ADAM SERWER EXPLAINS THE RIGHT'S WAR ON TAYLOR SWIFT WITHOUT EVER MENTIONING HER ONCE

You probably assume that Republicans who are attacking Taylor Swift are making a serious political miscalculation. It really might be a huge mistake on the GOP's part, but this piece by Adam Serwer in The Atlantic explains why they're doing it, even though Serwer never mentions Swift by name.

He begins:

Is sexism the Republican Party’s big-tent strategy? Republican Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, appearing recently on the right-wing network Newsmax, dismissed the party’s losses among women voters by insisting, in language laced with stereotypes, that Black and Hispanic men would cross over to vote Republican in their place.

“This is the blue-collar realignment of the Republican Party, and what I can tell you is for every Karen we lose, there’s a Julio and a Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement,” Gaetz told Newsmax.

Serwer believes that "what Republicans have in mind is ... a diverse coalition of people who band together in their shared contempt" for women, gay people, and trans people: "a Rainbow Coalition of Haters."

Sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are widespread, and not just among conservative white men.

A 2023 PerryUndem survey found that while 90 percent of Americans said they “believe in equality for women,” sexist attitudes persist beneath the surface, with large numbers of people disagreeing that, for example, husbands should be prosecuted for raping their wives....

Although the numbers varied some depending on the statement, large and roughly similar percentages of Black, Hispanic, and Asian men agreed with statements like “I’d be uncomfortable if someone thought I was gay,” or “I’m more comfortable with women having more traditional roles in society, such as caring for children and family,” or “women are too easily offended.” That means there is a potentially meaningful audience—one that Republicans don’t usually reach—for the kind of sexist, homophobic, or anti-trans rhetoric that has become a staple of right-wing content in streaming videos, podcasts, and social media.

Serwer and Gaetz emphasize the potential for this kind of content to win over non-white male voters, but it may be winning over some young white males as well, at a time when we've assumed that the young are overwhelmingly left-leaning. And this seems to be happening in other countries as well as in America:

NEW: an ideological divide is emerging between young men and women in many countries around the world.

I think this one of the most important social trends unfolding today, and provides the answer to several puzzles. pic.twitter.com/kG4qQReqfT

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) January 26, 2024

(I've seen critiques of Burn-Murdoch's data, but even some of those suggest that young men are significantly more right-leaning than young women.)

A new survey reported in The Guardian suggests that sexist content is moving young men rightward in Britain.

Boys and men from generation Z are more likely than older baby boomers to believe that feminism has done more harm than good, according to research that shows a “real risk of fractious division among this coming generation”.

One in four UK males aged 16 to 29 believe it is harder to be a man than a woman and a fifth of those who have heard of him now look favourably on the social media influencer Andrew Tate, the polling of over 3,600 people found.

Tate, the British-American former kickboxer who has 8.7 million followers on the social media platform X, is facing charges in Romania, which he denies, of human trafficking, rape and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women. He has talked about hitting and choking women and has said he is “absolutely a misogynist”.

The bestselling author and Canadian academic, Jordan Peterson, is also seen favourably by 32% of 16 to 29-year-old men, compared with 12% among women of the same generation....

The figures emerged from Ipsos polling for King’s College London’s Policy Institute and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. The research also found that 37% of men aged 16 to 29 consider “toxic masculinity” an unhelpful phrase, roughly double the number of young women who don’t like it.

There's an ethnic skew in Britain:

Ethnic minority men are most likely to follow Tate, with more than a third agreeing he “raises important points about real threats to male identity and gender roles” compared with 12% among white men.

It may seem that Taylor Swift is universally popular, but her fan base skews very female. Some men, especially young men, consider it appalling when women enter what they regard as male spaces. Remember Gamergate -- "a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign and a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture," according to Wikipedia? Remember the male backlash against a 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters in which the ghost fighters were all women? ("You're runing my childhood!" the haters wailed.) This is the feeling Republicans are trying to replicate with their denunciations of Swift.

Swift is a pop superstar who operates like a mogul, which, in the eyes of sexists, makes her a woman who won't stay in her lane -- and these days, in a lot of online content aimed at young men, women's lane is seen as very, very narrow:

Much of this content taps into socially conservative ideas of women's role in society, as well as fake-science incel ideas about how women are allegedly damaged, both physically and psychologically, when (like Swift) they've had multiple sexual partners. We can see all this -- plus some bizarre gay-baiting -- in a tweet from Owen Benjamin, a racist and anti-Semitic right-wing comedian and online influencer who has more than 200,000 followers on X/Twitter:

A real man would want a young virgin who doesn't work, and who not only doesn't endorse candidates, as Swift has done, but also doesn't vote:



Can content like this flip enough young male votes to throw the election to Trump? Hard to know. But Democrats need to hang it around the GOP's neck. I think most people find all this bizarre -- or they would if they knew about it. They need to see it and need to be told that this is what the GOP is in 2024. It's not Mitt Romney or Nikki Haley. It's this.