Taylor Swift’s lawyers douse an online flare-up with kerosene
A low-profile blogger questioned the pop singer’s politics—specifically an apparent leaning to the hard right—and her legal team pounced. That roused the ACLU, and a national battle arose.
Quelling an online fire is a laudable goal. Stoking it into a PR inferno denotes a major miscalculation.
Blogger Meghan Herning suggested in her post “Swiftly to the alt-right: Taylor subtly gets the lower case kkk information” that one of Taylor Swift’s latest songs and its complementing music video bear undertones of white supremacy. With that, the pop star’s lawyers took action.
In the blog, Herning writes:
Taylor’s lyrics in “Look What You Made Me Do” seem to play to the same subtle, quiet white support of a racial hierarchy. Many on the alt-right see the song as part of a “re-awakening,” in line with Trump’s rise. At one point in the accompanying music video, Taylor lords over an army of models from a podium, akin to what Hitler had in Nazis [sic] Germany. The similarities are uncanny and unsettling.
Herning calls on Swift to denounce white supremacy:
[T]here is no way to know for sure if Taylor is a Trump supporter or identifies with the white nationalist message, but her silence has not gone unnoticed.
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