Swiftology and the Doctrine of the Present

The Current Year has been going on for years. The meme goes back to 2015, making that the first year of the Current Year. John Oliver's fallacy was born of a broader triumphal attitude on the Left following the ascent of Obama--that multiculturalism was irreversible. If the passage of time trumps all for you it's because you like the way things are going.

Those were the days we measured progress in days.

Then came the Trump "Resistance", postmodern anarcho-tyranny waged from the recording studios of Hollywood and Manhattan.
Despite nothing material changing since the election, and no real challenge to the cultural hegemony--other than that implied by Trump's election--the Left pushes for stricter limits on speech and behavior while doubling down on pro-Narrative propaganda. The genuine hysterics mask the totalitarian power grab. We have the first resistance practicing public purges. It's all very weird.

Having long ago banned too openly "conservative" people from participation in celebrity--yet, somehow, still, Trump!--there is nothing else now but to come for the silent or suspect. Taylor Swift counts as both. But they'd been after her for a long time--since she had the temerity to win one of Beyonce's awards, at least, but then Kanye only took the stage in outrage because Taylor was so provocatively white a persona in the first place. She was greeted with hostility by black America and artists from the get-go.

Black America adopted her as a white icon long before white nationalists, for the same reasons and without irony.

Swift's haters are taking advantage of the new, harsher cultural order mandated by the Resistance, to take her down if they can. Trump was their 9/11. The Resistance spawns various versions of the Iraq War, ginned up to milk the mania. One of those campaigns is turned on Swift. Steve Sailer's law of female journalism is very much in evidence and effect.

(That law, something like "most female journalism is dedicated to creating a world wherein the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking" should come with the corollary that black women demonstrate the effect with a higher level of intensity.)

Along with this a diverse millennial generation is assuming the establishment media reigns. Salon and Slate have long nurtured the SJW thumbsucker genre, where young writers weave warm coats for their vanity out of critical race theory and the latest Current Year fads.

Being well into the Current Year the fossils of the old establishment are sounding more and more like Slate and Salon. Time and Newsweek, grasping for both solvency and relevance, have adopted critical theory and identity politics fads in analyses and editorials.

(It's telling that no mainstream outlet yet has even thought of dipping a toe into the alt right perspective; it's not that they're leaving money on the table, they don't even want to know if it's there.)

So it was perhaps inevitable the Guardian would call out Taylor Swift's racism in its very own editorial voice, and the tone of that voice now has a hint of up-talk.

In the year since Donald Trump was elected, the entertainment world has been largely united in its disdain for his presidency. But a notable voice has been missing from the chorus: that of Taylor Swift, the world’s biggest pop star. Her silence is striking, highlighting the parallels between the singer and the president: their adept use of social media to foster a diehard support base; their solipsism; their laser focus on the bottom line; their support among the “alt-right”.

Is there a name for the "striking parallel" that isn't? Even if Trump and Swift were somehow alone in "adept use of social media" (Kim Kardashian is Hitler) it wouldn't tie them together ideologically.

But what struck me above all was this particle of oblivion:

Swift’s songs echo Mr Trump’s obsession with petty score-settling in their repeated references to her celebrity feuds, or report in painstaking detail on her failed romantic relationships (often, there is crossover). The message is quintessentially Trumpian: everyone is out to get me – but I win anyway. Seeded with clues to the identities of her famous associates, her lyrics reel in and solidify a hardcore fanbase – usually young, female followers known as “Swifties” – who passionately defend her honour on social media by attacking her detractors

As I wrote here before, Swift's "petty score-settling" is her adoption of the black model of popular music. Indeed, the pettiest and most prominent of those scores is that with Kanye West. Trump always appealed to black rappers especially, before he became a political figure in earnest, precisely for his style, which (you want to bang your head against the wall sometimes) he adopted in some part from black popular culture!
But even Trump didn't invent the posse of dedicated friends. That too is Harlem, not Queens or Taylor Swift's Reading, Pennsylvania.

The elite are operating the Megaphone out their ass.