Sunlight to a vampire
Formerly Twitter observed that there are more images and video of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce hugging and kissing after Sunday’s AFC Championship Game than of the JFK assassination. It’s been nagging at me in a good way.
David Letterman called it “a lovely thing.” He calls Swift “a glowing, bright light of goodness in the world,” and sorely needed.
Fans began calculating travel time, and whether Swift will be able to fly back from her Tokyo show in time to make the Super Bowl. Others noted that during the celebration on the field that Swift stepped aside so Travis Kelce could share a moment alone with his brother Jason. Swift shared warm hugs with Travis’ mother and father and sister. It’s an entire glowing, bright light of family values goodness.
Naturally, the right web is seething and losing what’s left of its mind.
The right’s lunatic fringe is floating insane consipracy theories about the left using Swift to rig the Super Bowl, and Swift planning to endorse Joe Biden at halftime, etc. The entire relationship is fabricated for ratings and political advantage, dontcha know?
User Andrew Nadeau snarked, “I love the idea that liberals conspired to get Taylor Swift to date Travis Kelce and then rigged the playoffs because this somehow abstractly helps Biden. That’s where we shine. We can’t get free healthcare but perfectly execute a Riddler-esque conspiracy to ruin a football game.”
The right’s freakout is about more than Kelce being vaccinated against Covid. It’s about this:
They’re scared. They should be.
But here’s the thing. Let’s go back to what Anat Shenker-Osorio said last week:
The thing is, people need to see, “Oh, that’s what my kind of a person thinks.” Humans are social creatures. We’re tribal. We want to find cues in our environment that tell us what our category subscribes to.
The left needs (and habitually fails to adopt) powerful symbols to indicate belonging and to provide those on the fence with social proof of what “people like me” think. “The left needs hats,” Anand Giridharadas suggests, a symbol that makes fence-sitters say, “I’ll have what she’s having.”
Shenker-Osorio writes:
As we’ve touched on previously, social proof — where people think the thing they think people like them think — is real. It’s one of the most persuasive tools in our arsenal. It’s the reason why the MAGA hat is so important and effective, and, conversely, why the green bandana has been so effective in Argentina and across Latin America. We used it in the abortion rights campaign in Argentina, and we used it in Mexico, we used it in Colombia.
But the Swift-Kelce relationship is more than just a symbol without a hat. The contrast between their “bright light of goodness” and the ugliness of what Trump’s MAGA movement represents to the U.S. and to the world could not be more stark. The right sees it plainly and recoils. It makes them seethe. It’s sunlight to a vampire. Swift’s good-girl image and her “lovely thing” relationship has (as I use too often) cut the right over the eye. Go out and work the eye.
Now to find a symbol for it that lefties will actually adopt and share.
Update from Brian Beutler:
There are many things to say about this brewing GOP conspiracy theory, but the most important one is a warning—of the rot that will ultimately consume any party that organizes itself around scheming and rat fucking and propaganda to manipulate voters, in lieu of trying to be decent and likable.