Taylor Swift’s Liberal Attachment to Whiteness Is Scarier Than If She Were MAGA

I'm not a Taylor Swift fan. I can recognize a few of her songs, and I like "Back to December," but that came out in 2010, when she was just an up-and-coming country singer. I remember writing a couple of posts years ago about how Swift's silence on politics was deafening. Why didn't she talk about politics? As if she were obligated to. "One of the world’s biggest pop stars doesn’t want to talk about politics. Is that OK?" was a POLITICO headline.

The completely sane Rob Reiner posted in 2024 that he was busy filming the sequel to "This Is Spinal Tap," which came and went, and as much as he'd love to have a cameo by Swift, "I’d give anything for her to endorse Joe Biden. She would virtually single-handedly save American Democracy." Well, she did endorse Joe Biden, just as she endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024, calling her a "steady-handed, gifted leader." The Republic was saved, with no help from Swift.

Ben Dreyfuss posted the headline of a piece on the personal site of Dr. Melissa Fabello that's pretty amusing.

I can’t stop laughing at this headline pic.twitter.com/WmI1IcEWAm
— Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) October 16, 2025

Fabello writes:

What I want to talk about here are the criticisms that The Life of a Showgirl is a bit of a magnum opus of white supremacy. Because I neither completely agree with this take (people are saying this is a dog whistle for far-right extremism; I think that’s taking it thirteen steps too far), nor do I disagree with it (as throngs of white Swifties come out of the woodwork screaming in defense of Swift’s purity).
I think it’s complicated.
More so, I think that within that complexity is a more insidious (and therefore, more terrifying) problem: liberal white women’s ignorance of their own whiteness.
Is Taylor Swift racist? Yes.
Is she actively, explicitly anti-Black? a Trump supporter? pro-eugenics? I doubt it.
But that’s actually what worries me more: that there are so many liberal white women who move through the world never making connections between their whiteness and white supremacy.

So she's racist because she doesn't recognize her white privilege? Is that it?

Are flag-wielding, MAGA-shouting Trump supporters a problem? Yes. They’re horrifying. But the biggest obstacle in taking down fascism isn’t far-right extremists.
It’s “liberals.” It’s “progressives.” It’s “democrats.”
It’s folks with “BLM” in their bios who live in majority-white suburbs and send their kids to private school. It’s folks who claim to be allies to the queer and trans communities and then have gender-reveal parties when pregnant. It’s people who look at the United States’ descent into fascism and ask, “How did we get here?” It’s folks who compare their European ancestors’ immigrations to what Black and Brown immigrants are experiencing today, as if race is inconsequential.
It’s Taylor Swift – and the majority of her fans.
Taylor Swift is a white woman whose success relies on cultural narratives of the fragility and purity of white femininity, while practicing zero interrogation into her own whiteness.
And her fans run to her defense whenever that is criticized. “But she publicly endorsed Kamala Harris!” they press, not realizing that this proves the point: Moderate politics dressed up as leftism don’t stand a chance against far-right extremism, a lesson I wish the Democratic Party would learn.

She's a white woman whose success relies on cultural narratives of the fragility and purity of white femininity. As our own Just Mindy wrote just a couple of weeks ago, after Swift announced her engagement, femi-Nazis "can't stand that Taylor Swift is now living the American dream of marrying, babies, and settling down. They know this will inspire young women to do the same. It's their worst nightmare."

One person posted, "'leftist feminists' are crashing out. Saying Taylor Swift is a part of the 'alt right pipeline,' and she is 'trad wife coded' and she’s 'giving Nazi vibes' all because she wants to do normal human woman things" like get married and have kids.

I was dying to know what Fabello's doctorate was in, so I checked her bio:

MELISSA A. FABELLO, PHD is a sex and relationships educator who uses her backgrounds in educational theory, developmental psychology, holistic life coaching, and sexuality research to help you be in right relationship to yourself and others. In her one-on-one coaching work, she helps you clarify your values, own your truth, and build new relational skills. As a queer femme, she believes deeply in the power of community care, which is what her work is rooted in.

No, it's not a brilliant satire of liberalism.

These people are certifiable.
— Smoke yer Joyful Cheap Fake (@Jlisa42067) October 16, 2025

The author’s bio had my crying. Could not believe it was not parody https://t.co/jH7DL7lEtm
— Onepingonlyplease (@VassilyVibrant) October 16, 2025

Good thing the author persevered through her PhD, the degree gives this article the gravitas that would not otherwise be warranted.

I have been repeatedly told that AI would be replacing white-collar jobs, but there appear to be jobs that even LLMs won’t do.
— DarkAdapted (@DarkAdapted) October 16, 2025

Against my better judgment, I looked up her website and IG.

Well, that was certainly interesting. I'm now going to go wash my eyes out. pic.twitter.com/DVznc0tY5k
— VNext Jim (@VNextJim) October 16, 2025

But the author has a PhD in her byline! How could she be wrong?
— John Carney (@carney) October 16, 2025

Ms Fabello was the editor of Everyday Feminism. Being a middle-class woman, she lives "in a marginalised body that experiences the trauma of oppression." Her seemingly endless neuroticism can be inadvertently entertaining. See, for instance, link below. https://t.co/V5u1CbZP83
— David Thompson (@ThompsonItIsHe) October 16, 2025

I won't bother looking up in which field she acquired a PhD, because I'm sure it must be something like electrical engineering or particle physics.
— Bobby Shaftoe (@robertshaftoe41) October 16, 2025