The Surcharge on Free

​One of the most hilarious, if insane issues that is maniacally triggering the extreme right – both the base and GOP officials – is Taylor Swift going to Kansas City Chiefs football games and cheering for her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, who is a tight end on the team.  This has ratcheted up even more now that the Chiefs will be playing in the Super Bowl.
 
This is all leading somewhere, so bear with me, even if you think you’ve heard it all.  Something new just cropped up, and it’s pretty lunatic.
 
Not that everything so far isn’t hugely lunatic already.  Starting with getting so deeply upset over a young woman cheering for her boyfriend at a football game.  Actually, you would think that a white, blonde woman cheering for her sports hero boyfriend would be something at the heart of today’s Republican Party. But not with Taylor Swift.  And Travis Kelce.
 
Travis Kelce is trigger enough for Republicans, since he’s done ads about getting COVID booster shots, which only to today’s GOP is considered something worth outrage.
 
But Taylor Swift?  She’s making their heads explode.  That’s because she endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, has endorsed Democrats and – and troubling of all for Republicans – is registering voters at her concerts and online.  Just one Instagram post with link last October got 35,000 new registrants that day.  But that’s nothing compared to 2018 when her Instagram post then got 102,000 new voters to register within two days.
 
By the way, her posts don’t say who to vote for or even party to register with, just to register.  In fairness, she did once say about Trump, “We will vote you out,” and her followers do tend to be younger and more liberal.  But still – it’s just been a request to register.  Nothing more.
 
What’s been so hilarious (and truly crazy) is the level of conspiracy and outrage she has evoked among the extreme right.  One tweet that transcended "deranged" explained in detail how it was a plot with agents of with Satan who were working to get President Biden re-elected.  (Apparently, this person believes that Taylor Swift is more powerful than God.) 

There was a conspiracy-laced comment from Jesse Watters of Fox who referred to Taylor Swift as a 'psyops."  (Conspiracies about Taylor Swift became a really big deal on the extreme-right when she was named Time Magazine's Person of the Year.)  Several tweets from people now explain that this is all a conspiracy with the NFL to get the Kansas City Chiefs to win the Super Bowl.
 
Indeed, one of those came from outer space, suggesting Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are nothing more than an artificially-created couple designed solely to announce their endorsement of President Biden right before the election.
 
Oh, I should note that that crazy one came from Vivek Ramaswamy!  Really.  Honest.

​Of course, nothing cries "artificially culturally propped-up" like the woefully unqualified Vivek Ramaswamy's "presidential campaign." But then, pretty much all his pronouncements have been "wild speculation," so why should we expect him to stop now? Though it’s nice that he considers a Taylor Swift endorsement "major."  And the least-kept secret of the presential campaign.​
​

(Just to be clear, as the cookies say, this is from 2020.)
​
​But my favorite reaction has been from a fellow named Nick Adams, who says that he wrote a book which was endorsed by Trump, and who goes by the handle “Alpha Male.”  He wrote –
 
“By being on the team that won the AFC Championship, Travis Kelce will received [sic] a bonus check of around $70,000.
 
“For those wondering why Taylor Swift is dating Travis Kelce: are things beginning to make sense now?”
 
It’s hard to describe how much that theory transcends hilarity.  Taylor Swift's Eras Tour is the first concert tour ever (man or woman) to gross over a billion dollars. Further, the concert movie of the tour recently became the highest-grossing concert film of all-time, making an additional $261 million. But...but…but a "bonus check" of -- $70,000!  That her man will get. A check which doesn’t even go to her, and which when they started dating she could only hope he might win two playoff games to receive (games for which the team was the underdog in both) – that’s why Taylor Swift started dating Travis Kelce.  “Alpha Male,” indeed.
 
(Fun fact:  Taylor Swift gave $100,000 bonuses each to 50 truck drivers on her tour.  And also gave bonuses to dancers, musicians, technicians, caterers and other crew members on the tour.  But Travis Kelce got a $70,000 bonus and might pay for dinner or buy her a nice pendant!!)
 
And none of delusion yet is the point here.  I’ll get to it in a quick moment.
 
It’s all really quite nuts.  On several levels.  One is that, while, yes, she's supports Democrats and is registering voters -- though of any party -- all she is doing right now that is driving them crazy is...cheering for her boyfriend at a football game.  And if she's on camera cheering, that's the network's doing.  Just like they periodically put the camera on San Francisco quarterback Brock Purdy's parents throughout the game yesterday.  And it's all the more bizarrely deranged when you realize that these attempts to counteract Taylor Swift (for cheering for her boyfriend) are so doomed to failure that the phrase “doomed to failure” doesn’t even come close to explaining how doomed to failure they are.  Consider --
 
Taylor Swift has 272 million followers on Instagram!  Not all in the U.S., of course, but – well, that’s a lot.  And she has 95 million followers on Elon Musk’s TwiXter.  All of them people who really, really, really love Taylor Swift.  A whole lot.
 
Which brings us to the point here.
 
And the point isn’t Taylor Swift, that was important background.  The point is Elon Musk. 
 
The Elon Musk who cries out that at the core of his being is Free Speech.  For all…except that journalists who criticize him, they get their accounts blocked.  And except for people in his company who do things he doesn’t like, they get sued. 
 
That Elon Musk.  The guy who told all users of Twitter (before weirdly changing the name to “X”) to vote for all Republican candidates.  And followed the request of the Turkey dictatorship to block information before the country had an election.  And has backed requests of other despots.  And retweeted and called “true” a deeply virulent and profoundly untrue anti-Semitic tweet.  And has made number deeply anti-Semitic comments, like saying that Jewish financier and Democratic donor George Soros “hates humanity.”
 
And the Elon Musk who told all advertisers that if they didn’t like him, after posting a particularly anti-Semitic comment, they could “Go f*ck yourselves.”
 
That Elon Musk.  Mr. Free Speech.
 
It turns out that many people on TwiXter found that Taylor Swift had been blocked from the accounts.  But even more than that, it turns out that everyone on TwiXter has been blocked from just searching for Taylor Swift!
 
I found this hard to believe.  But it was easy to check out.  So, I did a search for Taylor Swift.  And this is the result that I got --
​

What I especially love is that it not only says, "Something went wrong" with zero results, but that it adds, “Don’t fret -- it’s not your fault.”
 
I had to laugh at that.  Because -- oh, believe me, I know it was not my fault.  In fact, I have a good idea whose fault it is.
 
It certainly could have been a temporary, totally innocent accident.  But I checked six hours later, and it turns out there was nothing temporary yet about it.  The issue was still there.  Nor, given Musk's endorsement of all Republicans and support of despots and dripping arrogance that he can do anything and if you don't like it, you can to f*ck yourself, was there any reason to believe it was an accident or innocent, even if it was.  Because in the end, that it took as long as it did, amid all the blistering attention on the problem, whatever its cause, innocent or otherwise, to finally "fix" what was most surely a simple, quick fix is the most glaring Musk-related indictment of all -- not just of who he is, but how he's gutted his tech department.

The thing is, of course, with 95 million followers on TwiXter, I think there's a really good chance that her fans would be able to find Taylor Swift.
 
No matter how much Mr. Free Speech wants to tell you to go f*ck yourself.