Taylor Swift has many titles: cultural juggernaut; international pop star; billionaire businesswoman. She can now add MAGA conspiracy theory target to the list.

Far-right internet personalities and even a former Republican presidential candidate are spreading the notion that something is not quite right with Swift’s relationship with Kansas City Chiefs star player Travis Kelce — and that somehow the Super Bowl is rigged and it’s all leading up to a Swift presidential endorsement of Joe Biden.

Swift was once famously politics-averse, but she inched into the arena in 2018 when she endorsed Tennessee Democratic Senate candidate Phil Bredesen, and then she backed Biden in 2020. That may have first soured some conservatives on Swift, but in recent days, the right has seemingly launched a full-bore attack on her. It seems like incredibly foolish politics, particularly as the gender gap grows and Republican support with suburban women erodes.

To explore how Swift’s influence has grown and how the attacks could backfire on the GOP, POLITICO Magazine reached out to Brian Donovan, a University of Kansas professor who teaches a popular college course called “The Sociology of Taylor Swift.”

“The Swiftie fan is arguably the most immersive and intense fandom in the U.S. right now,” Donovan said. “And to anger them is just political folly. They are a political force that I don't think anyone really should mess with.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why is Taylor Swift suddenly at the center of the political conversation?

I think there is a cyclical reaction happening where we saw with the Barbie movie and with the Eras Tour, a kind of woman-centered cultural aesthetic take hold of the American imagination. And I think there's a ton of backlash to that driven by real basic sexism and misogyny.

If you look at the history of Taylor Swift, if you go back 10 or 12 years, her main critics were actually coming from the left. There was a feminist discourse that argued that she was too heteronormative, that she is supporting the patriarchy by writing these love songs with a straightforward, boy-meets-girl, happily-ever-after kind of narrative. So you would think that the right would embrace that. And for a while, when Taylor was more quiet about her politics, they had this notion that she was secretly one of them. You saw this in around 2017, 2018 when literal Nazis like Andrew Anglin or folks from the GamerGate community like Milo Yiannopoulos, were posting these memes that were suggesting that Taylor was secretly a white supremacist.

And so the fact that she had this political coming out in 2018, and started to embrace leftist causes, that was the first moment when the right rejected her. And as she gained cultural power over the last year, I think that's made her an easy target. You would think that her dating a football star would be something that would be........

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