about politics or other issues that were important to her without, you know, having to talk about herself.

And that was really helpful.

But there's also the dogmatic end of standom.

So I found this 2005 study that was published in the Psychology, Crime, and Law Journal, which identified four categories along the celebrity worship continuum.

I'll name them and some of their symptoms, shall we say, and we can determine maybe like which ones we each fall into about certain people.

So first there was one called the entertainment social level.

And this was defined by sentiments like, my friends and I like to discuss what my favorite celebrity has done.

I love to gossip about the likes of Jojo Siwa, etc.

I would say I can squarely fall into the entertainment social level.

And then there was another category called intense personal, the intense personal feelings category.

And this was classified by statements like, I have frequent thoughts about my favorite celebrity, even when I don't want to.

So we're inching along the spectrum, but this is maybe still not quite a stand.

Me with Britney Spears.

Yeah, you're just like falling asleep thinking about her even when you don't want to.

I'm like hitting myself in the head.

I'm like, make the thoughts go away, but it can't stop.

Well, and we can talk about how to get yourself out of a thought spiral surrounding Britney Spears or anything else you're aware of.

Cognitive behavioral therapy for Britney Spears obsession.

You know, I think there's a real market for that.

And

we can explore, you know, endorsing such a thing.

Yes.

This episode is sponsored by my new app, which offers discounted cognitive behavioral therapy for stands.

That's seriously, that's becoming more and more and more important thing.

So, okay, so the third category was called borderline pathological.

And this level was characterized by delusional thoughts, including my favorite celebrity and I have our own codes so we can communicate with each other secretly.

This might remind you of certain fandoms ranging from, you know, QAnon type cue drops to

Easter eggs, if I may say so.

I'm not naming anyone.

They can't yell at me if I don't say it by name.

This category was also defined by certain implausible expectations, such as if I walked through the door of my favorite celebrity's home without an invitation, they would be happy to see me.

So now we're talking about that parasocial separation of reality and fiction that you were alluding to.

Another sentiment expressed by this category was self-sacrifice.

So sentiments there included, I would gladly die in order to save the life of my favorite celebrity.

There was a fourth category as well, labeled deleterious imitation.

And these fans expressed a willingness to engage in illegal behaviors on behalf of their fave.

So, they would say things like, or they would agree with sentiments such as, if I were lucky enough to meet my favorite celebrity and they asked me to do something illegal as a favor, like January 6th, I would probably do it.

I'm like gripping the sides of my chair.

This is like

so horrifying.

Yeah, no, it is, especially because these behaviors are increasing in a measurable capacity.

You know, I attribute it in part

to the era that you were describing earlier where we were seeing some of those celebrity assassinations.

So that is obviously extreme, violent, dangerous, but uncommon, thankfully, IRL behavior.

Fortunately, you know, we're not seeing violence quite like that as much anymore.

Although, with the past two Trump assassination attempts, it's like, can we even really say that?

Although that's a different context, and it's hard to say what those people's motivations were.

But what we are seeing, I think, in general, is a longing for community, ritual, spirituality, and meaning that before that 70s era, like like when we started seeing the most intense celebrity stands of the modern era, such as Beatle Mania, ever since that era, celebrity worship has started to become more intense.

And I really think that that is due to the sort of exodus, if you will, away from mainstream religion in the United States and away from, you know, trust in the mainstream government.

There's a wonderful piece, an op-ed, that the writer Jessica Gross wrote for the New York Times.

And it's titled something like, you know, when did we start taking celebrities seriously?

And in that New York Times piece, she reported that in 1958, about three quarters of Americans, quote, trusted the federal government to do the right thing almost always or most of the time.

That was according to Pew Research.

But then a few noteworthy cultural events happened, including the Vietnam War, the economic recession of 1960, Watergate, the formation of many different cults and spiritual groups.

You know, people were leaving their childhood Protestantism behind.

Sorry, go ahead.

I just like that we're tracing my many Swifty death threats to like the Vietnam War and Watergate.

No, but like there is, it is not a coincidence that so many of Taylor Swift's stand scandals are modeled linguistically in the style of Watergate.

Tumblr Gate, Lavendergate, JetGate, because

to a certain faction of America, a certain like niche, but increasingly not so niche corner of our culture, it felt like Watergate, right?

That's, I mean, that controversy gate is a form of internet slang now, but it comes from somewhere and it's not a coincidence.

So by 1980, only about a quarter of U.S.

citizens trusted the government to do the right thing anymore.

But that didn't mean that we didn't need and want a different kind of public paragon to suggest that they could save us.

And that can be directly connected to the election of our very first celebrity president in the form of Ronald Reagan.

And, you know, kind of our relationships to celebrity worship changed forever from there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

That is a hallmark of my personality, though, is finding a way to blame Reagan for everything.

And thanks to Amanda,

we've done it.

Yep.

Oh my God, 100%.

We can blame Reagan for everything, including this.

But it's, it's telling, I think, that, you know, at ironically and then earnestly, and we can talk to, we can talk about the ironic for earnest pipeline, we are now seeing prayer candles emblazoned with the images of Taylor Swift, Harry Stiles, Saint Dolly.

And, you know,

there is a conversation to be had.

I don't know if anyone has the definitively correct answers about the role of celebrities in influencing politics, as celebrity worship combines with late stage capitalism, if that's a term that we're using.

But what can be said definitively is that there are some major negative side effects to extreme celebrity worship.

I'm going to rattle off a list of what basically are going to sound like the side effects on a pharmaceutical commercial.

And I want folks to know that like I am I am quoting from this empirical research and I don't want folks to feel judged or, you know, like I'm communicating that there's something wrong with them for being a stan if you identify as such, because again, that word can mean different things to different people depending on the context.

I have said so many times, like, I stan, you know, Jeremy Allen Way or like, I stan Chappell or whatever.

And it can, it can mean different things to different people again.

And I also want to communicate that like these communities provide so much solace, particularly for marginalized communities.

It is not the case that like every stan is going to suffer psychologically from their engagement with these communities.

However, there has been research to suggest that an excess of celebrity worship can come with some deleterious consequences.

According to this one 2014 clinical examination of

celebrity worship, some psychological difficulties that were found to be associated with high levels of standom included, quote, concerns about body image, greater proneness to cosmetic surgery, sensation seeking, cognitive rigidity, identity diffusion, poor interpersonal boundaries.

Some other observed qualities included depression, anxiety, dissociation, narcissistic personality tendencies, thirst for fame, compulsive shopping and gambling, stalking behavior, excessive fantasizing to the point of social dysfunction, which was termed in this piece, and I love this phrase, maladaptive daydreaming, relatable,

addiction, and criminality.

Yeah, I want to pause quickly to mention that like

stand Twitter can be very funny.

You know, the power of standem is incredible.

Do you know about the Trump rally in Oklahoma?

Was this the K-pop situation?

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Okay.

So

this is a good memory.

In June 2020, Donald Trump was running for president.

Donald Trump has been running for president for a very long time.

Donald Trump was running for president and he was holding a rally that June in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Trump team was boasting to media outlets that they had gotten millions of ticket requests for this rally and reporters noted a shockingly small turnout.

And if you're watching this on YouTube, I'm going to throw some pictures up on the screen because they are very, very funny.

The Trump team said that the reason it was pretty empty was because protesters outside were preventing the true Trump supporters from getting into the rally.

But reporters were like, not really, there like were very few protesters.

And what actually happened was K-pop fans en masse registered for tickets beforehand and coordinated a campaign to artificially drive up demand for this rally and then not go.

And interest, which is so smart on its own, and something that made it even smarter, was that many of these K-pop fans were quickly deleting the content that they made about it in real time so that that the Trump team would not catch on to the fact that they were doing this.

And they basically successfully thwarted a Trump rally.

And it was very funny.

You know, there are so many occasions of stands really banding together in a grassroots fashion that I think are really beautiful.

And the range of like outcomes that can come from, you know, celebrities treading outside of their lane into politics or activism can be, you know, Donald Trump to Dolly Parton.

You know, would we want to sacrifice Dolly Parton to save the world from Donald Trump?

That's an interesting philosophical exercise.

But, you know, would we want to give up Jane Fonda and so many, you know, profound activist figure celebrities in order to protect our society from the worst of the worst?

I don't know.

But I, yeah, I'm, I'm heartened by that K-pop stand story.

It's hysterical.

There's also, I mean, and this is kind of in the hall of fame of Stan Twitter situations, but

do you know about, okay, I'm just going to tell you.

In 2019, there was a Taylor Swift Stan account called Legit Tay Updates,

which wrote, Update, as most of you know, I haven't been very active in the past couple of months because I was in prison.

I'm back now though.

More Taylor Swift updates coming soon.

And someone responded, OMG, why?

And Taylor wrote, I refuse to join the IDF, LMAO.

Basically, legite updates refused to join the Israeli military and was put in jail.

And then returned to Twitter to be like, I'm back for more Taylor Swift updates.

Like the resilience is unbelievable.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

But, you know, there is a darkness here, as I experienced, and as one music critic, Jillian Mapes experienced in 2020.

So in 2020, Taylor Swift dropped Folklore, the album, and Jillian Mapes, then a writer for Pitchfork, the music publication, wrote a review for it that Swifties did not find to be sufficiently positive.

Jillian Mapes was doxxed.

She had physical threats of violence made against her.

She was receiving repeated, incessant phone calls to her home from Swifties.

And this is all insane behavior, but also the Pitchfork review was in 8.0.

That is so high on pitchfork.

Like, that is crazy.

That's crazy.

I have a similar story.

So one of my pals, Jill Gudowitz, who is a very, very funny writer,

has had a long-standing Twitter presence and is a self-identified Swifty.

She penned some truly hilarious and glowing reviews of Taylor's lover album for Vulture.

She was the victim of a Swifty

Twitter dog pile because in one of her articles, she referred to Taylor Swift's then-boyfriend Joe Alwyn as human oat milk, which like just is not cruel.

No, it's just like saying he's a white boy.

It's so, it's so mild.

There is this really fascinating dynamic I've observed among Swifties where they've always felt protective of her, as if she's like sort of ever needed the protection of like millions of strangers.

But like, there's this weird, do I want to call it incesty?

There's like this, there's this, like, you're my mother, I'm your mother, whose mother am I?

Like, what is our relationship?

There's this real like conflation of like maternal, but also sibling, but also bestie, but also fan idol dynamics that I think prompts some Swifties to get to get defensive of Taylor Swift, even when critique is so mild, even when it's not critique, it's just a bit.

And Jill told, she told me on an episode of Sounds Like a Cult where we covered the cult of Swifties, which was quite the tightrope walk.

She once had the FBI show up at her house because of something that she tweeted.

But the FBI clears you when they determine that this is no longer a problem.

She was never proverbially cleared.

by the Swifties.

And so

it is fascinating to me how Swifties will even sort of come after their own.

They'll even come after Taylor Swift if she violates some standard of mothering that they've set for her.

So it's all fascinating.

Well, to your point, I mean, something that I think, and I think this is kind of unique to the Taylor Swift fandom, is that they can kind of infantilize her as someone who would

disintegrate at the tiniest bit of criticism.

Like, you know, I think the criticism I wrote of Taylor Swift for her lack of political action was pretty tame.

And yet for days, I was receiving hundreds of messages from Swifties about how I was bullying her.

Right, right.

While these same people are telling me to kill myself.

Yeah, no, it's truly, it's

sort of ironic to put it mildly.

It reminds me of when there was all that discourse during the pandemic where people were complaining that the term Karen was a slur.

If Karen is is a slur, then yeah, you critiquing Taylor Swift's politics is bullying, which is to say, neither are the case.

This episode is brought to you by the Aeros Tour.

I'm kidding.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Come on.

No,

this podcast is brought to you by our friends over at Blue Land.

Blue Land was the show's first ever partner, and I'm a big fan of them because they are a gimmick-free way to make your home cleaning routines more streamlined and more sustainable.

You may think that that plastic film around your laundry detergent pods disappears, but it doesn't.

While it gives the appearance of dissolving, the plastic doesn't actually biodegrade.

Laundry pods and dishwasher pods are just one example of how everyday products we use sneakily end up as microplastics contaminating our environment.

I have long been using Blue Land's fully dissolvable laundry tablets as a way to get the job done without leaving any contaminants behind.

And Blue Land just released a first-of-its-kind fragrance laundry tablet in the scent Spring Bloom to give you the same clean and plastic-free efficacy you know and love from Blue Land now with a fresh, citrusy wildflower scent.

It is delightful.

If you'd like to try out Spring Flower or any of Blue Land's sustainable and frankly adorable home cleaning products, you can do that by heading over to blueland.com slash fruity for 15% off your first order.

That's blue land.com/slash fruity for 15% off.

Thank you so much, as always, to Blue Land for partnering with the show.

And now let's jump back down the rabbit hole.

I want to talk about an important through line between Gamergate and Stan Twitter and the tactics of Stan Twitter that, again, Joe Coscarelli identified in the New York Times.

Gamergate, I've talked about it a little bit on this podcast in various episodes, but basically the TLDR is it was a coordinated, loosely coordinated 2014 harassment campaign, mostly by very online young white gamers.

My favorite demo.

Male gamers.

Against a few women who were video game developers and critics, basically on the basis that these women were woke-ifying video games, that they were pushing for, you know, such devastating things as complex female characters with, you know, realistic breast sizes.

It was a harassment campaign that mostly happened on 4chan and 8chan, which is even crazier than 4chan, and Reddit.

Oh my god, what would 16chan be?

16chan is just hell.

The three main targets of Gamergate were Anita Sarkassian, who was a video game writer and critic, and the video game developers Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu, who sadly is now just kind of a right-wing troll herself.

But they were all doxxed.

They received death threats and rape threats for months and in some cases, years.

What's interesting is you're probably hearing this right now and being like, okay, this just happens every single day.

And you would be correct.

This became basically the textbook of internet harassment.

adopted by not only stand Twitter, but other fandoms, including those of Andrew Tate and accounts like Libs of TikTok, who just does this every single day to like random gay and trans teachers.

And now accounts like stop underscore anti-Semitism, which also every day just doxes like random Palestinian people for like having a pro-Palestine pin or something and then like being like, we have to get this flight attendant fired for being anti-Semitic.

It's like this is just and directing their thousands of followers to find the person's address and harass them into oblivion.

The Gamergate through line is an interesting one because what I felt when I was getting all of these messages from Swifties telling me to like get AIDS and die,

etc., etc.

You're just a faggot, da-da-da-da-da.

Like, you know, whatever, what hasn't been said to me?

These mirrored the exact messages that I received from thousands and thousands of 13-year-old straight white male Andrew Tate fans when I had a little tiff with him in 2022.

Hey, guys, you better fucking relax with your fucking saying, you fucking goose.

Fucking gay cunt talking about Andrew Taylor like that.

Look at you, bro.

You're a gay cunt man.

Go fucking die, bro.

These are largely the identical messages to those that I received from avid fans of JK Rowling for her TERF stuff, not her Harry Potter stuff.

These are identical to the messages that I get anytime I criticize Elon Musk from all of his, like, you know, crypto bros.

The Stan Twitter playbook mirrors the reactionary celebrity right-wing fandom playbook.

That insight, that I quickly identified while it was happening.

I was like, oh, if I cover the username and it's not like Taylor Swift updates 13, like this could easily have come from like, Andrew Tate is my daddy 13.

And I would not know because the messages are the same.

Yeah, I think it speaks a lot about what kind of language is normalized on certain platforms.

Mercifully, I am not on Twitter.

I tried to tweet a couple times throughout my life.

You're going to live longer than me.

You know, someone has to be conducting some kind of really longitudinal study about lifespan and Twitter use.

I would love to see those

receipts.

But yeah, I think there is, you know, a certain linguistic culture that has developed on each individual platform.

And people adopt, you know, a linguistic vibe really quickly.

I talk about this in Cultish, which is my second book that talks about the language of cults from Scientology to Soul Cycle.

Okay.

So like this wide spectrum of groups.

And what's really sort of insidious about cultish language is that

an insidery language, no matter if it's as innocuous as pig Latin or as dangerous as sort of like incelly QAnon type verbiage, when you are involved in a a community that makes you feel really accepted, that makes you feel superior to those on the outside, like you have access to some kind of transcendent wisdom, that makes you feel like your life is meaningful, that you have a strong identity and can weather challenges that life might throw at you because you have this community behind you, you have this identity that you can stand by.

The language that they use, even if it's really violent, is the first thing you're going to pick up because language is invisible and seemingly commitment-free.

And it's also the last thing that you're going to let go.

And I found this in so many contexts when I started talking to cult survivors for that book, folks who'd gotten out of everything from heaven's gate to just like a way to intense fitness community.

A lot of them were like still using the in-group jargon that they had adopted when they were a part of this group that they had since defected and were now lambasting.

So language doesn't appear powerful or influential to some folks because, you know, we grow up with axioms like, sticks and stones, get rid of your bones, but words will never hurt you.

We often fail to recognize its material power.

So I think that's going on, especially on Twitter, you know, where the culture can be so poisonous.

This type of language is normal, no matter what.

no matter what flavor or aesthetic your community has, this is the kind of register that you might be talking in.

And I also think that like just generally in certain corners of the internet, our

natural conspiratorial tendencies as humans are set aflame.

So, you know, we as a human species, like we really like to force cause and effect relationships into situations where there is no real one singular villainous cause for an unfortunate turn of events.

Sometimes it happened because of complex array of events or it just happened because of random misfortune, but we don't like that as human beings because it makes the world feel chaotic and unmanageable.

So in certain fan communities, stan communities, really toxic ones like Andrew Tate, but now it seems like also Swifties,

there's a reason why like Q drops and Taylor Swift Easter eggs can seem sort of analogous because there's a conspiratorialism underneath it all.

It is that same parasocial thing of like she or he or whoever is leaving messages for me that only I can read.

And if you were to threaten a stand's understanding of reality, and you know, your critique of Taylor Swift in that moment seemed to threaten a lot of these people's understanding of reality, it makes the world feel chaotic.

It makes them feel like their community is at risk or that you're a threat to their community.

And if they've had a lot of practice using this vitriolic language, because that's the culture of Twitter, it's going to lead them to a pretty dark place.

Well, I mean, that segues perfectly into the next part of my outline, which I called standing as a religion.

I want to read off to you some of the notes that I took while I was getting death threats.

Yeah, quantify, quantify that bullshit.

Okay, I was taking notes because I was like, this feels religious.

The way these people are attacking me, you know, a few weeks ago, for the first time, I know I'm late, but I watched Going Clear, the documentary about Scientology.

It's never too late.

It's evergreen.

It's great.

And if you haven't seen Going Clear, it is a good one to get a fundamental understanding of Scientology and also to just understand how kind of the in-group, out-group psychology of cults work.

But one thing that Scientology is, you know, notorious for is going against its defectors and going against outsiders.

And as this was happening to me, for again, my most mild criticism of Taylor Swift, I was getting this onslaught of harassment that felt like the stories I was hearing about and going clear.

Evangelical.

And so I started taking some notes about, like, okay, what about this feels religious to me?

And here is what I wrote down.

The things that make Stan culture feel fundamentally religious, you have a deified figure, whether it's a pop star or a CEO like Elon Musk or an influencer like Andrew Tate.

You have a community of fellow believers that sometimes you may attend in-person events with that you might pay a lot of money for tests of loyalty to the deified figure rejection of outsiders harassment of critics and a flow of money constantly towards the deity

and i added that last bit flow of money towards the deity because stans spend a lot of money on these artists yes i was reading this 2005 study it was in an academic journal called advances in consumer research and the study was called Parasocial Relationships in Online Communities by Paul Ballantin and Brett Martin.

And they were writing in 2005 how basically parasocial online communities spend more money, which I thought was really interesting because that is true of Stan Twitter.

These artists are not only streaming a song like a normal person would or like maybe buying an album here or there, but they're setting up hundreds of playlists where they can add the songs, the newly released songs of their favorite artists, and play them over and over and over again.

They instruct each other on how to stream with the volume all the way down so that you can stream a song all day without actually listening to it, but so you can boost those artist numbers.

They are buying all 40 variants of Taylor Swift's Tortured Poets department and all the different vinyls and all the different bonus tracks and all the different live versions.

Like they are spending so much money.

And so I do think it's important to note like who is the ultimate beneficiary here?

You know, yeah, well, you know, first, I want to sort of highlight that some folks get they sort of bump up against the conflation of terms like religion, cult, culture.

I really like the way that theologian and journalist Tara Isabella Burton talks about the sort of porous boundaries between these concepts.

She talks about how, like, there

really is no stark separation between religion, cult, and culture.

It has so very much to do with sort of cultural normativity.

So many mainstream religions in the United States were once considered blasphemous cults.

There are plenty of groups.

I mean, this is one of the themes that I discuss on Sounds Like a Cult, albeit lightheartedly.

There are so many groups that on the outside look really sort of like ritualistic and fringey, whether you're talking about like Disney adults or certain fitness communities, that when you really break it down, it's like, okay, well, no, they're not as dangerous as Scientology.

And then there are certain like totally accepted on the books, government institutions, Silicon Valley corporations, that when you check off the list of red flags, you're like, wait, no, that's actually more like a cult than that other thing we were roasting.

So that's important to point out.

You know, there are plenty of jokes told by religious studies scholars to point out those fuzzy boundaries between cult, religion, and culture, like cult plus time equals religion, or a cult is a group where the leader thinks he can talk to God.

A religion is a group where that leader is dead.

Now,

we as a society are becoming less traditionally religious, but we are not becoming less ritualistic, zealous.

Obviously, the internet carves out a space for us to be ritualistic and zealous in a new way.

When I observe hardcore swifty behaviors, it absolutely feels culty, religious-esque, however, you know, whatever sort of equivocal language you may or may not want to use, because Taylor Swift has fully participated in creating a sort of, you know, Bible-esque body of lyrics that people pick apart like verses and interpret and lead their lives by.

She's created a cinematic universe of aesthetics, you know, and it is no coincidence that people use language like mother to refer to her.

Now, you know, using terms like mother or, you know, daddy or even aunt to refer to celebrities does have its roots in ballroom culture where you would have, you know, your chosen family, your mother in communities where, you know, the family you were born into might not have been able to provide the parenting or mothering or sort of familial support that was necessary.

So that sort of, you know, chosen family idea has been adopted in ways that are not problematic and ways that are problematic by stand communities.

And so in one sense, it's a bit, in one sense, it's a joke, but in another sense, it's not a joke, because I actually did find some research to support the argument that I made in that first chapter of The Age of Magical Overthinking, suggesting that celebrity stands that were most inclined towards stalking tendencies tended to be those who lacked what were so-called positive stressors from their real-life parental figures and communities.

And so they would focus on these surrogate mommies and this sort of uncanny, fictionalized drama in place of those real life challenges, say your mom, you know, telling you that like you have, you cannot quit the violin.

You have to go to orchestra practice.

It's going to be good for you.

Or like your mom challenging you to, you know, repair that relationship with a friend when you wanted to cut them out, stuff like that.

So I found, interestingly, that there was this sort of connection between religiosity, celebrity fandom, and a profound lack of adequate mothering.

Wow.

So maybe when they call Taylor Swift mother, it's like, there's truth or at least empathy that I can give them for putting her on the mother pedestal.

I mean, if the mother pedestal is empty, then.

Yeah, no, totally.

And like, I can easily see that if you are not someone whose relationship with your mother, let's say, is nurturing enough, you might look for that type of support and validation and nurturing in places that fundamentally can never fulfill you because they're parasocial.

We just keep segueing so nicely, Amanda.

This leads to the next part of my outline, loneliness.

Here is where not only do I have to give empathy and understanding and, you know, perhaps a warm hug to stands if they all accept it from me, but also an admission.

Amanda,

I

had a Stan account.

No.

For whomst?

I know.

That's the question, right?

Because if I made one now, it would most certainly be Britney Spears.

But as a child, I had a little monster stan account.

Oh, wow.

Which is Lady Gaga, if you're, you know, living under a rock.

I can see that easily.

Well, so this was the thing.

I was probably 12 years old, which means this was 13 years ago.

It was in the early days of Twitter.

Lady Gaga had just come out with Born This Way.

And I remember that because I clung to that album.

Couldn't imagine why as a closeted queer kid.

I remember one summer making a stan account.

And I actually remember the username and I looked it up when I was writing down notes for this episode and it's not there anymore.

So I guess I deleted it at some point or maybe Twitter got rid of it because it was inactive for so long.

But I was a closeted preteen gay boy.

I did not have a lot of friends in real life.

And I knew someone from summer camp, actually, who had a stan account for Lady Gaga.

And I was like, oh, I'm going to do that too.

And I remember immediately, and you know, I had it with the profile picture was a picture of Lady Gaga and everything was like all of the different born this way photo shoots and we were streaming her songs and we were like, The Edge of Glory, stream the Edge of Glory right now, you know, or actually, it was probably by the Edge of Glory because I don't, I don't know if Spotify was really a thing yet, but I remember being on my, you know, iPod Touch or whatever it was then, like constantly.

And I was like checking, and I was like, I was like doing like follow for follow with all of the other Lady Gaga Stan accounts.

And it did, for a brief moment in time, fill like a real void for me where I needed connection with other people.

And I wasn't getting that because I didn't, because people were not nice to me

at school.

So I want to mention here too, that like, I think it's, it's hard to ever know exactly who's behind all of these Stan accounts, but I think it's safe to say that a lot of them are young, queer people.

Who else famously obsesses over pop stars in this way?

I think the loneliness I felt as a preteen, like I'm not envious of people that age now because I think loneliness has only gotten worse, especially since 2020.

I was reading a piece by Nicole Cardis in Salon.

She wrote, According to the May 2021 American Perspective Survey, Americans have fewer close friendships than they did in the past.

They talk to their friends less than before, and they rely less on their friends for support.

Could it be that stand culture is the result of us replacing in-person friendships with the mirage of celebrity ones?

In other words, are we filling the gaps with celebrities because we're actually lonely?

And that resonates with me on a personal level.

Oh, definitely.

Oh, definitely.

I mean, not to quote Brittany Mahomes.

What's her name?

We need to heal our childhood wounds.

No, but like, honestly, let me quote a different actual icon: that being Elle Woods.

Happy people don't shoot their husbands.

And like, really resourced folks who are like immersed in IRL community are probably not quite as prone to engaging in the worst end of celebrity worship or the most deleterious end because they don't need to.

Now, that is not to say that like if you feel isolated in your community and so many people do in a way that is totally outside of your control, that you should like avoid fandom because you're afraid you might, you know, fall down the rabbit hole.

I don't mean that at all.

But, you know, I talk about this a little bit when I discuss cults in everyday life.

There are certain signs you can look to to know if the particular corner of the internet that you're in might be getting a little too cultish for comfort.

Like if you really aren't allowed to express any kind of critique or pushback, if you will be censured for having one foot out the door, like if you're a little monster and a Swifty, you know, there should be room for having an identity that is more complex and multifarious than the identity of like just the perfect Swifty or just the perfect, you know, Barb or whatever it may be.

But the, you know, the example that you brought up from your childhood also made me think of like specifically Charlie XCX's fandom.

I don't know if you're familiar with the example of, you know, folks sort of dehumanizing Charlie XCX by, and by folks I mean hardcore Charlie's Angels, her biggest stands.

They would dehumanize her by bringing sort of like unseemly props for her to sign in meet and greets from poppers to, you know, sex toys to, in one case, a vial containing the ashes of one stand's dead mother going back to the mothering.

And so many of these sort of like extreme and ritualistic stands were once little queer kids because Charlie XCX is known for having like a very gay fandom, a very gay white male fandom.

And I have like incredible empathy.

There's no ex there's no excuse for using violent language.

And it's not like, you know, just because someone tweeted something horrible about you, but they also identified as gay in their Twitter bio, they're somehow absolved.

Like that's not the case whatsoever.

But I find that like, if I can be more compassionate toward what someone who's clearly very lonely is going through and more skeptical of my own behavior, that can be like a good place to like reroute the conversation.

I have been reading currently actually Naomi Klein's book, Doppelganger.

Something she talks about a lot, which I mentioned in my episode previously about the wellness to alt-right pipeline, is that sometimes people have correct feelings, but their feelings are pointed in the wrong direction and oftentimes exploited by nefarious groups or movements.

And so the example she cites is that people have distrust in what is an increasingly surveillant technology that's ever present in all of our lives through phones and cameras and smart speakers and Siri.

But that valid concern gets exploited by people who are like, all of your information is going to be put in the vaccine QR code and it's, the vaccines are going to be, you know, used to turn you into like sheep communists, you know?

And so that's why you shouldn't get vaccinated.

Yeah.

And it is kind of a distinctly American thing too, I will say, because we happen to be an exception among wealthy nations in that, you know, despite having so much money in the American coffer, we don't have adequate social support systems in almost any way, you know, and that's becoming increasingly true when I think about, you know, the barriers to accessing health care to women and to queer folks.

It's increasingly valid to mistrust the powers that be, which is also a phrase that the crunchy dollar right pipeline has weaponized.

It is increasingly valid to mistrust them.

And because we have this like every man for himself bootstrap your way to success no one's gonna help you but you general american attitude that like paves the way for potentially ill-intentioned figures to come in and be like the government's not gonna save you i will

and i think like what distinguishes a fan community from say an Andrew Tate style community is because like Andrew Tate would be the cult leader, right?

Like, he's actively participating and egging his followers on in a material and direct and violent way.

Taylor Swift is such a little mystery.

Like, it's always hard to tell exactly how much she's purposefully egging on her fans.

And that's like, I would call it a beige flag.

But it is different.

It is different from, you know, the groups where there is one singular charismatic leader, so to speak.

Yeah, it definitely is.

It definitely is.

I guess in conclusion, I have empathy for the stands.

Wish death on me though they may, I have empathy for them and I want something good, something fun, something productive for them.

Where do we go from here?

Oh gosh.

I really wish I had some super pithy piece of wisdom to leave us all with.

I don't know.

I mean, unfortunately, I learned while researching the age of magical overthinking that it is really, really hard to change other people's minds due to all of the cognitive biases each of us have at play in there.

In fact, one of the most disheartening stats that I learned while researching the book was that even an increase in science literacy does not help people become savvier at distinguishing real facts.

It just helps people become better at using science to defend their existing beliefs.

So like, it's a little chalked, you know, but I just keep coming back to this sentiment that we're actually much better at changing our own minds.

And if we can kind of like lead by example with self-skepticism and, you know, sort of, yeah, I guess like taking steps like this not to, not to be, you know, as sort of like tribalistic as we might feel pushed to be by people who are like positioning us as enemies, if we can extend empathy, if we can open up conversations, that's the only thing that's been able to help me get through this particularly culty time.

I could leave with this sentiment.

So, on Sounds Like a Cult, we categorize every cult of the week as either a live your life, a watcher back, or a get the fuck out.

So, like, I remember, spoiler alert, we said that Trader Joe's was a live your life.

Um, Purity Rings were a get the fuck out.

There are a lot of different types of watcher backs, from like soul cycle to like theater kids.

And I would actually, I would call

Swifty's a hardcore watch your back.

Yeah, I would say it's sort of like a watch your back sun, a watch your back moon, and a get the fuck out rising.

So you gotta, no, maybe I would say it's a watch your back sun, it's a live your life moon, and it's a get the fuck out rising.

So it's a combination of all three.

And if we can have a sense of levity about that, it'll also help us get through.

There we go.

The astrological warning signs of being a Swifty.

Thank you so much, Amanda Montel.

Thank you so much.

Amanda Montel, thank you so much for being here today.

Where can people get more of you?

Get more into cults question mark.

Thank you so much.

This was a total honor and a pleasure.

And I'm just so impressed by what you do at this show.

So if folks want to keep up with me, my books are available wherever books are sold.

My most recent one is called The Age of Magical Overthinking, and I talk more about celebrity worship in there.

And I also have two podcasts called Sounds Like a Cult and Magical Overthinkers.

Sounds like a cult comes out wherever you find podcasts on Tuesdays and Magical Overthinkers comes out every other Wednesday.

And if you have made it this far and are about to,

I don't know, message me some new creative way to kill myself that people have not yet discovered, then go with God.

I can take it.

I wish the best for you.

And if Taylor Swift is the Messiah, I hope she's coming soon to save us all from the hell that we're living through.

I have nothing else to say after this experience.

I love you all.

Thank you so much for being here.

If you liked the show, I don't know, send it to your Swifty cousin or

don't.

I don't know.

I'm going to run in the other direction for now.

I'm going to lock my doors and shut my windows.

And until next time, stay foodie.