I was struck by the magnitude of anti-Americanism exhibited by Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro:
Staring directly into the camera on Monday, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro had a message for [singer/songwriter Taylor] Swift: “Don’t get involved in politics; we don’t want to see you there.” [WaPo]
As if the United States was not founded on the principle, among others, that we all get to participate in the governance of our nation, and all the activities that go along with that[1], regardless of skin color, religion, and a few other unjust reasons for exclusion[2]. Sorry, Mz. Pirro, but Taylor Swift’s American citizenship makes her far more qualified to comment on and influence American elections than, say, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Naturally, we can say this is just part of the rough and tumble of American politics, but it puts Pirro in an unfortunate light.
But this bit speaks to the paranoia and methods of the managers of the conservative movement:
[Jesse] Watters said Monday on Fox News that [Taylor’s romantic partner and Kansas City football team member Travis] Kelce is “sponsored by Pfizer” and that his relationship with Swift “was engineered in a lab.” Alison Steinberg, a host on the ultraconservative One America Network, claimed that Swift’s relationship is a “fake, carefully crafted show” meant to get children “obsessed with some grown man who gets paid millions of dollars every year to throw a ball around while promoting poison death shots.”
I might expect such ridiculous jabber from a juvenile science fiction show, but not from adults – unless they had solid evidence they could introduce in court without embarrassment. Their reading on the silliness meter is a measure of their worries.
And what is their worry? That the infamous conservative epistemic bubble, observed by many over the last twenty and more years, encasing the conservative movement and stopping the importation of other views and other arguments, might be breached by Swift. Swift is a pan-political phenomenon, reportedly having masses of fans in most political movements, as well as the a-political. She can be considered a funnel into which otherwise-verboten views and thinking can be injected into a conservative movement which will inevitably have members with weaker commitments to the philosophy.
Such weak commitments that the comments of a pop star could sway them.
This attitude really speaks to the consciousness of the conservative leaders of the weakness of their fundamental intellectual arguments, and of their dependence on the isolation of the conservative movement from mainstream intellectual currents in order to maintain the conservative movement as a national force.
And not as just some podunk collection of far right extremists whose arguments have self-aggrandizement behind them, rather than the common weal.
Will their epitaph be Destroyed by Taylor Swift?
Time will tell.
1 Subject to what are often portrayed as common-sense constraints, but are argued over and meddled with endlessly, which is itself part of politics.
2 But age is not one of them. Age is used as a constraint for the office of President. It’s important to note that age is inevitably changing, unlike, say, skin color and religion, both of which can change, but are unlikely to do so. 30+ years ago some Minnesota legislative member advocated for giving the vote to kids, which I thought was just nutty.
