This Week in Discourse - The Incel Right Hates Taylor Swift

Plus: TikTok fights the labels, Elmo gets trauma-dumped, and the internet's dark matter

Incel Taylor Swift Conspiracies

Over the last week, the Very Online Right has worked themselves into a frenzy over Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s relationship. There are dozens of these morons spouting all kinds of theories - it’s an op by the government to promote Joe Biden. Kelce is secretly gay. Et cetera. If you’ve been online and avoided this, congratulations, because it’s been everywhere.

There’s already been an enormous number of takes on this from just about every angle. Yes, these people are sad, insecure, delusional. Yes, this is an expression of how paranoid and lost in the culture war the current political Right is, especially in the US and especially online. Yes, it’s very weird that conservatives are somehow hating on a blond country singer and a football star. Yes, the right is now losing the battle of ‘which party is more populated by weird freaks with bizarre grievances’ (which is never a given with the state of the far left).

I don’t have much unique to contribute, because there have been hundreds of takes already here. But I do want to point out one thing I haven’t seen explicitly called out yet.

Let’s look at a series of unrelated pictures:

The entire arc of this story hews so closely to the incel ‘Chad and Stacy’ meme that you’d be forgiven for thinking it was part of a script. It’s eerie.