The Racial Anxiety Behind Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life of a Showgirl’

Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl is criticized for showing Swift’s anti-Black bias. (Credits: Republic Records, Getty Images, Google)

Taylor Swift has been facing the worst firestorm of criticism in her career thus far.

Her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, has been torn apart, even by a lot of Swifties, because of the rancid and cringy lyrics and stale production. Swift could probably weather this without breaking a sweat. But some critics are using a word that probably has Swift spiraling–racism.

The Life of a Showgirl‘s biggest critics believe Swift is dog whistling to her audience about Black women, Kayla Nicole in particular. Nicole, a sports reporter, influencer, businesswoman and podcaster, is the ex of Swift’s fiancé, NFL star Travis Kelce. From what Swift has written about in her songs, some critics believe her anxiety about love is becoming racially-tinged.

But is it? There’s a lot to talk about, so let’s get into it.

Early thoughts about the album

I’ve listened to the full album several times via Anthony Fantano’s listening stream and various YouTube reactions. After meditating for a long time, I have concluded that if this was my very first Taylor Swift album to hear, I’d be very confused as to how she’s a big star.

Granted, I haven’t listened to a lot of Swift over the years–I’ve heard her songs in the zeitgeist, and there are some that I actually like from a storytelling perspective. Generally, when a new Swift release comes out, I usually don’t pay attention to it. I think the Swifties usually expect locals not to pay attention to it either.

But this time, us locals did because many Swifties themselves started blasting their shocked dislike of the album on social media. So I had to listen to it for myself.

Truth be told, as an album in general, it is not good. It’s just your basic reheated pop album. As a Taylor Swift album, it’s definitely not good. From the little I heard of her throughout the years, I could acknowledge that she had a knack for writing relatable, diary entry-esque lyrics that I–and her fans–could appreciate. But this album just feels like slop. (Some would say it feels like AI slop, in particular, but that’s a different story.)

I feel like when it comes to creating a fanbase, Swift’s biggest strength was her Tumblr-esque relatability and vulnerability–she literally writes like a 2012 Tumblr account come to life. But that vulnerability and willingess to put her unvarnished self on the page was her undoing with The Life of a Showgirl. While romantic insecurity and frustration has been a core theme of her work, her latest album shows she’s used that particular theme much it’s become threadbare.

Perhaps what has shown her weak spot is the fact that she’s in what we hope is a loving relationship with Kelce. She’s won–she’s living out her high school fantasy of being the adorkable girl who gets the high school quarterback. But yet she’s still writing about being jilted by past loves, regret over a high school relationship that could have been, and how everyone, including social media, is against her in some capacity. She even says she’s “afflicted with a terminal uniqueness” that just makes it so hard for her to fit in or be liked by everyone. On top of that, she’s now writing about Kelce’s past loves in the same way she has written about her past boyfriends. Talk about a sore winner.

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Being blonde as a personality

Swift’s personality hinges on being a victim at all times, even in victory. Despite liking a few of her songs, I’ve had this critique of her for a very long time. It has always been very “white feminist”/”I’m a white woman victim” coded. But it’s only now, with the state of America being what it is, that people–including many Swifties–have finally gotten sick and tired of it. It’s like when a mom finally snaps after tuning out their child’s whining for so long. There’s only so much of the same “woe is me” story you can take.

Of course, since Swift is a human being, she probably does feel like there is validity to her victimhood. We can’t say she hasn’t been through things since most of us don’t know what her personal life is like. However, if what we can glean from her songs is true, it seems like, at least to the outsider, she hasn’t had much to worry about aside from who she’s dating or what girl she thinks doesn’t like her. (From the lyrics in these songs, maybe they had a reason not to like her.)

The thing that’s important to understand is that regardless of Swift’s real life, she has shrewdly based her career around the “innocent white blonde girl” schtick. This schtick is rooted firmly in American racism and white supremacy. White women might be at the top of the pyramid of desirability in this ridiculous country, but white blonde women is the most desired type of white woman you can get. Whether she’s buxom or Tumblr, the blonde is seen as pure Americana, the girl next door. Blondes get protected from real and percieved threats, they are childlike, and they are always seen as adorable.

I can’t speak for the totality of her fans, but I can tell you that I know a big sect of her fans latched onto her for this very reason, whether they knew it or not. She is the aspirational whiteness that even some white people can’t achieve. She represents what it means to be the ultimate white American girl.

Caitlin Scialla wrote for Her Campus, “[B]londe hair is often an indicator of privilege and status,” citing how expensive it is for white women, even some blondes, to dye their hair that perfect shade of platinum blonde. The money and effort it takes coincides with having (or wanting to appear to have) expendable income.

Blondness is also a calling card of the conservative right, who buy into the idea that blonde white women are the ultimate symbol of homespun American values. As Scialla wrote, a blonde girl next door becomes “[a] beacon of old-fashioned norms and tradition. She is charming and threatening and unassuming. Properly feminine. White.”

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Being a white woman is a political act

I feel like Scialla might have meant to write “non-threatening,” but “threatening” actually works as well, because the unassuming quality of the white blonde woman allows her to wield the full authority of white supremacist values, all while claiming victimhood. We are taught by this country to believe that white women were historically the victims of their racist husbands, but as books like They Were Her Property will tell you, white women have upheld their side of white supremacy with gusto. From owning and buying enslaved people to putting them in their wills to charging Black men with sexual and non-sexual crimes alike just by screaming their word against theirs, white women have done a lot of violence against Black people through their weaponized victimhood.

This is to say nothing of how they treated Black women, the set of women they could have allied with.

Black women were mistreated under slavery severalfold. First, just the act of being enslaved is terrible. But under slavery, Black women were also at the mercy of the slaveowner, who could sexually assault them by making them his “mistress” and saying she liked it. Whole branches of science were developed to try to excuse white men’s sexual deviancy by saying that Black women were inherently more sexual than white women, therefore Black women couldn’t claim to be raped. Meanwhile, the slave owner’s white wife just had to take their husband’s infidelity and sexual crimes. How could she excuse it? How could she justify it to herself?

The only way to justify it, therefore, is to believe the pseudoscience and blame the Black woman for “seducing” her husband.

Earlham College’s Iman Cooper wrote in Commodification of the Black Body, Sexual Objectification and Social Hierarchies during Slavery that slave owner’s wives often compelled their husbands to put their “mulatto” children up for sale. She also cited Harriet Jacobs, who wrote about her experiences in slavery in her 1861 memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. She recalled her licentious master’s wife, Mrs. Norcam, who became aware of her husband’s interest in her. Mrs. Norcam is said to “watch her husband with unceasing vigilance; but he was well practiced in means to evade it. …I had entered my sixteenth year, and every day it became more apparent that my presence was intolerable to [Mrs. Norcam].”

Jacobs wrote that Mrs. Norcam blamed Jacobs for her husband’s wandering eyes, writing, “[S]he felt that her marraige vows were desecrated, her dignity insulted; but she had no compassion for the poor victim of her husband’s perfidy. She pitied herself as a martyr; but she was incapable of feeling for the condition of shame and misery in which her unfortunate, helpless slave was placed.”

Jacobs also recounted in her memoir another experience with a vengeful wife, this time the wife of a Dr. Flint, who kept coming after Jacobs. Jacobs went to Mrs. Flint for protection, according to Winthrop University’s Christopher Adams in The Female Slave Experience. But Mrs. Flint resented her instead and cast her out. Jacobs wrote, “I had not returned to my master’s house since the birth of my child. The old man raved to have me thus removed from his immediate power; but his wife vowed, by all that was good and great, she would kill me if I came back and he did not doubt her word.”

Even if the slave in question wasn’t of age, Black women and girls were still seen as threats and bodies ready for torture. They Were Her Property author Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers told Berkeley University how one white female slave owner brutalized a young girl in her care. According to Jones-Rogers:

“One woman kept the enslaved people she owned in a state of near-starvation and would tempt a young enslaved girl who cleaned her bedroom by leaving a piece of candy on her dresser each day. One day, the enslaved girl yielded to temptation and ate the candy. When the slave-owning woman discovered the candy missing, she accused the young girl of stealing it and proceeded to punish her by placing her head on the floor underneath the curved portion of her rocking chair. This woman then summoned her young daughter to help her punish the enslaved girl. While she rocked back and forth on the young enslaved girl’s head, her daughter whipped her. When they finished punishing the enslaved girl, she was irreparably disfigured. She was never able to eat solid food again because her jaw would constantly slide to one side of her face. When she reached adulthood, her teeth never grew on that side, either. Each time she was in her mistress’s presence, her mistress was daily reminded of her cruelty, and it became so overwhelming that her mistress gave her to a relative, so she wouldn’t have to look at her anymore.”

White weaponized purity and white anxiety collide in The Life of a Showgirl

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Blonde ambition and Black stereotypes come together in a frazzled, insecure mess in The Life of a Showgirl. Whether Swift realizes it or not, she reenacts the trope of a good, Christian, pure white woman who believes her so-called inherent status places her above the likes of the Black women her fiancé has previously been with.

To be clear, the Black women I wrote about in the previous passage were Black women who had to make concessions to keep as much of their agency and dignity as they could; they lived during a time in which they were thought of as chattel and had no rights, including no right to say no to the white men who could freely sexually assault them without persecution. However, the stereotypes that were birthed during those times–the Jezebel, the wanton, sexually promiscuous and “exotic” Black woman who seduces good white men into her dark lair of debauchery–still exists today, especially in the mind of an insecure white woman who wants to prove to her fiancé that she’s better than the “bad bitches” he used to date and lust after.

If it isn’t clear yet, Kelce used to be what the streets call a “wigger.” He clearly used to wear Blackness as a costume, and that could be it’s own article. But right now we’re staying on his dating history.

I didn’t know much about him until he started dating Swift, but fans of football–and Black women who watch for these types of white men–knew about Kelce’s predilections for a very long time. His past dating history has been predominately Black women. Nicole was with him for five years. It’s rumored that Kelce tried to get with Megan Thee Stallion before getting with Swift. It’s safe to say Kelce has a type.

Here’s where we start uncovering Swift’s obsessive worry and simmering anger at Kelce’s past, at herself, and at Black women.

“Opalite”

Like I said above, much of the album is objectively terrible. But we’re going to focus on just a few songs for this article. The first, “Opalite,” is probably the clearest example of Swift trying to put herself above Nicole as Kelce’s preferred woman.

The second verse audaciously talks about Kelce’s past with Nicole, infantilizing Kelce with a story that makes it look like he’s been as desperate as Swift has been when it comes to love, and how the big bad Nicole just couldn’t give it to him because she was using him for clout.

To quote Swift:

In any context, she doesn’t have the authority to talk about Kelce’s love life for him. And, as some YouTubers have surmised, if Kelce has been talking rudely about Nicole to her, he’s just as bad–talking about your ex as if they were solely the problem negates the part you played in the relationship (barring if the relationship was abusive, of course). If Kelce had been doing that, Swift’s naive for believing him at his word. Nine times out of ten, if a man gives you a sob story about how their girl was the problem, you might just want to take it with a grain of salt.

Swift’s lyrics show that if Kelce did try a sob story on her, she bought it hook, line and sinker. She’s positioning herself as someone who wouldn’t stay in their phone, who does love love, who will give all she’s got to the relationship, and she won’t leave him starving. You could say it’s very “pick-me” and dismiss it as that, but the racialized component comes with her description of Kelce being “[s]leepless in the onyx night” and now, with Swift, the sky is “opalite.”

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Please don’t tell me about how her use of the word is to describe the love they made for themselves, and that’s why she used a fake gemstone in the song. I’m sure that’s the canon reason she has. But either she consciously or unconsciously decided to use those two gemstones because one is obviously black–and has been used to describe Black people’s skintones in very cringy ways–and the other is, by and large, white. Kelce was sleepless while being with his “onyx” girlfriend and now his sky is brighter because he’s with his “opalite” one. (Can she at least be the real stone?)

I’m going to be fair here and acknowledge that opals and opalites do come in different shades, as most gemstones and rocks do. However, the most popular version of opal(ite) is the white version. That’s the first thing you think of when you think of opals and other moonstone-like rocks. That’s one thing I want some of the more belligerent Swifties to admit to. You’re not thinking of “Mexican Fire Opal “or “Black Opal” or “Boulder Opal” or even the light seafoam-looking “Common Opal.” You’re thinking of the moonstone-looking white opal. So to act like you know for sure Swift meant any other opal is silly.

To be fair, we can say that even I don’t know for sure if Swift meant a white opalite or some other kind. But I feel that, compared with the lyrics in this song, some of the other lyrics in other songs, as well as my own past experiences with some weird white females, I can make an educated guess that she was thinking the white, translucent stone.

Let’s also not forget that Swift fans can’t claim any high ground–for months, if not for a full year and a half, Swifties have been harassing Nicole on her social media because she used to date Kelce. Swift hasn’t yet told her fans to lay off. So as much as they might want to claim Swift isn’t racist, they can’t really same the same for their own actions.

“Eldest Daughter”

The other song that exposes Swift’s racial insecurity is “Eldest Daughter.” To be fair, I have listened to this song multiple times and I still don’t know what it means. As many reviewers have said, it’s a jumbled mess of non-sequiturs that coalesce around the idea of Swift never leaving Kelce, despite not being a “bad bitch” or a “savage.”

Her insistence that she’s loyal is her hoping this is enough to keep Kelce tied to her and away from anyone else. Her desperation stems from her lack of “bad bitch”-ness, but who is a bad bitch? Generally, Black women.

Personally, I have love-hate relationship with the term, no matter who uses it. I feel it conjures up the same type of ideas that the Jezebel trope does. But, at the same time, I also like how some women use it as a reclamation of sexual identity, power and agency. Many women use it to describe themselves in positive, self-affirming tones. And women like Megan Thee Stallion, the very rapper Kelce tried to go out with, have made such a term popular.

Megan used both “bad bitch” and “savage” in the song, aptly called “Savage.” Such lines include, “Bad bitch, still talking cash shit” and “I’m a savage/Classy, bougie, ratchet/Sassy, moody, nasty.”

The song explains that a “bad bitch” is someone who’s challenging to man while being alluring– in fact, the challenge is part of the seduction. She’s a multitude of things–classy when she wants to be, sexy when she needs to be. She’s got curves, hair, nails and sexual prowess (to quote Megan’s various lines in this song, “Pussy like water, I’m unbothered and relaxing”…”Eat me and record it, but your edge-up all I’m showing”…”That body right, but you know this pussy fat, ooh”).

She’s clearly everything Swift feels she’s not. Hence her plea to Kelce that even though she’s not a bad bitch or a savage, she’s never going to let him down or leave him now (to paraphrase her).

In reality, if she was confident in herself, she might not feel like she has to compete with Megan. Allegedly Megan turned him down anyways and now she’s with NBA star Klay Thompson. But it’s not just Megan Swift is worried about. It’s all of the Megans–all of the Black women who Megan represents. These women have been Kelce’s type for so long. And, if we’re looking at Swift’s exes’ dating history, several of her exes have gone one to be in stable relationships or marry Black women. All Swift feels she has is her desperate loyalty and white woman purity. Will that be enough, she wonders?

@tatianasiren Hmmm am I seeing a pattern #greenscreen #swifties #taylorswift #blackwomen #traviskelce ♬ Eldest Daughter – Taylor Swift

That’s just my reading of the situation. It so happens to line up with other Black women’s readings of the situation. I definitely think our collective canon events with frazzled, insecure white women who feel threatened by our existence leads us to believe what we believe about Swift’s racial anxiety. It could be that in this one instance, we are wrong and Kelce and Swift are meant to last. But our lived experiences do deserve to be given serious thought.

In any event, the quick rush some Swfities have had to absolve Swift of the possible racial faux pas–thereby talking down to Black women who have raised issue with this song–does several things at the same time. First, it infantilizes Swift, a grown woman, by assuming she couldn’t have known what she was talking about. Second, it invokes the culture of white victimhood and innocence–Swift couldn’t have been racially insecure, and it’s the bad Black women who are misconstruing her words. Third, it weaponizes fandom culture against people with actual good-faith criticism. Overall, some Swifties have quickly reminded some Black women why sisterhood between the two will keep failing until intersectional feminism or womanism is the norm.

“Wi$h Li$t”

The racist dog whistling doesn’t end here. “Wi$h Li$t,” an ode to Swift’s desire for domesticity, includes one of the wildest lines in the whole album (barring the entirety that is “Wood”)–“Have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you.”

Of course, it’s not out of the norm to want to have kids with your significant other. However, “got the whole block looking like you” is a whole different thing entirely.

We’re in a political and social climate where we have been inundated with people dog whistling and just outright proclaiming of white supremacist viewpoints. From the President on down, American society has witnessed people in government positions ransack others’ rights and disappear people just because they don’t align with the Project 2025 vision of a “pure” white nation-state. This kind of climate allows for a supposedly innocuous line of having the whole town look like you feel way more insidious and disgusting than it might have a few years ago.

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In fact, let’s talk about why Project 2025 exists–it exists and was supported by Trump’s voters because there is a very real fear a lot of white people have about being replaced by people of color. You’ve probably read the prediction that by 2030, white people will be a minority in America. Some census-readers have said that this could happen even sooner than 2030. White folks who believe in the replacement theory worry that marginlized people will treat them the same way they have treated the marginalized. In other words, they feel their rights will be taken away and they will become second-class citizens.

In order to keep that from happening, Project 2025 hopes to ensure that whiteness will be enshrined as the law of the land. Particularly white maleness. How does this happen? Through forced births, increased risk of death for people of color, especially women of color who are pregnant, Nazi-esque patrols and kidnappings such as the ones we’re seeing by ICE, mysterious deaths, erasure of healthcare for all, and gutting the Constitution so that a white figurehead can be put in power while people like Stephen Miller and Peter Thiel pull the strings.

Embedded in this horror show is white women’s subjugation disguised as worship. Just like in the south during slavery, white women will be leaned upon to keep the white population up through childbirth. Their reward for putting the entirety of the population on their back is to be thought of as women who are upholding “Christian” (i.e. white supremacist) values and maintaining their purity (which actually means keeping up appearances and divorcing yourself from your humanity while ignoring any suffering or guilt you might feel for yourself or others).

Is Swift thinking about this when she’s writing a line about having a neighborhood block that looks like her and Kelce? Who’s to say. But my theory is that while it might not be a conscious thought, it certainly is an unconscious one. She has surrounded herself with conservative ideology at every turn–not only are her parents conservative (or at the very least her father), but now she’s knee-deep into the conservatism of the NFL (and don’t let Jay-Z’s presence fool you of anything else). On top of that, thanks to Kelce, Swift’s new friend group includes Brittany Mahomes, who has been upfront about her MAGA support. Even old friend Blake Lively can’t be counted out, because she and Ryan Reynolds got married at a southern plantation.

Swift also isn’t a dummy. During the Miss Americana era, she was worried about if she was doing her part as a Democrat and a liberal. But that was when America still thought of itself as a liberal country. There was money in appearing liberal. Now that America is in the throes of MAGA, it makes more sense as a businesswoman to cater to those right-leaning fans. So why not throw in a dog whistle of living on an all-white block while in reality, neighborhoods are being torn apart because ICE is rounding up non-white people?*¹

This also isn’t the first time Swift has romanticized racially problematic stuff. Way back in 2015, I wrote about Swift’s music video for “Wildest Dreams,” in which she’s the heroine in an Out of Africa-style romantic storyline. The issue many critics had was that the music video brought back the racist imagery of a colonized Africa, filmed on location in South Africa and Botswana. The video didn’t feature any native Black Africans; instead, Africa was shown as an untamed wilderness that white settlers and adventurers were taming. The white characters’ presence isn’t challenged by the anti-Blackness and racial violence that would exist in reality. For Swift, the most important thing is the majesty and aesthetics of an old-fashioned love story, whether or not the imagery would tee off her Black supporters.

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“Actually Romantic”

Unfortunately this isn’t where Swift ends when it comes to her anxieties about women. Swift decides to make an unforced L and go after former Reputation tourmate Charli XCX, who released the song Sympathy is a knife. The song is about Charli’s own insecurities about being a woman in the industry, and how those insecurities lead her to think she’ll never compete with the likes of women like Swift and others.

Charli writes:

She also talks about suicidal ideation because she’s “at war with” herself and the negative voice in her head. She continues to bring up the woman people assume is Swift, saying:

Overall, the song is about a type of jealousy, but it’s as Charli describes it–paranoia. Ths woman is triggering Charli’s insecurities, and Charli is talking about her struggle to contain those thoughts. It’s not dissing Swift.

However, Swift decided to release “Actually Romantic,” in which she hurls a lot of venom at Charli, including the lyrics, “Like a toy chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse/That’s how much it hurts.”

“It” being the supposed shots Charli has been taking at her. We can only assume she’s talking about behind-the-scenes stuff since Charli has publicly told her fans not to go after Swift, giving the impression that she doesn’t want there to be any bad blood between her and Swift’s fanbases. In any case, Swift shows her mean girl hand.

After listening to “Actually Romantic” for a while, my reading of the song is that she’s one of those women who must be the victims in order for their lives to make sense. She has the football star, the money, the fame, the fandom, and yet she’s still so angry that someone allegedly called her “boring Barbie” that she writes a song about them.

It’s clear Swift has some venom to spew at Charli, and it goes in tandem with the venom she’s been underhandedly spewing at Black women throughout the album. She has to be the woman on top, otherwise she’s threatened. When she gets threatened, she starts using veiled phrases, such as calling Charli a chihuahua. Of course, Swifties can say Swift meant this as a way to describe how Charli’s supposed “funny valentines” were as annoying as a dog yapping. I think we all get the text of the lyrics. But the subtext–which is where the onyx/opalite reading stems from–is where you find something a little more sinister. Why call a woman of color a dog?

Charli is Gujarati Indian and Scottish, so even though she is white passing, she has called herself “Indian” in interviews. She full acknowledges her heritage. Wouldn’t Swift know this if she’s been on tour with her and if so, wouldn’t it have given her pause before calling Charli a dog in a song that was going to be heard worldwide?

Again, in a similar way to how Swift invoked slave owner’s wives’ past with taking out her aggression on Nicole to assuage her worry about Kelce, Swift goes after Charli because of her friendship with Swift’s ex Matty Healy. Swift alleges in “Actually Romantic” that Charli said she was happy that Healy ghosted her. It is fair of me to point out that Swift has taken out some aggression on Healy himself in a song from The Tortured Poets Department called “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.” But she can’t get to Healy anymore, so who else can she get at? Charli. It’s also worth asking why she even cares about Healy anymore. Once again, you’ve got the football star. Why do you care about an ex?

What happens next?

As of writing this article, Swift hasn’t acknowledged the racial allegations outright. But she did say in a recent Apple interview how she treats the first week of her album releases as a time that if anyone’s saying anything about her, they’re helping her sell copies. As someone on social media or YouTube pointed out, we have never heard Swift talk this matter-of-factly about album reactions before. To me, her answer was very much a practiced PR way of expressing her displeasure at how her album has been received. Combine that with her assertion that the album is satirical–a backtrack from prior statements of this being her most personal album and the album she’s always wanted to make–and it’s clear Swift isn’t thrilled at what folks are saying and wants to do some story management through anxious, gritted teeth.

After writing all of this about Swift, I want to make it clear that I don’t hate her. I find her incredibly grating and annoying, especially with how she wields invisible racial power. Her stardom owes a huge debt to how America views whiteness. Thankfully, it seems like America is waking up.

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With that said, I have started feeling sympathy for her. It must be exhausting and frustrating to put out what you thought would be hailed as your greatest work, and instead folks now see you as the poster child for rampant consumerism and late-stage capitalism because of your 29 album variants, artistic theft because of your use of generative AI, and, oh yes, racist MAGA culture because of the Nicole and Charli-themed lyrics and your friendship with Brittany Mahomes, which may or may not be hinted at in the song “CANCELLED!”**²

But, apart from projecting boldness with her “If you’re talking about me, you’re helping” assertion, Swift hasn’t done anything to clear up things up. Yes, everyone might be talking about you, but do you want them to say you’re a racist? Or is she eventually going to rely on that tried-and-true chestnut of being a victim if the hate train doesn’t let up? Personally, my money is on the latter.

1. Late-breaking news this weekend was some scandalous merch from Swift’s latest merch drop. Commenters clowned a ballcap that reads “I protect the family” in white letters as a hat that cop moms and MAGA “mama bears” would wear. The most egregious piece of merch, a lightning bolt (or “lightening bolt,” as the website erroneously said) necklace. However, the design and placement of the lightning bolts makes the wearer look as if they’re wearing a bunch of SS symbols; the SS being the Schutzstaffel, or the Nazi soldiers who were rounding up Germans for the internment camps during World War II. The necklace quickly got labeled as “not available,” but the damage was done. More and more Threaders and TikTokers are placing Swift as a masked-off proponent of the alt-right. Whether that’s actually true is another thing, but you’d think she would put out a statement by now to try to stop the bleeding. ↩︎
2. I know she’s probably talking about Blake Lively and her issues with Justin Baldoni, but Swift said “I like my friends cancelled,” not “friend.” And we know she’s friends with the Mahomes because of Kelce. ↩︎