Paul Rouse: Swift and Kelce victims of society's shift away from reality
LOVED UP: Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift’s high-profile romance has outraged the Maga movement.
Everywhere Elvis went he was screamed at. The bigger his fame grew, the more it closed in on him. He retreated in pursuit of privacy and respite to Graceland, which he bought and filled with things that he liked. There was, ultimately, to be no peace. He was 42 when he died, filled with multiple drugs, and was buried in the grounds of his estate.
It was not just those who loved Elvis who damaged him, it was also those who hated him. In his early years of success, Elvis drew brutal criticism from people who were outraged by this new rock’n’roll. The genius of Elvis had seen him fuse all manner of music, something which was not acceptable to America’s racists in the 1950s. Others were enraged by his style of performance which they considered to be sexually provocative. All told, he was considered a threat to America’s moral probity.
What is happening at the moment to Taylor Swift is of an altogether different order. Like Elvis, she must live in a chamber of screams – it appears the inevitable price of being the most successful musician in the world.
But just as Elvis lived his fame in the context of his America, so Taylor Swift must do the same with hers. And it is a disturbing spectacle.
It says much about the post-Covid world, that in the week of the Super Bowl, the NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has had to issue a statement to deny conspiracy theories that the Super Bowl is rigged and that Taylor Swift is involved in that rigging.
Here’s the story: Swift has been going out with one of the Kansas City Chiefs star players Travis Kelce since last September. The Kansas City Chiefs are playing in the Super Bowl next Sunday – their fourth final in five years. They have in their ranks the quarterback Patrick Mahomes who is already reckoned to be one of the greatest to play the game.
Taylor Swift has outraged supporters of Donald Trump when she has gone to see her new boyfriend play in 12 matches this season.
As the Chiefs gathered momentum in the course of the season, the abuse from the MAGA (Make America Great Again) Trumpets has got worse and worse. It reached new heights after Kansas City surprised heavily favoured Baltimore Ravens in the AFC Championship Game to reach the Super Bowl. Kelce played brilliantly, Swift was in the crowd, and joined him afterwards on the field to celebrate.
This drove the MAGA crowd to new dimensions of apoplexy.
The core of their anger rests on a conspiracy theory which claims that Taylor Swift is a secret agent of the Pentagon, part of the 'Deep State', operating to stop Donald Trump retaking the Presidency.
There are multiple versions of the conspiracy, but the gist of it is that Swift and Kelce are not a real couple, but rather are pretending to be together in order to boost Joe Biden and deny Trump.
It would be really easy to mock these claims and the people who make them. But mockery misses the essential point that this conspiracy theory is now in the mainstream. For that reason, Roger Goodell felt obliged to address it square on this week.
At the end of January, Vivek Ramaswamy, who at one stage was running against Donald Trump for the Republican nomination for this year’s presidential election and is now adamant in his support for Trump, wrote: “I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this Fall.”
When people dismissed this claim, Ramaswamy said: “What your kind of people call ‘conspiracy theories,’ I simply call an amalgam of collective incentives hiding in plain sight.”
Across the media, Trump’s acolytes have been making similar statements. In the middle of January, Jesse Watters considered Swift’s popularity on a Fox News show that he hosts:
“Have you ever wondered why or how she blew up like this? Well, around four years ago, the Pentagon psychological operations unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset during a NATO meeting.”
All of this did not simply come from nothing. MAGA despises Swift and Kelce, individually in their own right, for a variety of reasons. For example, Kelce promoted the Pfizer Covid vaccine. And he also promoted Bud Light, which is also promoted by transgender TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney, something that also appalled MAGA.
Swift used Instagram to call her fans to register to vote. Previously, Swift in 2018 had endorsed two Democratic candidates in elections in Tennessee, saying: “I always have and always will cast my vote based on which candidate will protect and fight for the human rights I believe we all deserve in this country. I believe in the fight for L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and that any form of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender is WRONG. I believe that the systemic racism we still see in this country towards people of color is terrifying, sickening and prevalent.”
She followed this up by endorsing Joe Biden (and vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris) in 2020: “Under their leadership, I believe America has a chance to start the healing process it so desperately needs”.
The potential for a renewed endorsement of Biden in 2020 is obvious. But what makes this all the more potent is that Swift is significantly more famous now than she was in 2020. She has more than 270 million Instagram followers and polling shows about six in 10 Americans consider themselves at least casual fans.
It is wrong to trivialise or dismiss the slurs and conspiracies as being merely “nonsense”, or the inevitable price of fame, or as some diseased form of entertainment, or as a sideshow. Equally, it is wrong to see those who make and spread the claims merely as attention-seekers attempting to profit themselves, financially or politically, from their words and actions.
If it was only that, it would be bad enough.
The problem is that it is something much worse, something more profound which reaches into the heart of modern culture. The people who propound this theory are broadly the same as those who believed that Hillary Clinton and Democratic elites were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizzeria.
This was the point of origin of the QAnon conspiracy which propagates the idea that the alleged “deep state” is waging an invisible war against Donald Trump who was himself trying to dismantle the elite group of paedophiles (Hollywood actors, Democratic politicians and government officials.
QAnon pushed its way into sport. For example, in mixed martial arts, Don House, the long-standing UFC cutman and a friend of that organisation’s president, Dana White, wore the Q symbol on his chest and a WWG1WGA marking on the left arm of his shirt during a major televised contest. Those letters stand for “Where we go one we go all”, a slogan adopted by QAnon supporters.
There are elected politicians – all Republicans – who have expressed support for QAnon. Indeed, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado were both elected to the U.S. Congress using QAnon as a calling card for their Trumpism.
Both then became proponents of the lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump by Joe Biden.
It says much that the pizzeria where the paedophile ring was supposed to be based was shot up by a man armed with an AR-15, a shotgun, and a revolver. Nobody was injured but it was a most chilling form of radicalisation by conspiracy theory as spread across social media.
This is the world in which Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce live out their fame. Sport has never just been sport and music has never just been music. But both are now set within the context of society where the boundaries of acceptable behaviour are shifting rapidly and where reality itself is being overwhelmed by fantasy.
The average time spent online is seven hours per day per person in America. Research also shows that the majority of far-right extremists in America have been radicalised by YouTube more than anything else.
This is partly explained by ‘negativity bias’, a part of the human psyche that has been studied by scientists for many years. As Johann Hari says, this aspect of human behaviour means “we will stare at something negative and outrageous for a lot longer than we will stare at something positive and calm”.
Social media algorithms then feed that bias. Those algorithms have no duty to truth. Their ultimate function is to encourage you to keep scrolling, to distract you from everything else.
Down this rabbit hole, the distorting mirrors are warping decent people into hatred – and into professed belief in grotesque lies.
Taylor Swift hasn’t rigged the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl isn’t rigged.
