Episode 15: Taylor Swift

His persona and hers are both so rigorously unoffensive.

It's like being against literally like the football player and the cheerleader.

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

Whether we like it or not, I lost my train of thought here.

Sorry.

Well, we're in bed with the right.

That's what it is.

Sorry.

So, background is:

fun fact about me.

I'm functioning on three hours of sleep, and I have just run after 20 very sweet but very energetic toddlers for three hours.

So, my brain is fried.

And Muarazik, let us please jump on the recording right now and capture this comedy gold.

This is amazing.

Adrian is usually one of the most put together, competent, responsible people in the room, which is why I am just really delighted to see him finally weak enough

to be defeated by my powers.

I mean,

I think you give me too much credit, but I do acknowledge that I'm not usually, I'm an unusual state of trash fire today.

And so let's fucking do this.

And I should say that this is a topic that, you know, like podcast hosts love being like, oh, I kept myself pure for the episode.

Like, I really don't know very much about this.

I've absorbed all this secondhand, and you're going to walk me through it.

And I have every

suspicion that it's going to be stupid as all get out, but I don't know the details.

This is pretty stupid.

And what we're talking about today is kind of a profound trash fire, even by the standards of right-wing gender politics, because today we are talking about the conservative commentariat's decision to antagonize and advance advance conspiracy theories about a little lady named Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swift.

So, have you heard of Taylor Swift?

Do you know Taylor Swift?

I've been told that, you know, haters are going to hate, hate, hate, hate.

But she prefers to shake, shake, shake.

So I'm guessing it sounds like she has a lot to shake off right now.

I also believe it.

involves a man that everyone seems to know and I do not, from which I deduce that he's a sports person of some kind.

Yeah, this is going to be hilarious because a lot of this story is based on the interior politics of the National Football League, which is something that neither

nor I know anything about.

So let's set the scene a little bit.

Taylor Swift, in case you haven't heard of her, she's probably the most famous person in the world.

I'd say, you know,

not ringing a bell.

You know, she's one of the last items of monoculture.

You know, it's like her, it's Beyonce,

and, you know, it's like literally Joe Budden.

Like, those are maybe the three human beings who everybody in the world more or less knows who they are.

And Taylor Swift is coming off of a very, very big year.

The era's tour.

Yes.

She put on this massive worldwide tour.

I think it's technically still going on

in which she sort of played a concert that composed her entire catalog, which is at this point about a 15

or 20-year career.

And she,

you know, is performing to like 70,000 people per night in the United States.

She is wildly, wildly popular.

She's a pop musician.

And, you know, she is kind of famous.

for dating.

She dates, has dated many millennial and Gen X male celebrities.

Yeah, and then often written songs about them, right?

That's the other thing she's famous.

Yes, she's also, she is a mega star who, unusually for somebody as famous as she is, she tends to write most of her songs herself.

And she has cultivated her fan by like creating this.

persona in her music that is very first person driven in which she sort of like divulges like kind of an unusual amount about the you know interior experience of her celebrity life right i was trying to think of how i would characterize her music and it's a lot like there's a lot of jokes in it it's it's like kind of got a posture of self-deprecating knowing humor a lot which makes her very different from somebody like beyonce whose affect is very very different right in approach to um like sort of her relationship with her audience right i would say yeah a typical beyonce song has the subtext fuck you i'm awesome yeah yeah like and taylor swift is more like this may have partly been my fault that this thing fell apart like i think of that i know that song blank page right where like she basically seems to suggest that she she may be at fault at some relationships not working out.

Yes, she's very self-conscious or performs self-consciousness a lot, a lot of self-deprecating humor.

It kind of reminds me of like a voiceover sitcom

a little bit.

Remember like Malcolm in the Middle or like there would be like Fresh Off the Bill.

Yes, yes.

And there's a,

it's kind of like that because her songs are also quite, I should preface this that I like Taylor Swift.

This is somebody who like tends to attract a lot of ire just because of how famous she is.

I like her music.

I think it's fun.

But like she does have like four songs and they're sort of episodic and they're structured the same way.

And they sort of repeat and she'll like fill in these templates and make a new song.

And it reminds me of a sitcom that way.

It's like it's kind of the same 30 minutes once a week, but it's three minutes and she comes out with like one album every year.

So that's Taylor Swift, mega star, mega famous.

And what she really is,

because she is so famous, because she is a monoculture, because she is something that is consumed really by women, but by more or less every woman in America, She has become a stand-in for white womanhood itself, right?

That's what we have to understand about Taylor Swift.

I also have a thing about Taylor Swift because she and I are the exact same age almost to the day.

Oh my God.

Yes.

Taylor Swift and I are exactly contemporaries.

Enjoy birthday parties.

Yeah, I mean, I don't like pointing this out because, you know, I think Taylor Swift might be doing a little bit better.

So I would prefer if she had had a little bit of time.

But hey, not everybody.

Half of America is not mad at you.

Oh, wait, no.

Half of America is also mad at you.

So it's

scratch that.

Yeah, I bet she doesn't have a Prius and a studio apartment.

So, you know.

So, like, that's kind of the background of Taylor Swift.

And this was her mega, mega, mega year, right?

This is Taylor Swift at the absolute height of her powers.

And sort of the other bit of background that you have to know about Taylor Swift is that she has a boyfriend.

Adrian, do you know anything about her boyfriend?

I don't know how to say his last name, but he's a, he's clearly, his first name is Travis, it sounds like.

Is that correct?

Yes, the name is Travis.

How did he say his last name?

Kelsey.

Kelsey,

okay.

Kelsey.

Travis Kelsey.

I love this.

I love talking about American football with this like bean pole of a German at philosophy and literature, Professor Adrian Dow.

Look, no, I mean, like, so I noticed, so, yeah, so he's clearly, you know, I think he wasn't even on like SNL recently.

So like, he's, he's also having a moment alongside her, it sounds like.

And if I'm going to guess, given that we're headed to the Super Bowl, into Super Bowl Sunday, he plays for either the 49ers or the

Chiefs?

Who are they?

He plays for the Kansas City Chiefs.

He is a, he plays, the position he plays is tight end.

My favorite.

Yeah, it does, it does sound like kind of dirty, but it

is a hybrid offensive and defensive position.

So it's a very important position on the team.

Right.

And he is apparently quite good.

And he is also sort of at the height of his career, right?

Right.

And he is a guy who has made himself not just an athlete, but sort of a media star.

So, Travis Kelsey, right?

He was on SNL, right?

Like, I actually have no idea if he was on SNL or not, but that's like the kind of thing he would do.

His main thing is actually that he is a podcaster, as in addition to being a

because the thing you have to know about Travis Kelsey is that he has a brother whose name is, I think, Justin Kelsey, who is a few years older and who is also a professional football player.

So, Travis Kelsey is a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, and Justin Kelsey, who I think is retiring this year, is his older brother

who plays for the Philadelphia Eagles.

And together, they have made themselves

together.

They've made themselves like a

funny duo, right?

Where they have this podcast where the older brother, Justin, plays the wacky, kind of drunk, like silly guy, and Travis plays the bashful straight man.

Taylor Swift broke up with her longtime kind of like sad, limp boyfriend, like a British guy she was dating for many years at the beginning of 2023.

And it had been a long running

kind of a bit, like a joke on Travis Kelsey's podcast with his brother that he had a crush on Taylor Swift.

Oh.

So it was this like, and then she actually wound up, they actually wound up going on a date.

And it was like fun for football fans who had been following Travis Kelsey and listening to his podcast with his brother, where he's like, I have such a crush on Taylor Swift, et cetera.

And then she actually appears at his game, right?

Yeah.

I mean, I have to say, so I think that's very sweet.

On the other hand, like, I'm very worried about like any tear in the parasocial wall that isolates podcasters from real life.

This is, yeah, that's cute every thousandth time, maybe.

Yeah, you know, there is a.

But in this case, it's cute.

I also feel a little like annoyed that a professional athlete has a podcast because I feel like that belongs to those of us who are like physically kind of like uncoordinated and incapable.

I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

You, you have the ball and the running and I'm the one who talks for the living.

And like, this is God has distributed our gifts in this way.

And it's not fair for you to be on my turf.

This is going to be a recurring theme in this episode because there's a few times when people are stealing my lines, right?

Or like sort of stealing my possession.

So the two of them become like what we we kind of term in media, a crossover event, right?

Because they are extraordinarily famous people.

The other thing about Travis Kelsey is that he is famous for a football player, even before he starts dating Taylor Swift.

He's one of the important ones.

And so what it is, basically, is a merger.

of these primarily male and primarily female audiences into this one couple who have just massive, massive, massive, massive market share combined, right?

Yeah, it's as if the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Emily and Paris somehow like had a, had a crossover.

Yeah, it's kind of, yeah.

You're melding two fairly gendered properties.

Very gendered properties, right?

And also, you know, this

leads among football fans to some very interesting emotions, right?

So Taylor Swift, like Travis Kelsey is quite famous and quite rich.

Taylor Swift is much more so, right?

They are both at the peak of their fields, but sort of the magnitudes of their fame and their money and their ability to command attention are also asymmetrical.

And they're asymmetrical in a way that's contrary to what we normally understand as a gendered balance of power in heterosexual relationships, right?

It is not the man, but the woman who's more famous.

Travis Kelsey found like the one woman in the world to date who's more famous than he is.

But she starts performing

what we can see as like

very traditional feminine supportive role, right?

She shows up at his games.

She's wearing his jersey.

She's quite literally cheering him on, you know, and she's embodying the supportive role.

And it feels like in terms of status, like she's slumming it a little bit, right?

She's like going from her pedestal as like maybe the most powerful woman on earth, definitely one of the richest women on earth, and is like sort of becoming somebody who's standing by her man, right?

She's trying to embody this position where she is not the center of attention by cheering him on at the sidelines.

But that's not how media incentives work.

That's how heterosexuality works, but that's not how media incentives work.

So if you are a Kansas City Chiefs fan who's watching at home, suddenly the Sunday night football camera is cutting to Taylor Swift like every couple minutes, every play, every down, you get a cut to show her reaction in the box.

I should say I've watched a fair amount of football matches in my life, but I've never really paid attention to how they're put together.

It's a sport with relatively few audience cutaways to begin with, right?

I mean, like, it tends to be kind of focused on what's because it's such an incredibly busy field.

I feel like I see a lot more cutaways to audience reactions for things like baseball, because, like, honestly, there's 30 seconds you can waste anyway.

Is that right?

So, like, basically, it's also like an unusual presentation for a football game, or would you say there are cutaways?

I feel like at the very end, end, you sometimes see the owner's box where everyone's like starting to spray each other with champagne or something like that, or like Mark Cuban will be sitting somewhere and like, you know, be like either upset or happy or something like that.

But like, sort of like person on the street cutaways, is that a common thing in football?

It depends.

I will say, for when there are celebrities in the stands,

that happens more.

But like the famous courtside pictures are always basketball, right?

Like that's like, oh, here's Al Pacino sitting with Jake Gillenhall at the Nets game or something like that, right?

Like that, that'll be because they're right there.

There's also the fact that football is a sport played in the winter outdoors.

Right.

So I think it tends to attract, you know, when celebrities go to football games, and they do, but they are in boxes that are farther away from the actual players, whereas a celebrity at a basketball game is right next to the player.

That's Jack Nicholson.

Yes, exactly.

So that's one factor.

But, you know, they do, they do cut away.

An arrowhead field where the Kansas City Chiefs, their sort of home stadium, they have a tradition wherein the crowd specifically tries to like jeer and scream and make a lot of noise while the opposing team is trying to strategize while they're on the line so that the opposing team can't hear what they're trying to say to each other.

So that winds up being a

frequent cut in these broadcasts, specifically in Kansas City.

They cut away to the crowd who are all making this loud noise to try and throw the game towards their chiefs.

But, you know, this is kind of a

situation in which

football fans who I'm going to use as a shorthand, like they're men, overwhelmingly, they're men.

Like women watch football.

Football is a massive American cultural product, but the National Football League considers itself by and for men, right?

Right.

And they understand men as their primary viewership and men understand themselves as the primary consumers of football, right?

Now, football has women in and around it.

The sort of like wags characters are, you know, they're famous in like British soccer, but they're also a fixture of American football and basketball.

They tend to be not very like professionally high status women in their own right, right?

Like a wag will be somebody who is a college athlete with the, you know, the guy from the Eagles, or actually one of the Eagles was married to a prominent member of the women's national soccer team for a while.

But that, you know, I think he retired.

I think they both retired.

But, you know, there was, there's status asymmetry between these men and their wives that is very typical.

And so those wives command sort of less attention.

And then there are cheerleaders who are like purely ornamental and, in fact, are often, we know from some investigative reporting, like the subject of sex trafficking, right?

So like, those are women whose status is unquestionably lower than the players and like by sort of proxy that's lower than the audience, right?

And what Taylor Swift's relationship to Travis Kelsey did was inject a higher status woman into this male space where she is commanding attention.

She's also bringing like a lot of young girl fans to football because the like little girls, especially like Gen Alpha, like I'm talking like girls in high school and younger have started to watch Kansas City Chiefs games so that they can see Taylor Swift and see Taylor Swift's boyfriend play, which also means that there's an injection into the fandom.

The number of TikToks recorded in western Missouri just like shot through the roof.

Or like, you know,

I'm sorry, I'm assuming that Arrowhead Stadium is in Missouri, is in the Missouri part of the state.

I believe it's Kansas City, Missouri.

Yeah.

Okay.

Don't quote me on that.

But I think it's more like, you know, the guy, you know, I'm a, I'm a white man and I'm watching my football on Sunday.

And now it used to sort of be this me time or time I spent with my white man friends.

And now my like nine-year-old daughter is at my elbow and she won't shut the fuck up and it's annoying.

I think that's kind of what's happening.

So there is like a substrata of anti-Taylor Swift resentment among this kind of white-leaning, right-leaning sector of American men who are football fans, right?

But for the most part, and I need to emphasize this, like it's a very wholesome story that people are pretty pleased about, right?

Like these are good-looking people who are very successful and seem to like each other, and that is wholesome.

And then

it gets weird.

Yeah, I think this is the part, this is where I started taking notes.

I was like,

So, like, there's kind of like a substrata of like misogynist resentment about this, but it's really not the main thrust.

of this celebrity gossip story, right?

The main thrust of the celebrity gossip story is like, isn't this cute?

Most people are being normal about it.

And then the right wing sort of has a, has a, like a flicker, like you see, like in a movie, like a scary movie when things go wrong and you see like the TV screen sort of like cuts out to static a little bit.

Right.

So a couple of weeks ago, Fox News host Jesse Waters.

starts talking about Taylor Swift.

Friend of the pod.

Yeah.

You know, meaning a huge piece of shit.

Anyway.

Jesse Waters speculates that maybe Taylor Swift is, I'm quoting here, a Pentagon asset.

Yes, a PSYOP or something like that.

This is what first drew my attention to this.

I was like, I'm not a big football watcher.

I am not a big part of the Taylor Swift cinematic universe.

I am, however, an inveterate collector of the most insane shit Fox News says.

So this came on my radar.

I was like, oh.

So this is where I enter the story.

Yes, go on.

Yeah, so that's Jesse Waters as Fox News.

There's also weird comments from Jack Pasobiak.

I might be pronouncing his name.

Yeah, I don't know how to say his name, but yeah, that takes me back.

That guy, where has that guy been?

He, I'm not happy.

He's working, but like, he's self-employed.

He's got like a podcast.

He's got like a YouTube show.

He's in this sort of like right.

He was sort of an early, sort of like one of those semi-celebrity white nationalists that sort of popped up sort of around the Unite the Right rally in 2017 and then kind of disappeared again, right?

He was like, he's of the Milo Yiannopoulos wave, where like the New York Times couldn't fucking stop sticking a microphone in his face until they suddenly stopped doing it or something like that.

Yeah,

he's like

an alt-right

like TV guy.

He does like

YouTube.

He does like Newsmax-y things.

And he's got,

oh, not Newsmax, excuse me.

I just looked it up.

It's O-A-N-N.

O-O-A-N-N.

Yeah, he's a turning point guy.

Looks like he's got a think tank position.

You know, he's like one of these cranks.

According to Wikipedia, it's pronounced Pesobic.

Pesobic.

Yeah, I guess.

Okay, I guess I can do him the courtesy of getting his name right.

Pesobic.

I mean, no, please don't.

No, I mean, you can do, you can get it right while you say that he's like a race.

Also, that we can avoid it.

It's like, what's that woman's name?

Tommy,

Tommy Loren, whose name you're never supposed to get right.

But Jack Pesobic recently went on, he was interviewing Roseanne Barr for some reason.

Oh my God.

It's like a 2016 reunion.

And he

speculated that the Democratic Party and, you know, the nefarious, ill-defined forces of the deep state were going to try and use Taylor Swift as an asset in the 2024 election.

Right.

And then that was sort of picked up again by Vivek Ramaswamy, the erstwhile presidential candidate and conspiracy theorist who speculated, I wonder who's going to win the Super Bowl next month.

He said this in January.

And I wonder if there's a major political endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped up couple this fall.

Just some wild speculation over here.

Let's see how it ages over the next eight months.

So you'll age as well as your candidacy.

Yeah.

I'm not a fan of the word cuck.

I think it like, you know, it re-inscribes a bunch of horrible gendered, you know, stereotypes.

On the other hand, like, if ever there was a person that it was appropriate for, it's Vivek Ramaswamy.

I'm sorry.

I mean, it's just, he, he did the kind of thing that a lot of these guys are doing where he tried to be sort of like diet Trump, but I don't think Vivek Ramaswamy was ever really running for president.

I think he was running to get more

attention.

Yeah, I think he was like running for more YouTube subscribers, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And he is now responding to those incentives by saying a lot of crazy shit, right?

But so, like, this sort of

vibe that Taylor Taylor Swift is an asset for Biden, that perhaps she is even in the more conspiratorial forms of this being like controlled by the Biden campaign in the deep state.

Right.

George Soros, I'm guessing, is somewhere in the background.

He's got to be somewhere in there.

Yeah, he's always, he's a recurring figure, like Forrest Gump.

He's just everywhere in history.

Right.

Yeah.

And so that's kind of a recurring theme.

And it should be said that like Taylor Swift, for as anodyne a figure as she is, she is not a person who is like very strictly apolitical, right?

Yeah, right.

Like, she, she, I sort of picked up on her having vaguely progressive politics, right?

Yes.

Or she's not, she's not cool with reactionaries, I guess, is another way of putting that.

She's, she's a human being.

Well, this is a little bit of Taylor Swift lore that I can fill you in on, which is that when Taylor Swift and I were in our mid-20s, the far right sort of latched onto Taylor Swift, the alt-right that was ascendant

around the 2016 election, around like Unite the Right kind of vibe.

They started proposing her as their like Aryan princess, right?

I mean, fair enough.

She looks, yeah.

She is a

blonde-haired, blue-eyed, exceptionally light white woman.

She's like weirdly tall.

She's like 5'10 or 5'11 or something.

And she's skinny as a rail and she's very beautiful.

And she's very unquestionably white, right?

She is somebody who is

whose image is a useful vessel for this kind of like racist gendered aspiration yeah yeah and she

started voicing very tentatively her kind of blandly liberal political commitments specifically to reject that right right so in 2018 she endorsed a challenger to tennessee senator marsha blackburn the challengers challenge went absolutely nowhere.

So the Taylor Swift endorsement didn't really do him much good.

But

she reasoned in in this endorsement announcement that she

wanted to endorse a Democrat both because of her support for abortion rights and her support for the Violence Against Women Act, right?

So, you know, I am a Democrat for sort of like predictably standard issue feminist commitments, right?

For the absolute basics.

I do not, in fact, think of myself and people like me as objects.

So I have taken the bold step of arranging my politics to reflect that basic belief.

Right, which is like probably kind of a little infuriating for the like alt-right fear that needs her to act as an object, not just like an object of sexual desire, but an object of this sort of like racially gendered aspiration, right?

The things that they want white women to be, the things that they imagine white women will give them in this like sort of racially stratified future, the things that they imagine white women can aspire to be, right?

So, this was a rejection of that, and she subsequently endorsed Joe Biden in 2020.

So, this sort of

churn

of alt-right anti-Swift hate gets exacerbated the last weekend in January.

And there are a couple of things that happened the last weekend in January.

This is the 27th and 28th.

One, the NFL playoffs happen.

in which the Kansas City Chiefs, including tight end and famous boyfriend Travis Kelsey, advance to the Super Bowl.

So they will be playing in the Super Bowl on February 11th against the 49ers, by the way.

I had no idea.

I had no idea that San Francisco's football team was in the playoffs until I got woken up by fireworks.

And I was like, oh, do we see, do we have a football team here?

Well, they play in Santa Clara, right?

So we get the public urination and the parade.

But we don't actually get the traffic.

Maybe not even the parade.

We get the public urination.

They're going to lose because this was the exact same Super Bowl that was in 2020.

2028 Super Bowl was also the Chiefs versus the 49ers,

and the Chiefs won.

And I'm pretty sure they're going to win again because they are a stronger team.

Well, because George Soros

launching a deep spank conspiracy.

The Kelsey, the

Swelsey

conspiracy.

And so I guess we're now.

Wait, is the far right now rooting for

San Francisco 49ers?

The far right has a choice between.

Fellas, is it gay to root for San Francisco?

We have a choice between like a team from Missouri with a racist name

or the San Francisco 49ers.

So that was sort of one

item that maybe like ticked towards this explosion of ire, right?

Is that this high-profile woman is probably going to be physically present and probably getting a lot of attention at the Super Bowl

wherein she will distract from this this like, you know, virility, violence, masculinity festival that it normally is, right?

Not to be like too reductive about it.

Yeah, but I mean, like, I'm sorry, of all the football games in the world, the Super Bowl is really more about the Hyundai ads

and the celebrities.

Like, that is like a very non-purist, right?

I mean, like, I feel like it's, you know, if you're just going to watch some football, like, the Super Bowl has far less than the FDA-approved amount of football in it.

It's a lot of other horseshit.

It's like crypto ads.

Like there's probably more crypto ads than the Super Bowl were until recently than there's like actual like moving the line of scrimmage.

Is there?

For me, the Super Bowl is really about fried foods.

Eating fried foods in the apartment of your friend's boyfriend at a party where they've got the projector playing the game.

Like that is what the Super Bowl is about to me.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think I'm going to do that.

It's going to be really fun.

I'll let you know how that like I'm gonna spend a lot of time thinking about seven layer dip, but that was one thing, right?

Like she's advancing to the Super Bowl.

Oh no.

Yeah.

Those of us who like have this like weird resentment that our like you know weekly masculinity ritual is now dominated by like cuts to this very like high achieving high status woman who we resent because we can't have her, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

So that's one thing, right?

Another thing that happened is that the New York Times broke a story that same weekend that the Chiefs advanced that said that the reported that the Biden campaign is once again seeking Taylor Swift's endorsement.

I have some suggestions for other things the Biden campaign could be sending its time doing, but this is something that they are spending time doing, according to Taylor Swift.

So that was another one.

And then

there was reporting from Rolling Stone that Donald Trump is personally kind of annoyed at how much media attention Taylor Swift is getting, that I suppose he thinks should go to him instead.

That says, he said that, you know, I am more popular than she is.

You know, she's stupid, whatever, right?

So Donald Trump personally dislikes her.

Biden is seeking her endorsement and she's going to the Super Bowl.

We should say for our listeners who might have any doubt, Taylor Swift is much, much more

popular than Donald Trump.

A recent survey, I think that was taken last year and found that a majority of American adults, including both men and women, and including both Democrats and Republicans, identify as Taylor Swift fans.

Something like 44% of American adults identify as Swifties, which strikes me as something that implies a degree of commitment.

Yeah.

There's just, there's just no.

I like her, but I would not call myself a Swifty, so I'm not even in those 44%.

And I like her more than Donald Trump.

I mean, also, we don't have to like guess around for this.

Biden is seeking her endorsement because she's more popular than Joe Biden.

And if you're looking for people who are famously less popular than Joe Biden, we have a pretty good poll from 2020 that suggests it's Donald Trump.

He's less popular than Joe Biden by a couple of million votes.

So that sort of leads to this explosion, right?

There's this confluence of factors in the last weekend of January that puts this crucible of right-wing rage and focuses it onto Taylor Swift.

And I think this is really interesting because it shows a few things, right?

One is it's sort of part and parcel of this broad 2024 strategy of the Republican Party.

That's not just like an ideological shift that's come like into greater focus over like the past 10 years for them, but it's really like quite explicitly a strategy, which is that they are trying to drum up male voters with misogynist resentment.

This was something that was said on television by Matt Gates the other day, who said that, you know, every time we lose a Karen, we gain a Jose and Jamal, right?

Like sort of articulating in very vulgar terms this Republican Party strategy to compensate for the white women who are there, are losing after Dobbs by courting men of color, particularly black and Latino men.

It's not really working, but it is an explicit gender grievance strategy that they are pitching.

Right.

And it comes on the heels of like a lot of

anger at the success of post-Dobbs abortion mobilization by Democrats, right?

I think, like, don't hold me to this because it's the kind of thing where, like, I will look like I get a cream pie to the face.

But I think that in November, we might see white women finally flip to the Democratic Party.

That's a trend that's been happening very slowly for a very long time.

But I think Dobbs might accelerate it in a way that, you know, the Republican Party doesn't quite have a contingency plan for, besides, you know, like repealing the 19th Amendment.

So they are really leaning hard into misogyny as electoral strategy, both because they're embittered by the women who are abandoning them and their agenda, and also because they think that it is something that they can affirmatively use to attract more male voters.

Yeah.

Well, and I mean, it helps them, I guess, that just by happenstance,

the many court cases currently tripping up Donald Trump are disproportionately, right?

Like have, I mean, sometimes they tend to move women into these kinds of positions in order to hate on them, right?

Like they will like pick the woman in the group, but like that doesn't just seem to be the case.

It is run by, you know, there are a disproportionate number of female prosecutors involved, right?

Like Eugene Carroll just keeps taking him to the cleaners every couple of months, it seems like.

So he is literally getting his clock cleaned by women right now.

And like, and I can imagine that his fans like have responses to that too.

Yeah, you know, there is a degree to which, you know, the legal house of cards under Trump is starting to fall down, right?

So you alluded to the sexual abuse and defamation damages that were awarded to Trump right before the NFL finals,

awarded against Trump to Eugene Carroll, his rape accuser, who says that, and a jury agreed with her, that he attacked and sexually assaulted her in a department store dressing room in 1996.

She was awarded, I believe, $83.8 million by a jury in New York.

You know, there are male judges like Judge Kaplan in New York, who presided over both the Eugene Carroll case and one of Trump's civil fraud cases.

But, But, you know, he's being prosecuted by Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York.

He is being prosecuted by Fonnie Willis, the district attorney in Atlanta, who the right wing has launched a quite gendered attack on in response to

allegations about her sex life.

And Donald Trump is deciding, I think partly out of strategy, but also just partly out of necessity, to make courtroom antics a cornerstone of his campaign, right?

So in the Eugene Carroll defamation damages hearing, he was

speaking over Eugene Carroll's lawyers.

The two who were doing their presentation were both women.

He was speaking over Eugene Carroll while she was testifying on the stand.

He was, you know, sort of storming out theatrically.

And then there was also a

sort of like weird like sexuality contest about the lawyers where Trump fans were like posting this bikini picture of his lawyer Alina Haba who's a like a millennial lawyer right-wing woman who owns a bikini and looks great in it you know and and like that was kind of another um

this is like

all over again right like he has a he has the prettier attorney yeah he's like there oh i'm you know my proxy in court is actually this woman who

can be objectified to serve as a symbol of my virility right and then he's also doing these like domination exercises in the courtroom.

So that's like a gendered element to his sort of like campaign strategy.

And, you know, I think they're, they're really leaning into it on both sides, right?

They're leaning into it in terms of like the affirmative demonstration of Donald Trump's masculinity and the sort of negative harnessing of resentment against like women in the public sphere.

They're doing kind of both sides.

So that's one like sort of bucket of the reason for this Taylor Swift weirdness, right?

Is that Donald Trump has basically a campaign message that is all about these demonstrations of masculine dominance.

And that's been more or less his like implicit message, and he just makes it really explicit.

Like, I feel like he's going to take his dick out.

I mean, that's not a prediction, but you know, like, metaphorically speaking, that's kind of what he's doing all the time.

Yeah.

The other bucket is that the right-wing has really weird media incentives right now, where to a degree, what's happened, the right-wing media is much better funded, right?

Like sort of nonpartisan and left-wing media is completely collapsing and falling apart.

There've been this like massacres of layoffs every quarter for a few years now.

And over the past like a couple of weeks, it's been

particularly brutal.

And that doesn't happen in right-wing media, right?

Like their money keeps coming because they've got these deep-pocketed funders who are investing in this ideological dissemination.

But what they do have in right-wing media in places like Fox News, even like the Wall Street Journal, they've got this like weird new competition

from these upstart, even fringier outlets, places like OANN, oann places like newsmax that are even crazier and then they've got competition from

the like vast landscape of independent cranks on youtube on substack on their podcasts so they are like incentivized the fox newses of the world the jesse waters of the world are incentivized to keep saying crazier and crazier

so that they don't lose their audience to these even crazier fringe outlets.

That's kind of a media incentive that is going against the political incentives of the Republican Party, right?

Which like needs to win an election and can't be too out there.

But to keep the right-wing media's viewership in line, they need to be pretty out there so that they can like maintain those eyeballs.

So that's like a conflict, right?

Because the other thing that we should say is that this is like very weird and putting people off.

Most people are like pro Taylor Swift.

I think most people have like, you know, pretty good feelings about Travis Travis Kelsey.

Like, sort of role he plays in the Taylor Swift side presentation of their relationship, which is the kind that's like being presented to me as a millennial woman, is that he's like her kind of dumb, adoring boyfriend.

He's like, he's big, he's stupid, he's like good looking, and he's sort of like mentally gentle to her in this way that like doesn't challenge her domination in the outside world, but is kind of like wholesome, right?

So like his persona and hers are both like so rigorously unoffensive.

It's like being against like literally like the football player and the cheerleader or like, you know, Mickey Mouse or like, you know, a teddy bear and a Barbie doll.

Well, it reflects two things, right?

Like on the one hand, Taylor Swift's identification with, let's say, Biden and liberal causes is that like part of what this reflects is that like what has become the mainstream of that party and what's become the mainstream of that movement is just a bunch of freaks, right?

That like most Americans don't recognize themselves in that.

And, like, like, the number of celebrities that'll sign on to them is like, it's basically Roseanne Barr.

Like, you're, you know, you're like, sorry, mate.

Like, you're kind of stuck with her.

Like, you're not going to get like this,

nice millennial lady being like, yeah, take away my rights.

And like, also, like, Jews are controlling the money supply, right?

Like, they're not going to do that.

It's like, you know, like back when it was like, oh, lower taxes, like fiscal responsibility.

I could imagine a celebrity being like, I don't have any problem being associated with this.

But, like, people are like, no, I'm not, I'm sorry.

Like, you shoot up pizza parlors because of some cockamamie theory like why like it's it's just like you you will have less you have fewer and fewer celebrities basically and that's kind of what they're reacting to that like everyone they see on tv is basically like you guys are kind of wild you guys you guys are kind of bizarre because like spoiler alert you're kind of bizarre right they're getting too weird there used to be this meme on the internet that was like don't say what you really think because you're scaring the hoes.

The hoes, which is like not a phrase I use, but it's what I keep thinking of they can't help themselves.

Yeah, and they're scaring the normies.

They're scaring the people who should be their constituency.

And this is something you can see a little bit in some like mainstream Republican or like, quote unquote, what counts for mainstream Republican like frustrations with the anti-Taylor Swift turn.

So, like, Ross Duthot, friend of the pod, had a like very funny and very revealing tweet, and then a column that he wrote about his tweet, which is basically like, you know, it doesn't matter that these people are liberals.

I should mention also that Travis Kelsey is, I think he's like pretty apolitical, but he did take the vaccine and was public about having take the vaccine and did like a commercial for Pfizer about like, you guys should all go get take the vaccine and blah, blah, blah.

So like they don't, they also don't like him personally for that.

See, that's, that's his idea, right?

If prevention,

if disease prevention is like, makes you one of the enemies, like, yeah, you gotta have most of the enemies, bro.

Like, that's like, you're out there.

You're out there.

But Ross Duthat's point was like, these are, just because these people are like maybe personally liberal doesn't mean that we're conservatives should reject the quote unquote primal archetype, right?

And the quote unquote primal archetype is big, strong, masculine man, white, white woman.

He's like, what we need them to do is marry and breed.

And I think that brings us to the third bucket.

of Taylor Swift anxiety, which is...

She's too old to have kids, isn't it?

She's 34.

That's so that's something that they bring up a lot.

They're like, so when Taylor Swift turned 30, there was a lot of like right-wing speculation about the declining quality of her eggs, her remaining eggs, and how that, you know,

like these guys cannot be normal.

And, you know, this is, I think it's been like a slow burn on the creepy Taylor Swift resentment by the right-wing incel.

brigade for a while.

Right.

So this is another thing that I think is really like frustrating them about Taylor Swift is because she is an avatar of millennial womanhood, right?

She is like the most famous millennial there is.

She is famously unmarried and she doesn't have any children.

And this resentment is coming at a time when

the right wing is really starting to freak out after this post-pandemic reckoning with...

you know, the failures of marriage and it's overburdening on women and mothers, this post-Dobbs reckoning with just how invasive and exhausting and uncomfortable and dangerous pregnancy really is.

And, you know, this economy that has allowed a lot of women to be independent so that they can choose to opt out of marriage and motherhood, these things that they are increasingly seeing as unappealing, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Plus, there might be some anxieties there about, I don't know, about how there might be a,

I'm just speaking about like a replacement of

people having children with other people having children who they have less good associations with.

I mean, like, who could possibly say whether that's in the background for any of these columns?

Yeah, like Taylor Swift and the section of millennials who are most interested and willing, and interested, willing, and able to like avoid marriage and motherhood

are white.

You know, this is like a white middle class phenomenon.

Exactly.

Not exclusively, but you know, in large part.

And those are the women who, you know, the Ross Duthots of the world really want to breed.

Yeah.

And so there's been this kind of anxiety that the right has about the family, right?

There's been a lot of like sort of structural contradictions in the family, in the family form, in the marriage model that have been exposed like really vividly over the past like five years and that have failed to persuade the women who can no longer be forced.

Right.

And that is, I think, what Taylor Swift represents, like the possibility to opt out.

So even as she is frankly opting in, like this is a person who, you know, we could talk about the Galers, but I think she's about as heterosexual as anybody has ever been.

I think she's like maybe our like avatar of heterosexuality, right?

Right.

She's no, she's no case to.

No, um, she is somebody who is like not like positioning herself.

as opposed to these structures, right?

But they see her as somebody who could reject them, who could reject the family life, the gender role model that they are proposing.

Yeah, it's the queerness of spinsterdom, right?

Like there are women who are not queer-coded, but they become queer with time because they opt out of the maturation process that compulsory heterosexuality is supposed to set you on.

And right?

Like it's like these cool aunts you have, like where you're not sure, like, are they doing it or is it just like they no longer need men, right?

And like, she's, I guess, at 34, Jesus Christ, for them, she's on their way to that.

Yeah.

And so this also brings me to something that I wanted to talk to you about, which is that a few of these guys have been like, look, Taylor Swift, I'm going to try and find the tweet because it's

this weird podcaster, Owen Benjamin.

Owen Benjamin, I guess.

I have that here.

He's like, yeah, you read it.

So Owen Benjamin Ford context is, he's exactly my age, it turns out, almost, a sort of podcaster.

stand-up comedian in the loosest sense of the word and kind of uh also is he owan already what is he no he's um i think he's like on on the daily wire or something like that he has some kind of like he's a all-right guy okay so anyway so here he is this tweet is from january 30th 2024 has 1.1 million views because fuck you elog excellent yeah and then it's a big picture of taylor swift in lighting that i'm guessing is supposed to be unflattering she looks amazing

but i guess it's like it's kind of sharp so like you can see that like i don't know her skin does that thing that skin does under like very strong lighting and then it says, 34 years.

Like, you know.

Oh, you know what he did?

He Googled Taylor Swift age.

Oh.

And that was what, and that is a screenshot from what came up when he did it.

Oh, my God.

So, so it says, why would a rich, famous guy marry a 34-year-old woman?

That's already good.

If you started immediately, you might be able to have two kids.

And she's publicly had sex with a ton of guys.

Okay, this is the sort of low value stuff, isn't it?

Despite her wealth, she's very low quality.

Oh, there it is, low quality for any successful male.

just seems weird and almost like he's a gay guy why would a successful man want a middle-aged woman who's always on tour is it could it be because he's gay i mean fellas i i mean this is when it showed up on my radar again i was like this is awesome

why is it awesome tell me about it so because it's just like it's this form of communication of political communication from these hyper masculine and this is a big alt-right thing right like partly because it's all through YouTube and through all these channels where they're where their audience frankly hasn't had a whole lot of sex yeah where they like twist themselves into these weird pretzels where suddenly it's like isn't sex with women kind of gay and you're like okay like say more about that right like so that's beautiful and then this whole like weird kind of low value system it really kind of it becomes this i mean like what's scary is that apparently a lot of young men are going in for this right and especially you know the teens and whatever like that is scary like the andrew tate disciples etc etc but like it is on the face of it absurd right because it's like this value system by any value measure of any value system taylor swift is a bit of a catch for just about any person on this planet you may need to recalibrate your your value system if being with her is somehow like suspect right it's a little bit like you know you're marrying you know the queen of england and people are like feels like a step down it's like

i don't know i feel like i'm gonna have more castles than I did before, right?

Like, it's just,

it shows like how these kind of online swamps create these kind of systems that are internally kind of consistent, right?

Like, they are like a lot of the creeps and weirdos we've been reading, right?

Like, Weininger does this kind of thing.

Nietzsche can sound like this.

Schopenhauer certainly sounds like this, right?

He's like, that's the wrong hip size, right?

Who the fuck made Arthur Schopenhauer boss, right?

And they decided what the hip size had to be, but like the skull measurers the you know the evo psych guys the dilbert dude right like it's got this sort of sheen of scientificity but it only barely covers that what it is is like absolute pure and unalloyed lunacy right yeah i'm glad you bring up the this like lineage intellectually of how these guys are getting to this idea that

fellas is a gay to have sex with Taylor Swift because from my lineage from like a radical feminist perspective, right?

We're like, I'm decoding a lot of

masculinities, like Trump masculinities, right?

And

to his, you know, I guess credit, maybe, or at least it's notable that Trump himself is not the mousepiece of this.

It's, you know, people who are taking cues from what he's doing in private or maybe trying to impress him.

But, you know, it's not Trump going in for this, but I decode

Trump like masculine sexuality as being kind of like borish libertine sexuality, wherein masculinity is proved via the sexual domination of women, right?

Their domination, their humiliation is what makes me a man.

And that's kind of what you see if you're like taking, as I often do, the sort of like Andrea Dworkin approach to coding, like men's behavior.

And it won't lead you astray that often, right?

But it cannot lead you to, fellas, this is a gay to have sex with Taylor Swift.

That's this other more like fascist intellectual lineage that understands sex with women not as something by which men can like sort of dominate, control, humiliate women, and thereby prove themselves as men.

It almost like proceeds from

a fear of women and a fear of contamination by women, right?

Like contamin, like proximity to women, even in this like masculine-coded activity of fucking them, can be seen as like implicating you.

That's right, because you might have to travel afterwards.

You might have to have conversations.

You might watch a Taylor Swift concert with her.

Yeah, and I mean, like, the other thing, of course, is this is a form of controlling women of systematization, right?

To sort of say, oh, I understand women better than they could ever understand themselves, right?

I can, like, right.

Wasn't it this weird sort of stacey system among the incels and whatever, right?

Like, there's this kind of, this kind of absolute need to like over-theorize, right?

Like, the thing that you can't do is like ask a woman what she might do or want.

Like, you need to be the expert for them, right?

Like, like the pickup artists are all about this, right?

Like, it's basically, for I think for a lot of pickup artists, it would be kind of gay to have a woman be like, hey, you're actually kind of interesting.

I'm going to go home with you.

Right.

It's like, no, you have to trick her.

Right.

Like even if she might go, might be like, hey, you're not that bad looking.

And honestly, I'm, I wouldn't mind.

But like, no, no, no.

Like, you have to work your system to like pick them up.

Right.

Like, it seems to me.

It's about kind of projecting knowledge onto women and sort of imagining domination that way, right?

Because it's often like behavior that like, if experienced IRL will lead to the absolute absence of sex, right?

With anyone but like the most delusional, desperate, or misinformed.

And famously, like these are not spaces.

Like they're all like, why were women data?

It's like, I don't know, man.

Like, like, check out anything you've ever said, tweeted, or written, right?

Like, that would give you a first five million clues, right?

But like, so there is this kind of like control through

knowledge, right?

Which is, which is also like a super old misogynistic trope, right?

Like, it's men's job to understand women better than they understand themselves.

But here it becomes almost this like Kabbalistic thing, right?

Where it's like it's a system where you're like, I'm sorry.

So like, what are we doing here?

Like, it's very obscure, right?

And it's a line of thought whereby, like, frankly, rape becomes not just acceptable, but kind of the only acceptable way to have sex, right?

There cannot be mutuality.

of desire.

And I wonder if there's something about like being seen by women and

interpreted by women that is

anathema here, because like this is like you mentioned earlier, this is like a

subset of viewership, these like sort of online right-wing misogynist communities that are producing these kinds of like discourses and lines of thought.

They're not people who seem to know a ton of women, right?

Maybe they're mothers, you know, they're not people who seem to be like dating very much.

And there's something about the idea of a woman like assessing them at all regardless of what she what she finds when she makes that assessment that is like communicating with other women about you also uh famously something they don't like ask me how i know um

but you know it's a uh it's a fear of being seen right which of course like women sort of like also struggle with we have to sort of like reconcile ourselves to the system of being surveilled and assessed like very early but like now this is something where you know economic conditions have made it so that like men might also have to subject themselves to like a desiring and assessing gaze.

And that's like something they're really not fans of.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway, we've gotten really into the weeds about Taylor Swift.

Do you have any final thoughts or closing arguments?

Yeah, I mean, I thank you for taking me down this rabbit hole because I did see sort of like some of the highlights of this discourse.

I'm like, what is happening right now?

It's so fascinating to think about.

It is an interesting snapshot of masculinity here in the sense that like, this kind of conspiratorial conspiracy, you know, you and I, I think, as gender scholars tend to think that patriarchy has really strong reserves of support in the population.

And you and I got to hang out with Professor Anita Hill last week, right?

Like, the recalcitrance, the ability of patriarchy to strike back is really just like this constant.

But then I think one sometimes forgets that, like, while there is a kind of patriarchy that can sort of camouflage itself as just quote-unquote common sense, as like you know the way of things have always been as tradition there is always also this kind of whacked out like prong of it where it's just like i'm sorry what right like uh that just kind of you know it's sort of perfectly teetering between the demonic and the absolutely hilarious and i i hope i didn't make too light of this like this is these are troubling people like it is definitely not a surprise that like this is basically a retread of like our 2016 2017.

i mean the fact that you mentioned the word normies right like it's a word i haven't heard for a while but like it was everywhere with that angela nagel book like in 2016 17 right like jack prosobi like i hadn't thought about since like 2017 like i'm surprised milo hasn't come out of the woodwork yet right like didn't like didn't tommy lauren do something about that

yeah it's like it was like a total like it was a total reunion of like the this kind of bullshit from like 2016 17.

it has conduits it has ways of persisting and one place i do think it persists very strongly is TikTok, is YouTube.

We're at Clayman now, sort of going through a bunch of stuff, as you know, a bunch of videos about the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial, and like a whole lot of that shit is basically sort of skull measuring to McGee, right?

Like, where it's like, you know, like you can see her eyes are going there, or she's looking like that, right?

Like, and it's this like physiognomy that, like, you know, sort of was briefly popular among the alt-right and then kind of people just kind of forgot about.

But like, these things have a nasty way of persisting in our online spaces, right?

Especially, as you say, because of these perverse incentives for the media ecosystem, right?

That like if it's not utre enough for TikTok, you can put it on your YouTube channel or whatever and monetize it there.

And like, it's just waiting there for the underinformed, the bored, or the terminally adolescent to discover it and turn it into their life philosophy.

Yeah, I think, I think it might be one, I mean, this might be an optimistic note to end on, is that I think one reason

that the right might be so weird is that, you know, they do rely on, as you said, it's like an internally consistent but kind of hermetically sealed, like logical worldview that needs to be continually reanimated with these like minor outrage cycles, right?

And that this is getting weirder and more alienating and also kind of repetitive at the same time.

I think it indicates that they're kind of running out of juice.

Repetitive and arcane, right?

Like, we have not spoken since, you know, Meatball Ron himself suspended his presidential campaign, RIP Meatball Ron.

But Ron DeSantis' campaign, like, had a terminal case of being too online, right?

Like, he was always name-checking whatever he saw on X, whatever he saw on in the conservative echo chamber.

And, like, it turns out even Republican primary voters, right?

who, you know, no offense are probably, you know, among the freakier people in this country, right?

Like, were like, what the fuck are you talking about?

Like, this feels like work like i need to like how much do i need to know in order to understand what this is a reference to right he'd have these like jokes where it's like i'd like end up going down like 20 minute google and wikipedia like holes and be like i think this is what this is about right like and like it would be these like grievances from like 2016 where like like an ad featured a like trans person in the background or whatever and like it's just you know you're like what the fuck like who has time for all this shit And like, I think people just like bounce off of it because they're like, I mean, I feel vaguely mad about what you're telling me, but I don't understand what I'm actually yelling about.

Yeah, I think this brings us nicely maybe to a place to land, which is what I was saying earlier, that the right wing is kind of stealing the left's bit.

This is a point that

John Gans made in his newsletter, the writer John Gans, really, I mean, a smart guy.

And he was like, listen, esoteric decoding of mass culture that other people sort of like anodynely accept, and the finding of like obscure, nefarious meanings in it.

He's like, no, no, no, that's our thing.

That's a left-wing pursuit.

And this is why I'm like, you know, I did put on my tinfoil hat with you a little bit talking about, you know, dominance versus like almost separatist masculinities here.

But this is stuff that most people are just kind of enjoying.

Most people are like, well, you know, Taylor Swift is pretty and her songs are catchy and Travis Kelsey runs fast and he seems to like her and isn't that lovely?

And you know what?

You get, sometimes you got to be normal.

So I want to congratulate anybody who made it to the end of this episode.

You are definitely the most normal of them all, our beloved listeners.

The one man who listens to this podcast.

Thank you so much.

And Adrian, thank you for coming along on this journey with me.

Thank you so much.

In Bed with a Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Kalthis.