This is, sorry, way too many Taylor Swift posts in a row, but something genuinely and troublingly weird is going on with The Life of a Showgirl, reception of. There is a persistent attempt out there, particularly on Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok, to paint this album as very racist, even as flirting with neo-Nazi imagery. So many new talking points arise that the rhetorical effect is that you want to end up conceding some of the minor charges just so that you can seem reasonable when you say “no, a necklace with lightning bolts on it is not winking toward the SS.”
And I don’t really think that these talking points are getting much purchase. It’s more that there are a lot of them and they keep popping up. But ever since the affair of Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni I have felt a bit suspicious of anything where suddenly a lot of people all seem to dislike a woman for constantly shifting reasons.
So I am just going to say this: I don’t think this reaction is organic. I think somebody is see…