Taylor Swift or Nazi Queen?
By: Anna Pacheco
Image from Arte Playground
'Honey I rose up from the dead I do it all the time' / 'I don’t like your little games' / 'I don’t like your tilted stage' / 'The role you made me play'. While you read these lines,
imagine a group of white supremacists raising their hands and reciting Taylor Swift’s latest single while they watch their Aryan ‘muse’ reaffirming her position among them. At last, Taylor, our friend, you’ve done it. You’ve given us an anthem.
A Reddit user has devoted himself to analysing every last detail, each and every line of the latest single by the singer he calls his ‘new Nazi Queen’. That’s to say, Taylor Swift. And the result, he says, is unquestionable: the song and video are full of references. Taylor’s song is neither innocuous nor simple. According to him, her political song is replete with pro-Trump messages. It’s the new anthem of the alt-right. It’s also the anthem that they’ve been waiting for.
'Honey I rose up from the dead I do it all the time'
(The user says this refers to Trump’s unexpected victory, and all his victories since he was voted president)
'I don’t like your little games'
(In reference, he clarifies, to the manipulative games of the press)
'The role you made me play'
(For branding her a ‘Nazi’ just for supporting Trump)
'Of the fool, no, I don't like you'
(The Democrats call us deplorable and laugh at our intelligence)
¯\_( ツ)_/¯
His interpretation is not the one-off obsession of a man from the United States. In reality, the Taylor Swift + Nazi affair is one of those conspiracy theories that make the Internet such a pleasant place to live in.
For some time now, the American right have claimed the figure of Taylor Swift as a kind of undercover ally who, through her songs, sends implicit messages to the American population. Swift has never openly said anything about her political leanings; so Trump’s defenders have taken it upon themselves to use her as an icon. Although it's true she's never said anything to the contrary either and she does embody the values of the most rancid American right. The feminist activist Camille Paglia once said that she reminded her of an ‘elitist Nazi Barbie’.
‘It's incredible really that she's surrounded by these filthy, perverted Jews, and yet she remains capable of exuding 1950s purity, femininity and innocence. She is the anti-Miley [Cyrus], while Miley is out having gang-bangs with coloured gentlemen, she is at home with her cat reading Jane Austen’, said André Anglin, member of the pro-Trump alt-right group with ultranationalist, anti-semitic and homophobic tendencies, last year in Broadly.
In reality, it was through statements on his blog, Daily Stormer, that this unfounded rumour gained its strength. ‘She is a pure Aryan goddess, like something out of classical Greek poetry. Athena reborn’. Anglin also wrote in his blog that Taylor Swift is ‘secretly Nazi’ and that she was waiting for the moment when Donald Trump would arrive at the presidency to announce her agenda ‘as the world’s Aryan goddess’. Now that the prophecy has come to pass and Trump is President, Swift just needs to give her confirmation. Although that would seem highly unlikely.
‘It's incredible really that she's surrounded by these filthy, perverted Jews, and yet she remains capable of exuding 1950s purity, femininity and innocence. She is the anti-Miley [Cyrus], while Miley is out having gang-bangs with colored gentlemen, she is at home with her cat reading Jane Austen’
Coming back to the subject of the song, the fan that began the thread – cheerfully titled Look What MAGA (Make America Great Again) Do – has also decided to analyse the video’s visual references. The guy has an explanation for why a scene from a Taylor Swift video looks suspiciously like one of Beyoncé's. According to him, the likeness was a deliberate way of counteracting the ‘terrorist’ movement (which is how he describes it) of Black Lives Matter. Basically as a way to rebel against the pro-Afro American rights movement. She’s not white and blonde for nothing.
Until a year ago, there was a Facebook page dedicated solely to this conspiracy with memes of Taylor Swift together with Hitler quotes. The page Taylor Swift for Fascists Europe (which gained some 18,000 followers) was removed last year, but the memes created by the blogger Emily Pattinson already form part of the collective memory.
Take a look and see just how inspired they make you feel.
Taylor Swift from Fascists Europe