The Taylor Swift red herring

What seemed like a coordinated attack by a handful of misogynistic activists against the person of the year, Taylor Swift, has turned out to be a coordinated attack by the campaign of Republican candidate Donald Trump. After flooding the internet with synthetic pornographic deepfakes of the American singer, they proceeded to cover it up with a series of bizarre conspiracy theories. According to the latest revelations from the Trumposphere, Taylor Swift is a pawn of the Pentagon, a psychological election interference operation designed to manipulate voters. Even worse. She is accused of cheating to get Travis Kelce and the Kansas City Chiefs to the Super Bowl.

In addition to being her boyfriend, Kelce has done promotional work for the Pfizer vaccine for Covid and the flu. Sabrina Singh, the Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary, has stated: “Taylor Swift is not part of a DOD psychological operation. Period.” The days of ignoring the baroque conspiracies of far-right networks ended on January 6, 2021. Even QAnon started off with a humble Pizzagate.

Swift hasn’t yet announced who she’s supporting in this election, but it’s easy to guess. In 2018 she supported the Democrats in her home state (Tennessee) and in 2020 she endorsed Joe Biden, also telling Donald Trump on Twitter that they were going to throw him out of the White House (“we will vote you out”). Taylor has 95 million followers on Twitter; Trump has 87.4 million. Last September, the singer encouraged her fans on Instagram to celebrate National Voting Day by registering on Vote.org. The organization received more than 35,252 new registrations in a single day, 23% more than the previous year. (Taylor has 279 million followers on Instagram; Donald Trump, 23.7 million).

Non-consensual synthetic pornography is already a common tool to intimidate women who testify in cases of sexual assault and harassment, and to degrade women who aspire to political office. And yet, it seems extraordinary that Trump should attack the woman who has the new voters of America in her small fist, a mass phenomenon who dwarfs the Beatles, Michael Jackson and even Beyoncé herself. On her latest tour, The Eras Tour, Swift sold out the 90,000-capacity Wembley Stadium eight times in a row. Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, where the Super Bowl will be played, has 72,000 seats. With Trump facing 91 felony charges, including election interference, fraud, paying hush money to Stormy Daniels, hijacking classified documents, and defamation, the attack on Taylor is starting to look like a denial-of-service attack on the media, according to the doctrine that his chief strategist explained to Michael Lewis in a Bloomberg article published in 2018.

“The Democrats don’t matter,” said Bannon. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” The strategy, taken directly from the Goebbels guidebook and updated by all authoritarian populists, from Duterte to Bolsonaro, is not to lie, but to disorient and suffocate. The media’s main job this year will not be to verify everything the machine produces, but to decide once again what news is really news and dodge everything else.

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