We are pleased to present writer, activist, and community volunteer Bree J. Schuette’s new opinion column titled “View from the Mountain Top”. This refreshing and funny weekly opinion column will be posted each Friday. Enjoy!
I would never describe myself as a huge Taylor Swift fan — in fact, the frenzy to gobble up her concert tickets last year left me puzzled. However, having said that, Blank Spaces and Bad Blood have featured heavily on my running playlist for years, and years after it was released Dear John got me through a messy break-up with some spot on lyrics.
But, I had given very little thought to Tay-Tay and the Snake Family and their impact on politics until this fall. Suddenly, I noticed an increasingly large number of predominantly white men crying on Facebook and Twitter on Monday mornings after Swift had been shown the previous day cheering on her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end, Travis Kelce.
And with each passing week, the consternation ratcheted up a notch — finally reaching fever pitch this week when Kelce and his teammates punched a ticket for a Super Bowl matchup with the San Francisco 49ers.
One of Fox News’ most notorious hosts for spewing disinformation claimed, without any proof, that the Department of Defense wanted to use Taylor Swift as a psychological operations asset — to manipulate people through her song lyrics. Then rumors began to leak out that Donald Trump and his band of MAGA minions planned to launch a holy war against Swift. And, then, fake nudes of Swift began to flood various social media platforms.
Alone, these events would simply seem like weird blips on the pop culture radar screen. However, in 2024 and with the current political climate, they indicate that the radical right has decided to declare war not on Taylor Swift, but on all women. The first step in this was overturning Roe v. Wade — dictating what we could do with our bodies and forcing women to flee across state lines to access essential care. But, this was not enough. Now, the MAGA world wants to control what women say and where they sit in a football stadium or who they cheer for and how loudly.
It is becoming more and more clear that this group of political extremists will not be content until they can turn back the clock to a time when we were barefoot, pregnant, and silent. It is not just Taylor Swift that they hate. They hate any woman whose world vision does not align with their world filled with -isms. They despise women who strive to be exceptional. And, they loathe women who are not afraid to speak up against injustice.
The only way to stop this drum beat of attempted silencing is organizing, turning out voters, and voting blue up and down the ticket. As Taylor Swift sang in Vigilante Sh**, “I don’t start it, but I can tell you how it ends. Don’t get sad, get even.” And, in this case, getting even means one thing — a blue tsunami in November. -Bree J. Schuette
