Fantastically famous, wealthy, and talented, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce aren’t normal, of course. But after all the weirdness that we’ve been bombarded with by our culture involving sex and gender, here’s a relationship that is positively retrograde and heteronormative, and the online right can’t handle it.

I wrote about this at Politico today:

[Taylor Swift] has her roots in country music. There’s nothing transgressive about her, nothing highly sexualized, and nothing very political, although she has endorsed a few basic center-left positions in recent years. She’s not having a breakdown like Britney Spears once did or acting outlandish like Lady Gaga. She’s not singing protest songs (except about her ex-boyfriends) or suffering wardrobe malfunctions.

Moreover, she’s not dating another pop star, or Pete Davidson. She’s dating a football player, for God’s sake.

The last time I checked conservatives celebrated football as the rough-and-tumble game of American gladiators. And here one of the toughest of them — a beast of a tight end — lands the biggest female pop star in the country, and they see the tentacles of powerful forces promoting the Biden 2024 campaign.

The image of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift kissing on the field after his victory in the AFC Championship game is arguably the most iconic American photo since the Trump mugshot. For anyone whose worldview hasn’t become twisted by politics, it’s a picture of normality. It’s the cheerleader dating the high school quarterback. It’s traditional femininity meets traditional masculinity. It’s the pinnacle of success.

Once upon a time, conservatives would have celebrated it as pure Americana, and poured scorn on anyone who found a reason to say otherwise.

The roles have been reversed because, also once upon a time, the Left would have found some way to be weird about it — attacking the gender-power imbalance inherent in the kiss, or whatever. But here we are.