Earlier this summer, Taylor Swift got married to football player Travis Kelce. Now, unless you’re a hardcore Swiftie, you probably haven’t given this too much thought beyond “Oh, that’s nice for them” or possibly being upset at the traffic mishegas around Madison Square Garden. You probably haven’t spent any time at all ruminating on how this affects you, your life, or your political beliefs, because of how it doesn’t do any of that. It’s just two people of whom you may or may not be a fan, getting married to one another in a ceremony that you did not attend.
But, if you’re reading this right now, odds are you probably don’t care very much about what other people do with their romantic and personal lives so long as they’re not bothering you or anyone else — and you’re almost definitely not Allie Beth Stuckey. That’s just not really our audience.
Stuckey, if you are unfamiliar, is the host of a podcast published by Glenn Beck’s the Blaze called Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey, although it is not especially relatable unless you are a terrible, terrible person who spends an inordinate amount of time grumbling about how other people choose to live their own lives.
On Thursday, Stuckey and her producer Bri had a little chat about the Swift-Kelce nuptials in which she speculated that perhaps this is some kind of evil Democratic psy-op meant to make it seem to people that they can be Democrats and still get married and have children, which she describes as “trad.” Not trad like rockabilly tattoos and skinheads who are not explicitly racist and just really into ska and trapping you in two-hour explanations of how the original skinheads were multiracial and a “working class reaction to the mods,” but trad like “tradwife.”
Conservatives have always been a little miffed about Swift. In their minds, she’s someone who by all rights should be on their side. She’s blonde, she’s white, she’s conventionally attractive, she lived in Tennessee for a significant portion of her life — and yet, instead of running to their loving, accepting arms, thrilled for the opportunity to be their Aryan goddess, she went and became a lib.
Was this just because she didn’t want to discriminate against people and maybe thought that people shouldn’t be in debt forever over their medical bills? Or was it something more sinister, like she just really wanted Allie Beth Stuckey to have a bad day and not feel special? Or is she being used as a pawn by the Democratic Party to further their evil agenda of “ensuring people have their basic needs met” and equality for all?
Let’s let Stuckey explain! (Transcript via Media Matters.)
“Her [Taylor Swift] and the Kelces are all part of a psy-op that helps the — not that it’s not real, I’m not saying that it’s not real, but they represent what Democrats, like, want to convey. That you can be a progressive, feminist, who likes Kamala Harris and hates Donald Trump, and you’re from, like, the Midwest, you represent normal Americans, you can be trad, you can have kids.”
See, this is what happens when you think that other people minding their own business and living their lives the way they want is an attack on you, personally. You then assume everyone else feels that same way about the way you choose to lead your life. She assumes that because she, a conservative, is deeply bothered by those who choose to not get married and have kids or by same-sex couples getting married, that those of us on the Left have that same opposition to people getting married and having kids … which really is not a thing.
It is also what happens when you don’t spend a lot of time in the Midwest and your entire concept of what “the Midwest” is comes from TV and your own imagination.
“But I think when presidential election time comes around that the Kelce-Swift combo is going to be flexing their influence muscles for the Democrats. And they’re, like, they’re getting a very real demographic that is up for grabs, that white suburban mom. I know I’m getting into this that, like, instinctively doesn’t like Trump, but is also kind of trad, and I think, like, the more trad she gets and the more she remains progressive in other ways, the more they think that she’s going to be able to persuade people over to their side. That’s part of what I think is happening. She’s playing a long ideological game here.”
Yeah, either that or she is simply existing. She is living the life she wants to live, with literally no thought to how Allie Beth Stuckey might feel about it or what political leverage her choices might give the Democratic Party in future elections.
The idea that Republicans own all married heterosexuals as voters or all voters in the Midwest or all voters in the suburbs is absurd. While urban areas are largely Democratic and rural areas are largely Republican (about a 70/30 split in both), the suburbs are pretty evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. As for the Midwest, much of the former “blue wall” included Midwestern states like Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan — and some (me) might argue that Wisconsin and Michigan were lost in some presidential elections because certain candidates chose to veer Right on economic and foreign policy issues, which led to people who felt very strongly about those issues staying home.
Democrats, frankly, are a far better choice for parents than are Republicans. Republicans demand people have “more children than they can afford,” while Democrats want people to be able to afford the number of children they have or want to have. Democrats want to fund education, and subsidize daycare, pre-K, and college, while Republicans want to destroy the Department of Education, fire teachers for being LGBTQ+, and turn school into church. Democrats want all children and their parents to have healthcare (77 to 94 percent of us now want Medicare for All), while Republican policies led to 2 million children losing their health since Trump took office. Democrats want pregnancy to be safe and affordable (and many of us want that and all healthcare fully subsidized), while Republican policies have led to women bleeding in hospital parking lots because doctors won’t treat their miscarriages and to maternity ward closures all over the country.
The only thing Republicans actually “do” for heterosexually married couples who have or want children is to tell them that they are better than everyone else and tell everyone that they need to live that way, and while this clearly does it for some folks, it certainly does not work for all.
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Stuckey and her friend then went on to fantasize about how awesome it would be if the simple act of getting married made Swift more conservative and she started using her star power to their benefit.
BRI SCHRADER (GUEST): I think you probably right, ultimately, but I am going to take the white pill and I’m going to say I think she might become a little bit more conservative than she was before.
STUCKEY: And I love that for her.
SCHRADER: Not that she’d campaign for a Republican, but I think she’ll be a little bit less progressive than we’ve seen her be in the past. That’s my hope.
STUCKEY: And let’s hope — Yes, and let’s hope that this is for them, like, brings them to church, brings them to the gospel.
SCHRADER: Yeah.
STUCKEY: That could be what totally revolutionizes their life because that also can happen after people start settling down.
Yeah, you know, we don’t do this shit, and I love that for us. Taylor Swift has said before that she’s a Christian, but I guess it doesn’t count for Stuckey and her friend because she’s not using it to bash LGBTQ+ people or the choices made by other women, as that is largely what they seem to be in it for.
I feel a little bad for people like this. Like, it actually has to be hard to go through life imagining that all of the personal decisions people make for themselves and their own lives are a personal attack on you and yours. They probably wish we were all mad at them for getting married and having kids and being Christians instead of the issues we actually have.
For them, that’s basically the equivalent of hating them because they are beautiful, which is certainly far more flattering than hating them because they are weird, hateful, paranoid monsters who desperately want to control everyone else’s personal life choices because they think doing so will make them feel better about themselves.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
It is never going to sink in among these petty, paranoid conservaturds that life does NOT revolve around them and their ideological perspective. How arrogantly FULL of themselves can these Christopaths possibly be?
"Have you ever seen Taylor Swift drink a glass of water, Mandrake?"