The Press Box - Finally, Taylor Swift and Gritty Are on the Same Team | Damage Control (Ep. 534)

Episode Date: October 10, 2018

The Ringer’s Justin Charity and Kate Knibbs get together to talk about Taylor Swift’s decision to finally get political (2:01) and the political fight going on involving the Philadelphia Flyers mascot Gritty (21:08). Read Alyssa Bereznak on Taylor Swift here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone, it's Liz Kelly, and I want to tell you about the second annual Ringer NBA Palooza we have going on next week on Tuesday, October 16th. We'll be streaming a live marathon countdown to tip off with Bill Simmons and the Ringer NBA crew, featuring live podcasts, special guests, ringer original shorts, and culminating in a Sixers Celtics watch party. You can check it out live on Tuesday across all of our social media platforms. And don't forget to check out our brand new NBA Paloosa merch on the ringer.com slash shop. I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibb. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets,

excites, and divides us in popular culture. The Philadelphia Flyers have a new mascot, Gritty, a giant orange monster who loves to party. So normally we don't talk about sports on damage control since The Ringer has like 90 other more appropriate venues for athletic talk, but we have to discuss Gritty because he's somehow already at the center of a very silly political fight.

But first, we're going to talk about an only slightly less silly political story. We're going to talk about Taylor Swift. Now, Taylor Swift's political silence all throughout the 2016 presidential election, and then through the earliest years of Trump's presidency, it angered and irritated a lot of her liberal fans and a lot of critics in general. Gay rise to all these theories that she was secretly an arch conservative, a Trump supporter or a Nazi. But for the 2018 midterm elections, surprisingly, Taylor Swift has come out in support of two Democratic candidates in her home state of Tennessee.

And we're going to talk about it. Kate. Yes. Do you know who Marcia Blackburn is? The Tennessee Republican senator who currently holds the seat. What else do you know about Marsha Blackburn? I don't really know that much about her, to be honest, other than I probably. disagree with her politics based on the fact that she's a Republican.

I remember Marsha Blackburn from the beginning of the Tea Party movement. It's funny, there are a lot of prominent conservative women in particular who I think sort of were the vanguards of that movement at various points. Like Nikki Haley sort of. Well, Nikki Haley, I think the first really proto-T party figure is Sierra Pellin, right? And then it becomes Michelle Bachman. Ah, yeah. Michelle Bachman is the, she's wild, right?

And then Marsha Blackburn is sort of the other one. She's sort of like the third wheel. She's like the who of, of shit. Right. Because I knew she existed, but she's not very like, nothing about her has stuck out in my memory. Right. She's less telegenic and dynamic than Michelle Bachman. God.

But she's still one of those. She's one of those crucial like Glenn Beck era political success stories of the Tea Party movie. And so, you know, she'd been in Congress since, I want to say, 2002, maybe 2004, but she really made a name first off during the Tea Party movement, and she's currently a congresswoman from Tennessee. So Marsha Blackburn is the Republican nominee to replace Bob Corker, who's also a Republican in the Senate. Now, she's running against Phil Bredison, who's the former mayor of Nashville, the

former governor of Tennessee. He's the Democrat. And I think a lot of people just didn't really care about this race, frankly. It's weird. This is a midterm year where there are just so many races to keep track of that are competitive and dynamic and have really way more dynamic figures than Marsha Blackburn and Phil Bredesen. But that changed Sunday night because Sunday night, Taylor Swift, Nashville, Darling.

Popstar, Taylor Swift posted an Instagram caption where it's very long Instagram caption where she's basically encouraging people to vote in Tennessee. And she's making an endorsement, which is a thing that Taylor Swift very much was not doing with her platform and her pop stardom until Sunday. And she wrote this long caption saying, you know, I normally don't do this. I normally don't talk about politics. but I really want to endorse these two Democrats in this Tennessee race. And then she basically is, you know, it's a pretty positive message about Fulbredison,

but then you get to the halfway mark of the caption. And she really leans into the idea that really she's encouraging people to vote against Marsha Blackburn. And there's this line in the caption that's just skating where she says, Marcia Blackburn's voting record appalls and terrified. me. And she's talking about the Marsha Blackburn's conservative voting record on gay rights and women's rights in Congress. And so suddenly, suddenly this is like one of the important races in the American political landscape. There are stories already crediting Taylor Swift with a spike in voter registrations. Yeah, I mean, I think like vote.org did.

Right. Yeah, it's crazy. Did you registered a vote as a result? I'm already registered, man. That's right. We're responsible. Yeah, I mean, it seems to have really made an impact, which is great. It's an interesting thing because it's such a sharp contrast with how she behaved up until this point.

How do you feel about how she behaved up until this point? I remember around 2016 people were like, Taylor Swift is a, like, should be held responsible for, not being a political activist sort of thing. People were really upset that she didn't endorse Hillary Clinton. I thought it was unfair to like put that on her shoulders because she's not an activist. She's an entertainer. Obviously I would have preferred if she had endorsed Hillary Clinton because she has fans. It could have made a difference.

But I do think that like insisting that she become an activist was unfair to her. But I'm happy she's doing it now like better late than never. I think to give some context here. So Taylor Swift not really, again, Taylor Swift is this huge pop star. And in 2016 and beyond, but certainly in 2016, I think you just are at this point in American culture where celebrities being these sort of quasi political figureheads. Like people who expect Bono to tell them who to vote for, even though Bono is. You know what I mean? Even though Bono is not.

You know, it's... I have not trusted Bono Sinti put that U-2 album on my iPhone without my permission. I'm with you on that. But I think by the time the 2016 election arrives in American history, it feels like that's the norm. And the Clinton campaign specifically, if you remember the last couple weeks of that campaign, I remember there was this big rally in Ohio where Hillary Clinton brought out like LeBron James, J.Z. Beyonce. They're all these celebrities who were helping, you know,

sort of like a little bit fundraising, a little bit, get out the vote a little bit, like pop culture credibility of like Hillary Clinton's cool, right? And there's something, I mean, one, it's interesting to see that she had that that great star power in a way that Donald Trump did not. Yeah. He had like a guy from. He had the Z-List. Yeah.

He had the bald ones. Yeah, the lesser Baldwin brothers. Yeah, the minor Baldwin's. The minor Baldwin. And probably the minor Walbergs as well. Oh, that's true. Hillary had like, yeah, tons of all the A-Lex celebs backing her. Right.

You got Clooney out there stumping. Right. Totally. But it's weird to think that that's a thing to me. And I think Taylor Swift, it wasn't just that people were like, she's a huge pop star and she's not endorsing Hillary Clinton. It's that she looked so awkward because, every other celebrity at that point, it seemed,

had succumbed to that being an expectation of American culture. That, like, celebrities are supposed to tell us how to feel about politics. So they're supposed to amplify our thoughts and feelings about politics and our political imperatives. I'm just not comfortable with that. And I don't think Taylor Swift was comfortable with it. And I don't know that I'm any more comfortable with it now, even though Taylor Swift apparently is.

Well, okay, if you were like a super famous person, wouldn't you try to use your influence to advocate for like a better world? I do think that it's a huge problem that like people are taking so many cues from celebrities. But I don't think the celebrities themselves should be faulted for trying to use their platforms to say something of substance. That's absolutely right. Yeah. I agree with that. I mean, I think the Taylor Swift controversy from the 2016 election through now,

it's not like people were talking about Taylor Swift in this way of, Taylor Swift believes this. Why doesn't she speak out more about it? People in the very frantic way that fandom does everything, fandom invented her politics out of thin air and then blamed her for not artic. You know what I mean? It was one of those things where it's not like people were sort of identifying something about Taylor Swift and saying you have a responsibility to promote this,

people were basically taking their own politics and assigning it to Taylor Swift and then being mad at Taylor Swift for not. It didn't make a ton of sense to me. She left a blank space. Oh, right. That's enough of that. I have a headline that reads like that.

Oh, yeah, I remember that. The prehead. I remember, like, back when all this was happening, you wrote some really smart analysis just about how skewed celebrity political endorsement culture was and how, because there was such a big backlash against Taylor Swift when Trump won,

like, oh, she could have prevented Trump that I thought was so unfair to her. Even though I do think that, I do think that her silence was political. I do think that not making a political statement in that climate, when so many of her fans were like white southerners, was a political action

because she, I just think that sometimes not making a statement on something is political too. Yeah, I definitely agree that it was political, right? I definitely agree that silence is a political phenomenon. Yeah. By saying it's political, I don't know that I'm saying that it's bad. I just know that I empathized very strongly with that urge to be like, no, this paradigm is ridiculous. This paradigm in which you people have invented a political significance for me that I had no part in creating in the first place. You've invented this political significance out of thin air.

And then you're basically at gunpoint, like trying to force me to co-sign this political significance is an objectively like bonkers culture. That's like that is a bonkers way for culture and fandom to operate on a celebrity. So it's like even if I like I think it was political in the context of the 2016 presidential election, sure. But I also think it was political in the context of celebrity culture and how much of a share celebrity culture should have in political culture. Looking at her silence as it were as political that way, I just think it's a lot more righteous than if you just look at it as by not siding with Hillary. she was implicitly siding with Trump. What if she was just like a big Jill Steinhead the whole time? That's possible.

It is possible. And think of how mad everyone got at Susan Sarandon. She's like, Taylor was muttered or so I'm not trying to be Susan Saraneda. Yeah, yeah. It's funny, too. Like, okay, so let's fast forward to now, right? She endorses the Democrats in Tennessee. And one thing I noticed, there's this sort of catharsis that plays that online immediately after she does it, where it's like better late than never, like, finally, like I'd been waiting to hear this for such a long time.

Finally, I can stand Taylor Swift again. But one thing I saw was really conspicuous was people who were saying, you know, that took a lot of guts for Taylor Swift. Like, Donald Trump was probably going to attack her over this. And I just remember having that thought last year when people were demanding. her and calling her like a Nazi for not speaking. I'm, you know, I had this thought the whole time of like,

you realize that Taylor Swift is big enough. That if she half-heartedly even comes out and says like Trump is bad or whatever, like she is this, she is this pop performer woman who is just the exact sort of person that Donald Trump is going to attack in these very vitriolic terms. And I just, I don't know. I think the fact that people waited until now to be like,

oh yeah, would have Trump attacks her? I just feel like it's like a failure of empathy and a failure of foresight in terms of this, again, this whole culture of like expecting celebrities to gladly be these weird perverse political proxies for activists, even when they're not actually activists. He did attack her, right? But it was pretty much.

No, see, the thing is, I thought it was, he, he. Not even attack, just he, acknowledged that happened. He acknowledged it. Right. It was, it was the press pool asked him about it, like the day after. And he said, you know, I think I like Taylor's music about 25% less now, you know, but it was it was the mildest possible form of attack. And Marsha Blackburn ultimately responded. And she was kind of the same way. She did not say like Hollywood liberal Taylor Swift. She said, you know, I don't think Tennesseans care about that. I think they care about jobs and health care. Blah, blah, blah. Wait, do you think Trump listens to music? Like, do you think? No, absolutely not. I think he has no taste in anything. I feel like he's one of those people where he has no, like, if he listen to music,

he wouldn't even like recognize it as music. He would just be like, what are these sounds in my? You know what? He's the ultimate sort of guy who listens to the radio. Like in that sense of like, oh, what do you listen to? Like, you're on a first date with someone. You're like, what do you listen to? And the person goes, uh, the radio.

Like, Trump is like that. Does that happen? Does that happen? I just think that's a response to people. give sometimes. It's like their musical taste is the radio. Everything but country. Oh, see. But he wouldn't be in everything. He wouldn't be. He would be the radio.

He would not be everything but country. He goes to West Virginia too much to be talking about everything but country. Okay. So do you think that Taylor Swift will make an impact on the 2018 midterm elections? No. In conclusive ways, I think it's obviously hard to assess

the impact of these. people, right? But it's just, again, you look at the 2016 election where Hillary literally ends with this star-studded rally that's basically like a Madison Square Garden concert, but in Ohio. Yeah. And loses. And Trump, meanwhile, has like. Like Randy Quaid.

The ninth Baldwin brother and Randy Quaid. You know what I mean? That's actually rude to Randy Quaid. I think he's over. Oh, yeah. You're right. Randy Quaid is, yeah. Trump has like the minor baldies and like.

Artemis Baldwin. Ralph Baldwin and Rosanne and he's still one. Right. I just do not get why modern American popular culture is inevitably transfixed on celebrities as political proxies in this way. Because I don't even think they're effective in the way that people would like to think that they are. I'm glad that Taylor Swift did come out with these endorsements. with enough time to let people register to vote in Tennessee, with enough time to let people do their research before the midterms.

Even though you're kind of ambivalent about her becoming like an endorser of candidates in general, do you think that this was a good time? I don't know how to define good time. I mean, she sort of gestures at that idea, right, when she's opening her Instagram caption of like, yeah, I get it. It's a really weird time. But also just I've had, you know, she's like, I've had things happen in my life that have forced me to reconsider how I think about, like, my public pronouncements about politics. Because I think so many people look at celebrities and they can only frame things in terms of narrative trajectory.

And to me, it's just like, look, she got older. Like the difference between 2016 and 2018 is that she aged two years. And maybe she just is like, okay, I'm ready for this. I've braced for this a little bit. Or, like, I'm interested in doing it. doing this now. I kind of have a theory about why she came out now. I don't think she was a Republican. I think she's always been like a liberal just because of who she surrounds herself with and like the fact that she has so many like LGBTQ fans. I think that she probably voted for

Hillary Clinton and was planning to all along but didn't come out and endorse her because she assumed she would win and she knew that a large portion of her fan base was conservative and didn't want to alienate them. So she decided to basically take all of the criticism from liberals who were frustrated with her. And then once Hillary won, everyone would sort of forget about it and move on with their lives. I think that was her plan. That makes sense, definitely. Yeah.

And then I think once Trump won, she was probably like upset that she didn't endorse and has regretted it and then has been strategically trying to figure out what to do. That's my like completely unsupported theory on why Taylor came out now. If I were working for Taylor Swift running damage control for Taylor Swift in that moment, I actually, I completely agree with you that in a cynical way, that that plan makes sense. But in the days after Trump won, if that's where her thinking was, you would have drafted some sort of statement. If the problem is that she'd painted herself into a corner that she didn't think would even exist as a corner. I definitely think there would have been like a soft way to sort of telegraph the idea that like, you know, yeah, I voted for Hillary and it's a sad time. Blah, blah, blah.

And she could have really leaned into the idea that like the thing that was sad is not that Trump won, but that, you know, the first female presidential candidate nominee lost. I've heard this theory floated around. Do you think it has anything to do with Kanye going MAGA? I mean, well, I think they're related in the sense that they're all a part of the sort of celebrity culture we're talking about. But, no, if you mean, is it responsive to that? No. Yeah, I don't think so either. I just saw people hypothesizing that she was like, oh, now I can paint myself as like the liberal alternative to Kanye since he's like lost his damn mind.

Right. But that's sort of gets back to what my fundamental concern here is. right, which is that the problem with tethering political culture to entertainment culture is that then you have people process things in this way where it's like their only way of metabolizing political synthesis is through the is through these like pro wrestling type narratives of like Taylor did this because Kanye did this and oh it's a heel turn like that's their only way for processing political disagreement is as a series of cliffhangers. which I get that political culture itself can seem like that a lot of the times. But I think it seems like that largely because of the worst elements of political culture and political media. Well, while we're on the topic of entertainment figures getting turned into political figures. I'm so mad at you. I'm sorry.

I'm so mad at you. Let's talk about comrade gritty. Comrade gritty. Comrade Gritty. Okay. So just in case you don't know, Gritty is the new mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers. He is this, like, giant orange haggard beast who looks like he's been on a bender. Same.

Okay. Yes, very same. And people love him. He, like, he debuted recently to very positive feedback. Also same. Yeah, they did. They really made him into a meme right away, like it was very smart. So anyways, he just became a master.

like a few weeks ago. And this is already an actual headline from the Wall Street Journal. Antifa appropriates a creepy mascot. Keep your Marxist hands off gritty. He belongs to Philly. This is one of those headlines that would have made like absolutely no sense before the year 2018. Just to like break it down,

Antifa is like a nickname. Anti-fascist auction. Yeah. Antifascist. It's like a left. wing activist group who gets really vilified by even the mainstream media. Right. And Gritty is who I said, said he was.

So this columnist was very upset because she believed that Gritty had become like a Marxist totem. This like screed about how Marxists had like gotten their grubby paws on this mascot was like published in the Wall Street Journal. It's very, very stupid, obviously. But I wanted to talk about it because it has like a weird overlap with the Taylor Swift situation. Right. It's like this weird avatar. Somebody immediately appropriating like almost to the point that there's just no formative context for it. Appropriating an entertainment avatar as like an avatar of some sort of political faction.

Yeah. And in this case, Gritty literally doesn't speak. he's silent because he doesn't have a mouth. That's like Gritty's appearance speaks very loudly. Yeah. It's a very loud style, Grady. He does. And I will say that people, like

left wing Twitter people like do think Gritty is funny. I don't think it's like just a Chapo Trap House thing. I think lots of people in the media and just normal hockey fans and children all think Gritty is entertaining.

So it's really weird that they're just zeroing in on the fact that left-wing people do like this hockey mascot? Well, let's break this down, though. What are the elements of Gritty that I have ideas about this? He looks like a podcaster who hasn't. There we go. That's what I'm trying to get at it. It's like, what are the elements of Gritty style?

He's like a dirty ginger. He's a dirty, right. He's a dirtbag ginger who dresses kind of poorly. He has like a, his shirt has like a weird fit. Yeah. He's not good at ice skating. Right. He has this weird, clumsy, masculine look about him. He's disruptive looking. He looks very disruptive.

Yeah. And he's from Philadelphia. And Philadelphia sort of has this reputation for being a little rough around the edges. I don't know. There's nothing like... Gritty definitely has a podcast. Gritty definitely has a leftist podcast. Yeah, yeah. I just feel like that's 100% canonical. But nothing that this figure has actually done has... insinuated that it has politics in any way actually. So this is one of the most glaring cases of people just assigning politics to an entertainment

figure that has none to begin with because how could it? Right. So I think it's like an extreme example of the Taylor Swift situation because obviously Taylor Swift is a human being who can have her own personal politics but as a brand she was never political. Do you think that Gritty is a Marxist? Gritty is the ideal Marxist. Then I'll tell you why. Because I think in so much as there are parallels between Taylor Swift and Gritty, I think the encouraging thing about Gritty is that Gritty at least is entirely fake. Like inso much as Gritty is a blank space, he's not a blank space overlaid onto a real person. And so when people appropriate, gritty and they say, I'm going to invent a political outlook out of thin air and then assign it to this thing, at least we can all agree that the thing it's being assigned to is also not a real thing. It's just a symbol. And so it's like dehumanizing in this way that's totally appropriate

for a fake orange monster that attends sporting events, which is totally different from taking an actual human woman and being like, these are your politics, articulate them or else. So to me it's like strangely gritty is the way healthier version of Taylor Swift. Yeah, I get that. I feel way more optimistic about our political culture if it goes the way

of gritty. Okay. Then if it goes the way of smashing Kanye West and Taylor Swift against each other as avatars for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. What would you do if Gritty like went the way of Pepe the

Frog? Oh, and it's appropriate. by the approach. Ooh, explain this. Okay, because Pepe, well, Pepe didn't, I can't believe I'm saying, talking about Pepe because I hate that frog. But it was like a funny meme for like years before the alt-right internet got a hold of Pepe and made the frog into their symbol. So that was a case. And like the creator of Pepe was like, what the hell?

Because he's not a Nazi. Yeah, what if Gritty was sort of imbursed? by the alt-right, would we have to cease finding him funny? Right. Or what if there was a tug of war over Gritty? What if instead of it just being the Wall Street Journal saying, stop making him Antifa, you know, because he's just for kids. And instead, if the Wall Street Journal op-ed was, stop making him Antifa, he's actually a fascist. Like, that would be frat.

I think Pepe is this weird middle ground, actually, between Taylor and Gritty. Gritty is new. and immediately have this political significance thrust on to him. Pepe is old and was not a political avatar before, but the thing about Pepe is that Pepe had, insomuch as you'd see Pepe be used as like a meme in forum threads. Pepe, like that meme had a personality. And the alt-right displaced Pepe's personality with the, like,

Pepe's fake. I just want to be clear about what's fake and what's real, because that's the crisis of the. American political imagination right now is real and fake. Pepe's, like, original fake personality gets displaced, right? With this edgier, right-wing political personality, which is different from Gritty, which is, like, no personality and it gets filled in. So what happens if, like, Pepe, Gritty gets hijacked from the hijackers?

this is like a weird ontological I don't know I feel like I need a survey level college course to game out the political significance of Gritty Do you though? I do.

I do agree with you that at least with Gritty there's not a real person who you're shoving politics onto and making them deal with but it is just I feel like it's not a good sign that this is being discussed

in like a major American newspaper, it's a sign of how stupid everything is getting to me. And a sign that, like, we can't have fun things without just attempting to weaponize them for political purposes. Like, now everything has to be intertwined in the, like, horror show of American politics. Right. Although the uncanny element of that is that sometimes the weaponizing is itself very fun. Like, it's like you're appropriating entertainment, which is supposed to be fun to weaponize it. But then, like, gritty becomes fun in a way that's just, it's not less fun than before.

It's just a different kind of fun. But you're right. It's like the bigger question is why do we, first of all, I want to be clear that American politics has always been very stupid. Yes. It's not a new development of politics is stupid. We are not a historical on damage control. Right. It has always been bad.

It's been always been bad and frankly bizarre. But, again, it feels like. smashing action figures against each other. It's the fact that it's not just an avatar of a thing that exists in this one form and we sort of constantly refer back to it. It feels like a full service brand. And so Gritty isn't just like one photo or one gif of something. Like, Gritty's going to be with us forever. Oh, God.

Yeah. I think American politics at this stage is action figures. It is Kanye and Gritty and Taylor Swift and Pepe and it's all a nightmare. And Donald Trump, the scariest action figure of them all. All right, well, I'm Taylor Swift. I'm Kate Naps. No, you're gritty. That's it from us.

You'll hear from us again in two weeks. Thank you for listening to Damage Control.