Taylor Swift is fully in her 2017 mood, and that’s a mood which includes hissing and lashing out at anyone who has ever wronged her, or even thought about wronging her, from a series of hidden digs in her music videos to just all out threatening to sue bloggers for comparing her to Hitler.
The offensive blog in question is PopFront, where writer Meghan Herning called on Taylor Swift to condemn the white supremacists who have adopted her as their white power pop idol. In a story titled: “Swiftly to the alt-right: Taylor subtly gets the lower case kkk in formation,” Meghan wrote: “Taylor’s silence is not innocent, it is calculated. She needs to state her beliefs out loud for the world — no matter what fan base she might lose, because in America 2017, silence in the face of injustice means support for the oppressor.”
She goes on to compare shoes of a leather-clad, dominatrix style TSwift in the Look What You Made Me Do video to images of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, calling the similarities “uncanny and unsettling”. Taylor’s lyrics have previously been embraced by alt-right (read: white supremacist leaning) websites The Daily Stormer and Breitbart.
And unsurprisingly, Taylor isn’t happy about what it’s doing to her Reputation. Her lawyers sent the writer a letter (which Meghan swiftly posted online) threatening legal action if the blog wasn’t removed. In the letter Taylor’s lawyers called the blog “a malicious attack against Ms. Swift that goes to great lengths to portray Ms. Swift as some sort of white supremacist figurehead”.
The American Civil Liberties Union have criticised Taylor and her lawyers owing to the fact that opinion pieces are covered under America’s First Amendment rights. In a defence letter the ACLU said: “Ms. Herning and PopFront will not in any way accede to your attempt to suppress their constitutionally protected speech.”