Photo via @RonFilipkowski/Twitter,
Eva Rinaldi/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
July 9, 2021, 11:33 am
Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn made the odd choice of bringing up an old feud with pop star Taylor Swift during an interview with far-right media outlet Breitbart while condemning socialism, all the while being extremely wrong about what socialism is and does. Blackburn evoked the time Swift, born in Tennessee, called her “Trump in a wig” in a 2018 Netflix documentary, saying that the senator wanted to bring women back into 1950s-style sexism.
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“She gets to be the first female senator in Tennessee, and she’s Trump in a wig,” said Swift. “She represents no female interests. She won by being a female applying to the kind of female males want us to be in a horrendous 1950s world.”
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Blackburn apparently never got over this.
Rather than doing anything to defend her record or engage with reality on the topic of socialism, Blackburn claimed in the Breitbart interview that Swift and other female musicians would not be allowed to perform music or entertain at all without the state’s permission, citing zero evidence to back this claim.
“Taylor Swift came after me in my 2018 campaign,” she said. “But Taylor Swift would be the first victim of that because when you look at Marxist socialistic societies, they do not allow women to dress or sing or be on stage or to entertain or the type of music she would have. They don’t allow protection of private intellectual property rights.”
Socialism, according to Merriam-Webster, is “any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.” There is nothing in any socialist or Marxist theory that prohibits women from wearing or performing as they please, and any society which eliminated property rights, including intellectual property, would not be therefore telling women they can’t sing on stage. It would simply mean they couldn’t sue others for singing the same song.
It’s also not true that any society that could be called truly socialist or Marxist today prohibits women from performing music. In fact, socialist nations have tended to be more progressive on issues such as women’s rights than capitalist ones. The constitution of the USSR required equal rights for women and men—something that the U.S. constitution has never done thanks largely to Republicans fighting against it. Marital rape was also made illegal in the Soviet Union long before it was in the U.S.
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Regardless, the U.S. is extremely far from becoming anything resembling a socialist nation and the Democratic party, which Taylor Swift supports and which Blackburn is clearly trying to paint as socialist, is very much a capitalist party. Republicans have increasingly used terms like “socialism” and “Marxism” as amorphous boogeymen to scare up their base and anyone else who doesn’t know what these words actually mean while they demand networks cancel and censor women like Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion for the way they sing and perform.
This always ends in mockery from the actual political left in the U.S., but now Blackburn has the Swifties coming for her, too.
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Trump in a Wig aka Marsha Blackburn says: “Under socialism the government would have to approve of Taylor Swift’s music before its release, they do not allow women to dress or sing or to be on stage or to entertain.”
It seems she is still mad at Taylor for exposing her.
pic.twitter.com/JgFGFaAm2g
— Taylor Swift Facts (@TSwiftFTC) July 9, 2021
*First Published: July 9, 2021, 11:33 am
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