Republicans Are Once Again Being Very Weird About Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift was named the 2023 Time “Person of the Year” on Wednesday, and of course conservatives have been quick to claim that there is a vast liberal conspiracy to blame.

Right-wing commentator Jack Posobiec posted to X, formerly Twitter, early on Wednesday morning, writing that Swift’s “girlboss psyop has been fully activated,” and claimed that Swift is gearing up to be part of a “2024 voter operation for Democrats on abortion rights.”

Psobiec posted again, linking a video of Taylor Swift crying while talking about her frustrations with former Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn’s conservative voting record.

“I can’t see another commercial and see her disguising these policies behind the words ‘Tennessee Christian values.’ I live in Tennessee, I am Christian, that’s not what we stand for,” Swift said in the video. Swift broke her career-long political silence in 2018 to post on Instagram urging her followers to vote against Marsha Blackburn during the 2018 midterm elections when Blackburn ran for Senate.

Posobiec captioned the video of Swift, “The day the op was born.”

Former Trump adviser and resident internet twerp Stephen Miller also took to X on Wednesday night to air a similar grievance:

Conservatives’ claims that the billionaire superstar is secretly a political operative come after a remarkably apolitical year from Swift.

In 2022, she tweeted her disappointment with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but she hasn’t done all that much since. In October, Swift posted on Instagram encouraging young people to register to vote on National Voter Registration Day. As a result, over 35,000 people did so, contributing to a 23 percent increase in overall registrations. Swift’s call to action was distinctly nonpartisan.

So why all of the fuss? Do conservative men just hate to see a girlboss winning? Maybe a post by one of Donald Trump’s dear Fulton County co-defendants, Attorney Jeff Clark, can give us some idea of what’s going on.

Clark quote-tweeted Posobiec’s first post, and added, “This is what happens when we cede culture to the Left. Brainless youth raising themselves on Taylor Swift’s saccharine bland music and that washing over into the serious world of politics.”

Clark seems to hate Taylor Swift because he deems her representative of the so-called “brainless youth,” but to some degree, Swift is a uniquely apolitical pick for Time’s Person of the Year, with the possible exception of 2006’s “You” (seriously, what was that about?). But now it seems like conservatives are confused. Is Swift a major political player, or is she just a piece of leftist cultural flotsam washing up onto a more “serious” shore?

The answer is neither. Swift is a billionaire singer-songwriter and movie star who has kept everyone’s attention for the last 365 days. And ultimately, Swift was granted one of the biggest platforms in the world—the only women’s rights mentioned in the article anointing her as “Person of the Year” were Swift’s rights to her own master tapes.