Have you ever looked at Taylor Swift’s Instagram—her ubiquitous social media feed that’s full of her tall, leggy, impossibly blonde and snub-nosed friends (your Jaime Kings, your Karlie Klosses)—and thought: Hmmm, they certainly look like they are having a lovely, female-centric, wholesome time, but they also don’t look very—how to put this?—Jewish? Well, you’re not the only one! That’s right, Neo-Nazis, too, have eyes for Swift who is apparently… a Nazi?
“Taylor Swift is a pure Aryan goddess,” white supremacist blogger Andre Anglin, of hate-rag The Daily Stormer, told Broadly in a piece titled “Can’t Shake It Off: How Taylor Swift Became a Nazi Goddess.” The article tracks the rise of this peculiar fanfare, which apparently began with a Pinterest meme in which Hitler quotes were pasted onto pics of T. Swift and vice versa. The Internet, how fun!
According to the article in Vice’s Broadly, whose bloggers have stronger stomachs than I do for investigating the murky depths of the Internet, Nazis and others persons with alt-right political leanings are inspired by Swift whom they believe, once upon the throne, could “commands us to go forth and slaughter the subhuman enemies of the Aryan race.”
Said Anglin, a charmer: “[Swift is] like something out of classical Greek poetry. Athena reborn. It is also an established fact that Taylor Swift is secretly a Nazi and is simply waiting for the time when Donald Trump makes it safe for her to come out and announce her Aryan agenda to the world. Probably, she will be betrothed to Trump’s son, and they will be crowned American royalty.
“It’s incredible really that she’s surrounded by these filthy, perverted Jews, and yet she remains capable of exuding 1950s purity, femininity and innocence. She is the anti-Miley. While Miley is out having gang-bangs with colored gentlemen, she is at home with her cat reading Jane Austen.”
Obviously, these kinds of statement leads to some critical questions, to put it mildly. First of all, hasn’t Taylor Swift already been crowned American royalty? Second, go easy on Miley. Sure she’s hanging out with some questionable company, but who says she hasn’t read Jane Austen. Third, which of Donald Trump’s sons? The two older ones are both already married, and while a marriage between the 26-year-old Swift and the 10-year-old Barron Trump might emulate some of the more cynically dynastic marriages of the great European houses for which many white supremacists yearn, it sounds a bit squicky, not to mention weighted, towards reproductive challenges.
And besides, once you get rid of the Jews, who the hell do they think is going to negotiate the nuclear hellscape of that prenup?
Lastly, beside the fact that Swift is blonde and blue-eyed and disturbingly physically perfect, where exactly is the concrete evidence of Taylor’s Nazi sympathies? I hate to break it to you guys: if thinking that Kanye West acted like a jackass at the 2009 VMA’s makes you a white supremacist, then you guys might want to take a good, long look at—oh, I don’t know—President Obama.
Oh, right, apparently this began after that, in 2013, from a satiric Pinterest board made by @poopcutie, a teenager girl named Emily Pattinson, who superimposed quotes of Adolf Hitler on images of Taylor Swift as a way of making fun of the kind of inspirational meme culture that was all the rage on people’s Facebook pages back in, well, 2013. Nazis, whose rage towards the sinister Jewish invention known as “irony” was in large part a motivating factor of their weltanshauung, took this seriously, and extrapolated from there.
Not that I blame them. People are always looking for others who may be secret members of their tribe; it’s why my mother insisted Ringo Starr was Jewish for 30 years. And honestly, who knows what beast might be unleashed in Taylor Swift once the full horrors of the Trump regime are being reigned down on dissenting Americans. She might rebel and flee, she might become his Leni Riefenstahl, she might personally spirit Lena Dunham to safety across the border to Canada. Who knows? Let’s just hope we don’t have to find out.
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Rachel Shukert is the author of the memoirs Have You No Shame? and Everything Is Going To Be Great,and the novel Starstruck. She is the creator of the Netflix show The Baby-Sitters Club, and a writer on such series as GLOW and Supergirl. Her Twitter feed is @rachelshukert.