(2024-02-01) What If They Had A Culture War And Tay Tay Didnt Turn Up

John Birmingham: What if they had a Culture War and Tay Tay didn't turn up? She didn’t have to endorse Joe Biden to earn her place in Fox News’ 24/7 Two Minutes of Hate. She just had to be Taylor Swift.

Swift was one of the most well-known people on earth before she met Kelce. Now she’s even more famous. If you post a tweet making outrageous claims about Taylor Swift, or film a segment making even more outrageous claims about Taylor Swift, you are likely to attract a lot of potentially monetisable eyeballs

And potentially monetisable eyeballs are the Super Bowl of rightwing disinfotaiment.

While it might look like the worst are full of passionate intensity and the best lack all conviction, perhaps what’s emerging is a consensus that the best, or even just the mostly normal, lack any interest in Donald Trump’s fever swamp dreams of authoritarian restoration

His Army of Darkness thrills at the prospect of going to war with Swift, the NFL, Disneyland, Budweiser, with whoever and whatever gets crosswise to their weird, white nationalist obsessions.

But what they’re really doing is going to war with the dominant culture, and as the late Iain M Banks told us so many times, ‘Don’t fuck with the Culture’.