Here’s a promise I’ll make to you good people: I won’t pepper this column with inane puns referencing the inane song titles from Taylor Swift’s musical catalog, as so many other entries across the web have done amid this latest corporate-media-imposed tidal wave of publicity deluging America.

It’s the least I can do, since I feel guilty enough dragging this subject in front of your eyes.

Because we are utterly awash in Taylor Swift, and — but for all the insidious, sinister, and yet painfully obvious reasons we’ll discuss below — there is no good reason for it.

You cannot get any less banal and contrived than the mediagasm that erupted over the last couple of weeks over Swift’s flirtation (for lack of something better to call it) with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. She showed up in a suite at a Chiefs’ home game a couple of times, with some celebrity hangers-on in tow, and we were subjected to this:

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s mom Donna embracing at the Chiefs vs Jets game.pic.twitter.com/izYCXwXRG7

— Examiners Club. (@examinersclub) October 2, 2023

Not to mention this:

Sauce Gardner implied that the NFL is favoring the #Chiefs due to the huge crowd that Taylor Swift has been drawing to the league.

Mostly everybody agrees that the #Jets were screwed last night by the refs, and keeping the “swifties” undefeated has been a huge story the NFL has… pic.twitter.com/ZjiJv21BHz

— NFL Notifications (@NFLNotify) October 2, 2023

In case you didn’t pick up on that, the NFL’s Instagram actually called the Chiefs “swifties” and implied that Taylor Swift is the reason they’ve won their last two games.

Obnoxious. Look how awfully NBC behaved in promoting this branded event disguised as a football game:

NBC used Carson Daly and ‘The Voice’ to provide a Taylor Swift-themed explanation for tonight’s game:pic.twitter.com/Ig6XGYEymL

— Front Office Sports (@FOS) October 2, 2023

This is utterly beneath contempt. It’s so contrived and fake that it turns the stomach. But it’s everywhere, and it clearly works:

“We Taylor-gated.”

Wherever Taylor Swift goes, fans follow. Swifties descended on MetLife Stadium, where the singer was in attendance for Sunday's game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the New York Jets. Everyone was dressed for the occasion. https://t.co/hpYFB03pOG pic.twitter.com/Ouiq7AbHKC

— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 2, 2023

And it’s commercialized to the gills, as you knew it would be:

????️ | The Area shorts Taylor Swift wore to the Chiefs vs Jets game have now sold out online! pic.twitter.com/lMo7nKpVF4

— Taylor Swift News ???? (@TSwiftNZ) October 2, 2023

So, naturally, the stupid people deployed by Disney’s corporate media machine had to declare that the nation is now obsessed with Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift:

PUBLIC’S OBSESSION WITH TAYLOR & TRAVIS? #TheView co-hosts weigh in after Taylor Swift and her famous friends cheered on Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce when they faced off against the New York Jets. https://t.co/cVclFZQmjA pic.twitter.com/0ocz8sB7SM

— The View (@TheView) October 2, 2023

And the Chiefs knocked off the Jets on — surprise! — a terrible call.

Barstool Sports’ Kelly Keegs was rightly irritated by this, and she braved the wrath of the “Swifties” by speaking out against the saccharine pop-culture invasion of the NFL:

I think it’s safe to say that money is being exchanged at this point. Checks are being cashed, partnerships have been made — there’s no denying it. Taylor doesn’t let ANYONE use her so blatantly without having a little skin in the game. As they were advertising her Eras Tour movie that comes out next week, etc etc, I just cannot imagine a world where there isn’t a heavy amount of calculation going on.

Does this mean that Travis and Taylor are PURELY a PR relationship? I wouldn’t say that necessarily. It does seem like they enjoy each other, at the very least as “good friends.” It DOES seem like Taylor woke up one morning and decided, I like football now:

Taylor called up all her friends like 2 weeks ago and said “hey, Im in the mood to get really into football. Do it with me”

And they did!!!

— Kelly Keegs (@kellykeegs) October 2, 2023

…

So, ladies, is it working? Do we like football now? Personally, that was hard for me to get through. I make a lot of jokes about sports but I don’t necessarily hate them at all — I’m just RARELY in the mood to waste 3 hours watching anything other than, like, the Super Bowl. Planning my Sunday night around this was a little annoying and prevented me from having my last few relaxing hours of weekend before going back into a work week. The game ended up being close, I worried about them losing and everyone hating Taylor for it — stressful! Thankfully the Chiefs won, everyone hates Patrick Mahomes for not covering the spread, and Taylor is still sitting pretty. I wonder if this media circus will cease after the Eras Tour movie comes out, or if we’re going to push this all the way to February. Keep in mind, she goes back on tour in a few weeks and she’s performing in Tokyo during the Super Bowl so — even if her boo thang makes it, there’s NO WAY she’ll be there! Put your fangs away, NFL!

And Keegs’ boss Dave Portnoy demonstrated just how utterly asinine all of this is:

There is almost too much stuff going on for a Swiftie, a football fan and somebody who bet 25k on chiefs and has Kelce on my fantasy team. pic.twitter.com/q0Xy6zlbg9

— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) October 2, 2023

Virtually all the intelligent commentators in cyberworld have noted that this is fairly obvious media manipulation, and many have noted that since Travis Kelce is quite possibly the leading spokesman for Pfizer’s not-a-vaccine COVID vaccine, it’s at least a fabulous coincidence that the corporate media has chosen to hype the pairing of him with the suddenly political Swift, who attacks people for insufficient fealty to the LGBTQ Alphabet people when she isn’t registering Democrats to vote for people like Terry McAuliffe.

Most of the country is dazed and confused by this, wondering exactly why we should care.

Well, a lot is riding on this:

Theaters across the country are dying because the movies they normally screen in an attempt to bring in paying customers simply don’t do it anymore. The only true corporate-media smash hit this whole year was the Barbie movie — which shouldn’t have pulled in the audience it pulled but did anyway because of the utter dearth of competition this summer — and movie attendance is below what the theaters need to survive. (READ MORE: Barbie, or How to Create Millions of Victims)

So now it’s going to be concert films.

But why Taylor Swift?

Anybody older than, say, 45 can remember when the record industry turned out one groundbreakingly talented artist after another, so much so that we actually began taking them for granted and grousing over how much airplay their songs generated. That time wasn’t so long ago, but it feels like it — the reason why Swift’s concerts are selling out with utterly insane ticket prices on the aftermarket is that the music business no longer thrives, and audiences have caught on to the fact that they’re fed garbage by the corporate suits in charge.

And music sales, particularly of new music, are nothing like they used to be. When TV commercials are as likely to feature tracks from old and somewhat obscure artists like the Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim as they are more current acts, it’s a good indication of where we are.

Swift is the exception. She sings a whole lot of songs that sound remarkably alike and tend to revolve around a small number of common themes, and those songs have found a large, upscale, and loyal audience.

Of course, the theme that seems to come back more and more is Swift verbally abusing her ex-boyfriends. She’s 33 and single, and — while she’s certainly attractive and has never cultivated a persona that is outwardly less than respectable (she isn’t covered with tattoos, hasn’t been to rehab that we know of, etc.) — she does have a reputation as an exceptionally terrible female partner who can’t win for losing when it comes to relationships. Which matters as it relates to corporate media messaging.

But the point is that she’s one of the few pop stars left who can deliver an audience anymore, and so the cabal controlling corporate media is milking her for every dollar it can get — with Swift pocketing a healthy share as well.

So when Kelce boasts that sales of jerseys with his name on them have increased “400%” since his … whateveritis … with Swift was made public, you’ll know that this has at least some marketing and PR component to it.

You’ll also know that the chances of it being real and delivering something even remotely recognizable as a human story are utterly remote.

This little fadlet wouldn’t be so obnoxious if it weren’t so in-your-face. But it’s worth a small bit of attention because of three things lying just under the surface:

1. It’s a massive distraction from any number of real news events that would inflame the widespread dissatisfaction with our cultural and political elite. Let’s not forget that we’re in the middle of a presidential impeachment inquiry that is regularly turning up bombshells that explode oft-repeated lies told by Team Biden, not to mention the flirtation with a government shutdown the Democrats prolonged over the weekend chiefly over their demand to fund Ukraine — and, when that didn’t work, we got this:

Impeachable.

Congress has not authorized further funding for Ukraine. The White House has no constitutional power to appropriate money for foreign governments without congressional authorization.

Add this to the list.

— RVIVR (@RVIVRdotcom) October 2, 2023

2. The media machine in service to our elite has been dragooning NFL fans into causes counter to the interests of Middle America — and to the interests of masculinity in general — on a nonstop basis for the past 15–20 years, and this is simply a different tack. They draped the Black Lives Matter scam over the league for the better part of the last decade and had virtually zero success in changing fans’ minds on issues of race and policing, so they have mostly given up on it. Now it’s injecting Swiftie-ism into the mix, with the inevitable left turn into third-wave feminism to follow. Google “NFL and toxic masculinity,” and you’ll see that this narrative has already been sawed on; there will be lots more of it, and it isn’t hard to see how it plays out.

The inevitable Swift–Kelce breakup, without any particular underlying relationship of note to break up, probably provides the stage for it.

And that leads to the third thing:

3. Remember the four crucial numbers that explain virtually the whole of American society right now: Married men are R+20 voters, married women are R+14, unmarried men are R+7, and unmarried women are … D+37. Which means that everything in American culture and politics is driven by a desperate need to make as many unmarried women as possible and, therefore, preserve and expand that D+37 number.

Taylor Swift is the nation’s premier avatar for single women, and most of her hit songs are advertisements for that status:

We could go on and on with examples (and, by the way, both of those two videos were written and directed by one Taylor Swift, so these are her messages — or, at least, they’re branded that way by the corporate media suits).

Is it any surprise that songs like these explode onto Top 40 radio while other acts with far different messages have to struggle through underground success at best?

That isn’t intended to be a full explanation for this non-stop pop-culture deluge. It’s just something to watch out for while you hold your nose waiting for the Swift floodwaters to recede.