Who can forget when an NBC reporter, interviewing unexpected NASCAR winner Brandon Brown after the race, tried to gaslight viewers hearing the loud chorus of “F--- Joe Biden” chants from the crowd in the stands by saying, “As you can hear the chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s Go Brandon.’” This spawned LGB memorabilia and an unforgettable rap.
During Super Bowl Sunday night on Fox, when famous singer Taylor Swift, girlfriend of Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and seated at the game, was shown on the big screen, the crowd erupted into a loud chorus of boos. The angle from the announcers of the game (Kevin Burkhardt and Tom Brady) was that there were more Eagles fans in the stadium than Chiefs fans. CBS Sports had the same take. But on conservative media such as Instapundit, the loud booing was attributed to something else: Swift’s prominent endorsement of Kamala Harris in the presidential election. (Yes, Swift was pressured by the left to do it, but in the words of Glenn Reynolds of the Instapundit, “She chose...poorly.”) So who is right?
First of all, the same crowd enthusiastically cheered for President Trump. Furthermore, as far as I can recall, at last year’s Super Bowl, also with the Chiefs playing, Swift wasn’t audibly booed even by a subset of the crowd. I don’t recall any other celebrity rooting for either team in any Super Bowl being so loudly booed. Swift is not the first celebrity attending a Super Bowl to be the girlfriend of a player, either. So if sports analysts are going to speculate on the cause of the booing and state it as fact, a better guess would be her Kamala endorsement.
This looks like yet another example of sports networks and sites gaslighting the viewers and readers to avoid stating that which must not be said. Let them pay with the next Let’s Go Brandon variation. Funny, but Swift has a song called “Let's Go (Battle).” Maybe “Daylight” becomes “Gaslight.” I’m sure the readers can come up with something clever.
W.A. Eliot is a pseudonym.
Image: Eva Rinaldi via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.