Since the 34-year old singer began her high-profile relationship with Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce in September last year, conspiracy theories spouted by prominent MAGA figures have circulated online. They started off rather innocently — the misinformation accused the pair of entering a ‘fake’ relationship to boost their public profile (like Taylor needs that?).

Earlier this week, the accusations turned insidious and political, with a handful of influential right-wing personalities calling Swift an “election interference psyop” set on manipulating November’s presidential election. 

Swift has attended over 13-games to cheer on her boyfriend’s team and each time, a parade of cameras and commentaries descend on her every reaction. As their relationship played out publicly, some conspiracy theorists couldn’t help but slump into misogynistic trappings. 

On Monday, Jack Posobiec, a Trump supported who has been found to have “collaborated with white supremacists, neo-fascists and antisemites for years”, accused Swift of being “used”, though he failed to clarify whom she was being used by. 

“I think – and I’ve said this, I’ve taken a lot of crap for this online – I think they’re using Taylor Swift right now,” he said in a video posted on Truth Social. 

“They’re gearing up for an operation to use Taylor Swift in the election against everything: against Trump, for Biden, they’re gonna get her and all you know they call them the Swifties they’re going to turn those into voters, you watch.”

Former actor-turned controversial rightwing figure Roseanne Barr appeared alongside Posobiec in the video, saying, “I think that’s what they’re doing too, she’s definitely somebody who’s consented to speak the way the establishment wants to be spoken of.” 

“She has a lot of young girls…I think that’s gonna be the way they’re going to try to get on top of the next election.” 

The 71-year old former Nanny star and 2012 presidential nominee of the Peace and Freedom Party is a Trump supporter, appearing at a rally in Florida in November, calling the Former President the “Magador-in-Chief.”

Former Republican presidential candidate and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy responded to Posobiec’s post, writing on X: “I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.”

Ramaswamy has spread harmful misinformation about a number of issues in the past, including his claim that the January 6 insurrection was “an inside job” and that the 2020 election was stolen by “big tech.” 

Self-described Islamophobe and conservative Laura Loomer said “The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open.”

“It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion GOTV Campaign.”

Meanwhile, comedians have come out to ridicule these rightwing theories. On Tuesday night, Jimmy Kimmel opened his show with a monologue calling the theorists “a couple of nuts.”

Reading out a number of tweets, including one from Ramaswamy, Kimmel quibbed: 

“So let me get this straight: The same people who think Joe Biden has dementia and has Kamala Harris feed him butterscotch tapioca every night, also believe that he has somehow planned and executed a diabolically brilliant scheme to fix the NFL playoffs so the biggest pop star in the world can pop up on the jumbotron during the Super Bowl in between a Kia and a Tostitos commercial to hypnotize her 11-year-old fans into voting for Joe Biden?” he said on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

“I mean, it makes sense… These people think football is fake and wrestling is real.”

Swift has not yet issued an endorsement in the upcoming presidential race, though she is reported to be on Joe Biden aides’ “wish lists of potential surrogates”. 

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Braverman, who belongs to the right faction of the Conservative Party, was criticised for expressing her views in an article she wrote for Times of London last week where she accused the police of “play[ing] favourites when it comes to protesters” and turning a blind eye to “pro-Palestinian mobs” who she descried as “hate marchers”.

On Saturday, a huge pro-Palestinian rally was attended by hundreds of thousands of people in London. Police said up to 145 protesters were arrested, while nine officers were injured. 

In her article, Braverman said the rally was not “merely a cry for help for Gaza” but “an assertion of primacy by certain groups — particularly Islamists — of the kind we are more used to seeing in Northern Ireland.”

She accused the police of a “double standard” in the way they managed the protests. 

“Right-wing and nationalist protesters who engage in aggression are rightly met with a stern response yet pro-Palestinian mobs displaying almost identical behaviour are largely ignored, even when clearly breaking the law,” she wrote.

The prime minister’s office had not approved the article in advance as is standard practice, causing many to continue their calls on Sunak to fire Braverman.

As Home Secretary, the 43-year old former barrister had one of the most senior jobs in government, responsible for managing immigration and policing.

Media commentators predict Braverman’s sacking will further rupture the tension already brewing within the Conservative Party’s right wing faction. 

On Monday, Braverman said “it has been the greatest privilege of my life to serve as home secretary”, adding that she will “have more to say in due course.”

Controversial figure

Braverman has previously run for the Conservative Party leadership, campaigning on hard-right platitudes against asylum seekers, homeless people and the expansion of charities. 

Last month, she called migration a “hurricane” that would bring “millions more immigrants to these shores, uncontrolled and unmanageable”.

In her keynote speech to the governing party’s annual conference in Manchester, she said that UK governments had been “far too squeamish about being smeared as racist to properly bring order to the chaos.”

Conservatives, she said, would give Britain “strong borders.”

She also said that the Human Rights Act should be called the “Criminal Rights Act.” 

“Our country has become enmeshed in a dense net of international rules that were designed for another era,” she said. 

“And it is Labour that turbocharged their impact by passing the misnamed Human Rights Act. “I’m surprised they didn’t call it the ‘Criminal Rights Act’.”

“Highly controversial ideas are presented to the workforce and to the public as if they’re motherhood and apple pie: gender ideology, white privilege, anti-British history,” she added. “And the evidence demonstrates that if you don’t challenge this poison, things just get worse.”

Around the same time, Braverman appeared on Sky News to express her transphobic views after the health secretary announced that sex-specific language would be used when dealing with women’s health, and that proposals were in place to ban transgender women from being treated in female hospital wards in England. 

“Trans women have no place in women’s wards or indeed any safe space relating to biological women,” Braverman said. 

“The Health Secretary is absolutely right to clarify and make it clear that biological men should not have treatment in the same wards as biological women. This is about protecting women’s dignity and women’s safety and privacy. Therefore I am incredibly supportive and welcome the announcement today by the Health Secretary.”

Earlier this month, Braverman announced plans to establish a civil offence to deter charities from giving tents to homeless people. She suggested imposing restrictions on charities that give tents to people living on the streets. She posted on X: “We cannot allow our streets to be taken over by rows of tents occupied by people, many of them from abroad, living on the streets as a lifestyle choice.”

Braverman was thoroughly condemned for these views – a joint letter composed by UK charities including Crisis, Centrepoint, St Mungo’s and Pathway read: “Sleeping on the street is not a lifestyle choice. Laying blame with people forced to sleep rough will only push people further away from help into poverty, putting them at risk of exploitation. At the extreme end, we will see an increase in deaths and fatalities, which are totally preventable.”

Sunak has appointed former foreign secretary James Cleverly as the new Home Secretary. 

So who is the new foreign secretary? 

David Cameron. Yes. That David Cameron. The former PM, who led led the government between 2010 and 2016. 

In a statement, Cameron said Britain was “facing a daunting set of international challenges, including the war in Ukraine and the crisis in the Middle East.”

“While I have been out of front-line politics for the last seven years, I hope that my experience — as Conservative leader for 11 years and prime minister for six — will assist me in helping the prime minister to meet these vital challenges,” he said. 

“I’ve decided to join this team because I believe Rishi Sunak is a good prime minister doing a difficult job at a hard time. I want to support him.”

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Terrible tragedies test leaders to the full. Anyone watching from afar must be impressed with the way in which Jacinda Ardern has dealt with the aftermath of the Christchurch horror.

Ardern has kept her shocked population regularly updated, walked the talk in her embrace of the country’s Muslim community, flagged policy changes in relation New Zealand’s gun laws. She’s radiated deep compassion while publicly holding her emotions under control.

Friday’s atrocity would inevitably hit Australians hard, given the two countries’ “family” relationship. But we’ve been dragged much closer to it because the white supremacist perpetrator is an Australian.

On top of that, a federal politician has made appalling and shameful comments.

Senator Fraser Anning, ex-One Nation, who became notorious for using the words “final solution” when urging a popular vote on immigration, in his Friday statement declared Islam “the religious equivalent of fascism”, and said that “just because the followers of this savage belief were not the killers in this instance, does not make them blameless”.

A day later, when he was he was “egged” by a 17-year-old while appearing in Melbourne, Anning knocked the youth to the ground.

Unsurprisingly, some would have liked to see Anning expelled from the Senate for his comments.

The Senate doesn’t have the power to throw him out, but it would be a bad course anyway, setting an unfortunate precedent as well as making him a martyr in the eyes of the extreme right.

The voters will dispatch him soon. Before that, the Senate will denounce him, with government and opposition releasing a bipartisan motion on Sunday for when parliament resumes on April 2 for its final week.

The motion censures Anning “for his inflammatory and divisive comments seeking to attribute blame to victims of a horrific crime and to vilify people on the basis of religion”.

It also “calls on all Australians to stand against hate and to publicly, and always, condemn actions and comments designed to incite fear and distrust”.

“Standing against hate” requires robust leadership from the politicians.

Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten have done what they should, and what you’d expect, in the immediate wake of the NZ attack.

Morrison’s language was direct and accurate, describing the assailant as “an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist”.

The Prime Minister and Opposition leader, and other leading politicians attended gatherings of the Muslim community.

Morrison signalled that the big internet companies need to act, after the gunman’s live streaming took time to be removed.

But is this enough? The NZ attack has opened debate about extremism and what is likely to give or deny it succour in this country.

The countering of extremism of all sorts demands action on many fronts. One of them goes to political culture – that politicians should eschew the low road that self-interest too often leads them to take. The same, incidentally, should go for those in the media.

We must put in a reality check here: history tells us it is impossible to guard absolutely against attacks from fanatics of whatever variety.

And we have to recognise also that in this battle the internet, for all its virtues, is a formidable enemy. It fertilises the spread of extremist ideologies of all brands. It both enables and encourages unbridled outpourings of hate.

Those with extreme views and seeking attention have a communications route and reach inconceivable when there was little more than the mainstream media, with its filters.

The internet is the convenient medium but it’s today’s political climate that is providing the environment for intolerant views to be given wider expression and greater legitimacy.

The culture wars and identity politics, favoured by right and left respectively, have sliced and diced the community, fracturing it rather than uniting it.

They rewrite the past, define the present, and poison the future.

The resulting conflicts and divisions are frequently marked by a degree of intensity and absolutism that carries risks for the public good.

In recent years politicians and commentators on the right have become preoccupied with what they see as restrictions on free speech.

But the commitment to “free speech”, admirable in itself, becomes dangerous when it morphs into a cover for hate speech or the targeting of minorities.

The Coalition government has itself been torn on the issue, as shown by its internal tensions over section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

Now we have its chopping and changing on an entry visa for provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos for a speaking tour.

Despite the Home Affairs department telling Yiannopoulos he might not pass the “character test”, Immigration Minister David Coleman, granted him the visa.

But following Yiannopoulos posting an offensive comment about the NZ attack, Coleman announced at the weekend he would not be allowed to come.

An increasingly polarised media has seen the right wing commentariat become more strident and minor political players from the far right gain inflated prominence.

Immigration has always been a sensitive issue and successive waves of migrants have had their adjustment challenges. But immigration has become infused with ideology, and often a lightning rod for cultural complaint and bigotry, open or thinly disguised.

Discussion of immigration these days focuses minimally on its nation-building side, and frequently homes in on Muslims, stoking fears both of and in that community.

Among the mainstream right of politics, fuelling them-versus-us sentiments has been widely used as a political tactic.

This has been seen in the government’s blatant exaggeration of the consequences that could flow from the legislation passed by parliament to facilitate medical transfers from Manus and Nauru, and in its targeting of Labor’s plans to boost the refugee intake.

Earlier there was Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton’s extraordinary claim that Victorians were “scared to go out to restaurants” because of “African gang violence”.

Bile flows freely when shock jocks get together with their political favourites, a regular feature of the airways today.

Australia has always had a particularly robust brand of adversarial politics but it has reached the stage where it is in desperate need of some tempering and self-discipline from political offenders.

The desirable immigration level, the appropriate size of the refuge intake, and the like are legitimate matters for vigorous debate. But politicians (and media) should conduct those arguments much more responsibly than at present if they are serious about “standing against hate”.

A multicultural society will always require careful curation. It needs constant vigilance, general restraint and the avoidance of inflammatory language and claims for short-term political gain.

It’s no good being inclusive one day and shrill and politically expedient on another.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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