Out of the loop

I feel like there’s also been an upswing in anti-Taylor Swift stuff in general. It’s been growing since she started her most recent tour and re-recording older albums where she doesn’t own rights to the original recordings, which has lead to her dominating pop music radio stations and being named TIME magazine’s Person of the Year. The issues of ticket scalping from her tour publicly angered her and led to rumbles of a potential congressional investigation of Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s virtual monopoly over concert venues (which is long overdue). But the backlash really seemed to pick up this fall after she started dating a player in the National Football League and attending as many of his games as her schedule allowed. As one of the top-earning celebrities on earth currently, the cameras would often show her reaction after he had a good play, perhaps more often than they would if it was another family member. She would also be shown again a few other times during the games. I don’t know if it’s really happening, but there have been some reports that Taylor Swift fanatics who would not normally watch football have started watching in hopes of seeing her. All of this seems to have made a lot of people mad, but particularly a segment of conservative men for some reason. There was a conspiracy theory going around shortly before her boyfriend’s team played in the league’s championship game that the whole thing was rigged and that after his team won she would give a speech endorsing Joe Biden for president (never mind that the boyfriend’s team had won the championship last year and four years ago and lost the championship three years ago, making them a dominant contender in recent years). It’s been strange to me how many people I’ve seen who are very vocal about climate change being a hoax are suddenly posting about how much Taylor Swift uses her private jet and how bad the emissions from it are, making them strange bedfellows with climate change believers who also oppose private jet use in general. I’ve also started seeing memes from conservative people about how much they hate her music and would never want to listen to her performance, even though I’m pretty sure some of these people were fans of hers back from her debut as a country music singer-songwriter up until fairly recently, even after she transitioned to mainstream pop. I find the whole thing very strange, like out of 1984 when the war opponent would suddenly flip and everyone insisted they’d always hated the new opponent and loved the new ally, their old opponent.