How does anyone take the right seriously?
Somewhere on Friday a TikTok video went by (if I find it again, I’ll post it) with a woman complaining that football intruding on her Taylor Swift concert ruined the experience for her. Why, why, she was all about Taylor and yet the camera kept cutting away to shots of Travis Kelce the football player. That’s just wrong!
FOUND IT (3 P.M. EDT):
She was lampooning the “keep Taylor out of my football game” crowd, obviously.
Fox News is having a time of it as well, in a different way. The conspiracy theories Fox is spinning about the power couple are truly something to behold (New York Times):
Of course, people are entitled to their opinions on celebrity political speech or the possible existence of a secret Pentagon diva lab. But if Fox News’s hosts truly believe that it’s irresponsible and dangerous to invite celebrities to weigh in on politics, they might want to turn their attention to … Fox News.
Over the years, Fox has invited Gene Simmons, the bassist of Kiss, to talk about the handling of an Ebola outbreak. It had the fashion model Fabio on to blame crime in California on liberalism. It gave us Kid Rock on cancel culture. Last year, the actor Jim Caviezel declared Donald J. Trump “the new Moses” on “Fox & Friends.”
And let’s not forget that Fox was instrumental in the entry into politics of a certain TV celebrity, whom you might know better as the candidate Mr. Biden will likely be running against.
Fox is, after all, infotainment.
Except heavy on the ‘tainment, light on the info.
More broadly, Fox has long embraced a kind of pop-politics cultural warfare that made a martyr of Roseanne Barr and a demon of Kathy Griffin, and that encouraged its viewers to question whether their beer was too liberal. Like the right-wing publisher Andrew Breitbart (adapting an idea from the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci), it believed that politics is downstream from culture.
But it has been selective about which celebrities should stay in their lane, and which get to merge. After LeBron James criticized then-President Trump in a 2018 interview, Fox’s Laura Ingraham told him to “shut up and dribble.” The endorsements of Mr. Trump by the former quarterback Brett Favre and the golf champion Jack Nicklaus, for some reason, were unobjectionable.
Much of the criticism of Ms. Swift, meanwhile, seems tinged with condescension, suggesting that a 33-year-old female pop star is a gullible naïf, ripe for bamboozling by political operators. “Does Taylor realize the guy that they want her to endorse is a kind of stumbling, bumbling mess?” asked Mr. Hannity, raising a concern he has not voiced when interviewing, say, the right-wing rocker Ted Nugent (“never shy about sharing his opinions!”).
James Poniewozik concludes, “bashing celebrities, warring over culture and playing into the fear of cultural marginalization may be too deeply wired into Fox’s sensibility for the network to do otherwise.”
FOMO, Foxies, FOMO?