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Time Names Taylor Swift 'Person Of The Year,' Enraging Far Right

Time Names Taylor Swift 'Person Of The Year,' Enraging Far Right

Taylor Swift is Time magazine’s person of the year, a choice that makes perfect sense. Swift’s Eras Tour is on track to break global records for tour earnings. A concert film also smashed records for that genre and provided the AMC movie theater chain with its highest single-day ticket sales ever. She was Spotify's most-streamed artist globally for 2023, following three years in which Bad Bunny took that title. Swift’s romance with NFL player Travis Kelce has increased ratings for Kansas City Chiefs football games while sales of his jersey spiked by 400 percent. She is as dominant a figure as they come these days—exactly what Time’s person of the year is supposed to recognize.

Prominent far-right influencers are very unhappy. “And just like clockwork, @taylorswift13 (as I warned you all about) is being further activated by the media and the Democrats to interfere in the 2024 election,” Laura Loomer tweeted, tying it back to her earlier just-asking-questions conspiracy theory: “Has @taylorswift13 made a deal with George Soros and Alex Soros to get the rights to her music back in exchange for getting Zoomers registered to vote Democrat against President Trump ahead of the 2024 Presidential election?” (This is a particularly odd theory given that Swift has spent years rerecording her early albums to reclaim ownership.)

Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec also weighed in. “The Taylor Swift girlboss psyop has been fully activated. From her hand-selected vaccine shill boyfriend to her DINK lifestyle to her upcoming 2024 voter operation for Democrats on abortion rights,” he tweeted. “It’s all coming.”

Posobiec also offered up the Soros conspiracy theory: “Thinking about when Taylor Swift called out the Soros family in 2019 for buying the rights to her music and then how she came out a super liberal in 2020.”

Time’s person of the year interview with Swift makes clear just how ridiculous this idea is of her as a Soros puppet—or anyone’s puppet. Swift is forceful and direct. She is very much a person who knows her own mind and is charting her own course. Again, this is someone who responded to the loss of control of her artistic product by rerecording it over a period of years while continuing to put out new music and then launching one of the biggest, if not the biggest, tours of all time.

In the interview, Swift models support for other highly successful women in entertainment, refusing to be drawn into competition. She described her tour, Beyoncé’s tour, and Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” movie as ”a three-part summer of feminine extravaganza.” She praises both Gerwig and Beyoncé, in particular the latter:

“She’s the most precious gem of a person—warm and open and funny,” Swift says. “And she’s such a great disrupter of music-industry norms. She taught every artist how to flip the table and challenge archaic business practices.” That her tour and Beyoncé’s were frequently juxtaposed is vexing. “There were so many stadium tours this summer, but the only ones that were compared were me and Beyoncé,” she says. “Clearly it’s very lucrative for the media and stan culture to pit two women against each other, even when those two artists in question refuse to participate in that discussion.”

Swift even offered an analysis of how gender is at play in the economics of popular culture. This is not some blank slate being “activated” by the media/Democrats/Soros. She’s not just a singer and performer: She’s a songwriter and a major entrepreneur. At just 33 years old, she’s been navigating fame for more than 15 years. In that time has she learned an enormous amount about how the public responds to what she says and does.

Take her relationship with Kelce, another target of right-wing rage. Before the relationship went public, she told Time, “we actually had a significant amount of time that no one knew, which I’m grateful for, because we got to get to know each other. By the time I went to that first game, we were a couple. I think some people think that they saw our first date at that game? We would never be psychotic enough to hard launch a first date.” This is someone who has from a very early age had to see every detail of her life through the filter of how it might be reported and how her fans and haters might react. If she didn’t have an enormous amount of self-knowledge, she would not be the star she is, because she would have crashed and burned.

People like Posobiec and Loomer, who see everything as a conspiracy, look at Swift and see only a conventionally attractive young woman and pop star and simply cannot wrap their heads around any of that. But even if you’re not especially a Swift fan (here I raise my hand), any assessment of her that’s grounded in reality has to acknowledge her intelligence and independence.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Sean Hannity

How Fox Presents The Network's Tainted 'Talent' To Media Buyers

Fox Corp. gave their upfront presentation yesterday in midtown Manhattan. Outside the event, several protests gathered, including striking writers from the Writers’ Guild of America as well as anti-Fox protesters calling for advertisers to defund Fox News.

Inside the event, Fox reportedly deprived their guests of chairs as Gordon Ramsay dropped f-bombs and former NFL tight end Rob Gronkowski botched an ad pitch from Fox Sports’ Erin Andrews.

Fox News personalities were also featured in the presentation, including some of the network’s most extreme personalities such as Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Jeanine Pirro, among others. As Fox attempts to clean up the wreckage of a historic defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, they are simultaneously attempting to downplay the network’s extremism by promoting digital properties like Tubi, Fox Nation, and Fox Weather while also injecting right-wing propagandists on Fox News to signal that the company does not intend to deviate from its tried and true business model of sacrificing democracy for cable news ratings.

Fox is having an identity crisis across its various platforms. Last quarter the company posted a loss as a result of their $787 million defamation settlement. They’re currently also facing: an ongoing writers’ strike, a “soft advertising market” and the never ending cord cutting trend that only continues to get worse, and fallout from the unceremonious firing of their star Tucker Carlson that has tanked Fox News’ primetime ratings.

Despite all this, Lachlan Murdoch told investors last week that Carlson’s departure will not change “programming strategy at Fox News,” an indication that advertisers and cable providers should expect more of the same on the network.

And, indeed, Fox’s presentation to media buyers on Monday afternoon in New York City featured an appearance from a Fox News personality who bore significant responsibility for the lies that led to that defamation settlement.

Here’s some of just the recent commentary from Fox News personalities featured in the upfronts pitch.

The Five

The Five is Fox News’ top-rated show. It features a roundtable discussion among the most unhinged hosts at the network, including Greg Gutfeld, Jesse Watters, and Jeanine Pirro. All three hosts, in addition to Jessica Tarlov, who is a rotating liberal host on the show, were featured via a live feed during the upfronts presentation. In addition to his role on The Five, Jesse Watters hosts the 7 PM hour solo, and Gutfeld is host of the 11 PM hour on Fox, a program that is the network’s stab at a late-night talk show.

Jeanine Pirro was a key figure in Fox’s peddling of election conspiracy theories after the 2020 election. Emails disclosed via Dominion Voting Systems' lawsuit against Fox News review that Pirro's executive producer Jerry Andrews called her “just as nuts” as Sidney Powell, then-Trump's lawyer that was behind some of the most ludicrous lies told by his campaign. At the time, Pirro had recently hosted Powell on her show, during which she and her guest pushed lies about Dominion. Pirro pushed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election even after Fox's own “Brain Room” had debunked them.

According to Variety, Greg Gutfeld’s attempt at humor regarding the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike fell flat among the crowd.

Here are some recent eyebrow-raising clips from these personalities.

  • On May 15, Gutfeld said that Democrats are lying about the threat of white supremacy to “keep Blacks angry.”
  • In April, Gutfeld said climate change “improves people's lives.”
  • In March, Gutfeld suggested that “white leftists do worse things to Blacks than the Aryan Nations ever could.”
  • Gutfeld said in January it’s time to tell the homeless, “You don’t get to live with us.”
  • Gutfeld suggested that President Joe Biden is hiding “Barack Obama’s real birth certificate” and using it for blackmail against “Black males.”
  • On May 15, Jesse Watters said on The Five that Black Americans should be more concerned with “absent fathers, education issues” than with white supremacist mass shooters.
  • Watters said that “women are in their prime in their late teens” while mocking former CNN host Don Lemon.
  • During Black History Month, Watters said the “people who financed it” deserve credit for American infrastructure built by slaves.
  • Watters suggested burning squatters alive.
  • Watters accused teachers of “poisoning” and “trying to destroy” children because “the teachers have daddy issues.”
  • In January, Jeanine Pirro proclaimed that George Soros is “behind the destruction of law and order in America.”
  • Pirro argued that Nazism and white supremacy should be allowed on social media platforms.
  • In November, Pirro argued that “Holocaust deniers,” “hate speech,” and Sandy Hook truthers should be allowed on Twitter.
  • Pirro said that “we are living in a fascist state” because the media won’t cover Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Dana Perino and Bill Hemmer

Dana Perino and Bill Hemmer were featured as “straight news” personalities during the upfronts presentation. They are co-anchors of America’s Newsroom, where they both frequently push tepid right-wing talking points, blurring the line between news and opinion. Perino is also a co-host of The Five.

  • During a March edition of The Five, Perino struggled to define the word woke: “It could be a feeling, it could be a sense.”
  • Perino and her co-hosts on The Five attacked unhoused people for washing their clothes.
  • In September 2022, Perino said we should “involuntarily commit” the homeless.
  • In June 2022, Perino said she is “concerned” Americans won’t be “allowed to celebrate” the Fourth of July soon.
  • Perino suggested that the January 6 committee hearings were meant to “distract from other issues.”
  • Bill Hemmer attacked Disney for opposing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” bill, asserting that there was “leaked video now of Disney execs unveil efforts to push the company's woke agenda.”
  • In July, Hemmer suggested that federal gun legislation would not have helped stop a mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois.
  • In November 2021, Hemmer helped spread a baseless anti-vaccine rumor while on air.
  • In February 2021, Hemmer allowed former President Donald Trump to push lies about the 2020 election.
  • Following the 2020 election, Hemmer continuously supported Trump’s election challenges.

Sean Hannity

Reporting indicates that Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham were featured in the Fox News “sizzle reel” presented to advertisers and media buyers during the upfront presentation, “though primetime was decidedly not a focus of the presentation, with the 2024 election instead taking center stage.” Hannity and Ingraham have a long track record at Fox and elsewhere in right-wing media of extreme commentary.

Sean Hannity has been the poster boy for right-wing conspiracy theories and bigotry since Fox News Channel launched in 1996. He was a major booster of Trump’s election conspiracy theories and a singularly important driver of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. Here are some of his most extreme recent comments.

  • Hannity called for the arrest of Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
  • On his radio show, he said Trump should have pardoned himself and his family before leaving office.
  • He blamed Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse on “an obsessive company-wide focus on race, gender, sexual orientation.”
  • In February, Hannity endorsed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) call for banning “people who move from blue states to red states from voting for five years.”
  • He said in January that “vaccines and boosters do not work as they have told us.”
  • Hannity compared vaping Juul pods to giving children the COVID-19 vaccine.
  • To stop mass shootings, Hannity argued for “tax breaks” for armed military and police officers who work for free patrolling schools.

Laura Ingraham

Laura Ingraham is an anti-immigrant extremist and a propagator of hate, lies, and misinformation. She’s used her platform on the network to attack school shooting survivors and murder victims. Here are recent examples of extremism on her Fox show, The Ingraham Angle:

  • On May 11, Ingraham said an “untold” number of Americans “will lose their lives” because of immigration.”
  • She said the Biden administration is encouraging border crossings “to fundamentally change America.”
  • Ingraham told her audience that coverage of the Allen, Texas, shooting was a “bloody electoral strategy” by the Democrats.
  • She recently said Democrats want to put conservatives “in a camp.”
  • Ingraham defended Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas after reports that he received lavish gifts from a major Republican donor.
  • She compared Trump’s indictment in New York to “Stalin’s purges.”
  • Ingraham claimed that Trump’s indictment was a distraction from the school shooting in Nashville.
  • She called January 6 rioters “old ladies walking through the halls of Congress taking selfies.”
  • Ingraham and her guest Sen. Josh Hawley attempted to connect gender-affirming care to the Nashville shooting.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Boebert

Boebert Burned For Whining About Black 'National Anthem' At Superbowl

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) boisterously complained about the "Black National Anthem" being played at Super Bowl LVII on Sunday.

"America only has ONE NATIONAL ANTHEM," Boebert tweeted. "Why is the NFL trying to divide us by playing multiple!? Do football, not wokeness."

The song, Lift Every Voice and Sing, will be performed by Abbott Elementary star Sheryl Lee Ralph and had its National Football League debut at the 2020 season's inaugural game. It was then reaired ahead of Super Bowl LV on February 7th, 2021. It was also broadcast before every match this year.

"Often referred to as 'The Black National Anthem,' Lift Every Voice and Sing was a hymn written as a poem by NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson in 1900. His brother, John Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954), composed the music for the lyrics. A choir of 500 schoolchildren at the segregated Stanton School, where James Weldon Johnson was principal, first performed the song in public in Jacksonville, Florida to celebrate President Abraham Lincoln's birthday," the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) explains on its website. "At the turn of the 20th century, Johnson's lyrics eloquently captured the solemn yet hopeful appeal for the liberty of Black Americans. Set against the religious invocation of God and the promise of freedom, the song was later adopted by NAACP and prominently used as a rallying cry during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s."

Twitter users relentlessly trolled Boebert and her remarks.

Jay Black: "There world hasn’t heard whining like this since the waiting room at the gastroenterologist after your dumdum gun restaurant served pork sliders."

Ty-22: "Speaking of wokeness: - Ron DeSantis is so woke he wants school girls' menstrual info recorded by the school staff. - Ron DeSantis wanna ban books for school kids but not AR-15. Ron DeSantis wanted to ban Disney (backfired). Sen Scott wanna ban Medicare & Social Security."

Honest sports takes: "The American national anthem is not representative of all Americans, it is representative of white Americans."

Chidi: "Karen wants to speak to the NFL manager. Go find a safe space"

Tom Bonier: "Two thoughts: 1) You came within a few hundred votes of losing last year, and will face less favorable turnout in a presidential year. You may want to reconsider your positioning. 2) It seems like you're the one being divisive here."

Tony Posnanski: "All Americans can agree that you can go f*ck yourself."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Second Woman Says Walker 'Pressured' Her To Get Abortion (VIDEO)

Second Woman Says Walker 'Pressured' Her To Get Abortion (VIDEO)

Georgia GOP Senate nominee Herschel Walker “pressured” his extramarital girlfriend of six years to have an abortion when she accidentally became pregnant, and when she left the clinic unable to go through with the procedure he drove her the next day, gave her cash, and waited outside for hours to ensure she got the abortion he wanted, according to attorney Gloria Allred.

“Herschel Walker says he is against women having abortions, but he pressured me to have one,” the woman, identified only as “Jane Doe,” says in audio Allred released.

Allred held a press conference Wednesday afternoon featuring the woman she says was the former NFL star’s girlfriend.

“I am coming forward now, because I saw Herschel deny the allegations by another woman who claimed that he had paid for her abortion, and particularly I saw him state that the woman’s claims were not true, because he never signed any cards using the letter ‘H’,'” says “Jane Doe” in the audio. “I knew that was not true because he had often signed letters to me using ‘H.'”

“Jane Doe” says she voted for Trump, is a registered independent, and is urging voters to not elect Herschel Walker.

“I am a registered independent and I voted for Donald Trump in both elections. I do not believe that Herschel is morally fit to be a U.S. senator,” she says. “And that is the reason why I am speaking up and providing proof.”

“In April of 1993, our client learned that she was pregnant,” Allred told reporters. “She was surprised. She had been on birth control throughout their entire relationship. When she told Mr. Walker that she was pregnant, he seemed shocked. She didn’t know what to do. Mr. Walker clearly wanted her to have an abortion and convinced her to do so. Our client alleges that Mr. Walker gave her cash to pay for the abortion and that she went to a clinic in Dallas, Texas. However, while she was at the clinic, she became overwhelmed with emotion. She could not go through with it, and she left the clinic in tears when Mr. Walker called that pressured her to go back to the clinic with him the next day to go through with the abortion. The following day, Mr. Walker drove her to the clinic and waited in the parking lot for hours until the abortion was completed,” Allred says.

“At the time,” of Walker’s girlfriend’s abortion, “Herschel Walker was married and having an ongoing affair with the woman,” says former federal prosecutor Ron Filipowski, who tracks the far right.

Allred also held up what she said was a photo of Herschel Walker in her client’s Minnesota hotel room, “on the bed.”


In that press conference she also played audio of a voicemail she alleges is from Herschel Walker, who is now the Republican Senate nominee from Georgia, running against Democratic U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock.


Reprinted with permission from Alternet.