Let me get this straight. nnWhy is Taylor Swift the most popular performer on the planet? Because a wokeness-contaminated Pentagon enlisted her in a grand psychological operations plot.
Key to its success was the Biden administration ordering the NFL to raise her profile, assigning hulking Travis Kelce his own psy-op role as her boyfriend. The feds also threatened Patrick Mahomes with one directive: “Throw it to 87.”
Swift now uses a for-show romance to enhance her deep-state platform. Her assignment: Promote Democrats and wokeness. She denounces Donald Trump. She exhorts robot hordes to vote. Bead-braceleted caravans overwhelm polling places.
Really? Really? I have one thing to say to all that:
Sounds like a really good idea.
If the Pentagon hasn’t already carried out this ruse, it should run tape of the Fox Propaganda Channel, listen and learn.
Republicans – and, naturally, Fox Propaganda — are mightily afeared of Taylor Swift.
They have good reason. She has encouraged thousands of her fans to register to vote. She supported Joe Biden in 2020. She will again.
The ravings of America’s misogynist right can only boost her power as a change agent.
If you think Taylor Swift and her joyful flock are Republicans’ only problem, however, you haven’t been paying attention.
Consider Renee Rapp. She’s a fireball. Her singing lit up a recent “Saturday Night Live,” like she does on the big screen in the new musical adaption of “Mean Girls.”
She’s blonde, bold, gorgeous and gay: at 24, proudly lesbian. Coming out? For her, it’s stage-left — nothing to hide. Hear her young audiences and know: Others’ hangups with sexual orientation won’t hurt her career.
It might hurt some politicians’ careers, though.
Republicans, marching to the orders of the religious right and the gun lobby, consider themselves, um, bullet-proof. They think they have a good thing going with their jawboning against wokeness – “woke” another word for celebrating diversity in a world of difference.
They are wrong. They are losing young voters. They are losing female voters. They are losing educated voters. They are losing empathetic voters.
They are also losing Christian voters who think the biblical entreaty to treat others as one would wish to be treated countermands the urge to make pariahs of others based on race, sexual orientation and foreign origin.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson says he is directed by the Bible, but that can’t possibly be true, because he’d exclude LGBTQ people from the graces of Matthew and Luke.
He recently received an award for “Christian courage” from a religious-right group whose president calls LGBTQ people “a cult.”
One cannot overstate how out-of-step this is with young voters.
Red-state Republicans seek to make “trans” a curse word. Meanwhile, wacky “RuPaul’s Drag Race” is one of the most popular shows streaming into Gen Z apartments.
Republican positions offend most young voters: on climate change, on reproductive rights, on voting rights, on doing something — anything — about college debt.
The biggest turn-off to those voters is Donald Trump, who operates as if laws don’t apply to him, including those on assaulting women and tabulating votes.
Republicans will pay for all of the above as the party becomes chalkier and more calcified.
Joe Biden is ancient, but at least he knows what’s coming down the pike.
He knows that diversity is the essence of the American experience. He knows that a compassionate government can’t be the plaything of moneyed interests, or one race, or one dogmatic set of believers.
That’s why Republicans fear Taylor Swift. Unlike the narrow target audience of Fox Propaganda, Swift’s appeal just keeps growing and broadening.
If our government is behind Swifties’ rise, fantastic. We the people have latched onto how to build a more perfect union.
John Young is a longtime Texas newspaperman who now lives in Fort Collins, Colo. Email jyoungcolumn@gmail.com. See johnyoungcolumn.com.
From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2024
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