For the normies whose brains have not been broken by a terminal internet addiction, this year’s Super Bowl was a shocking and welcome blast to the past. After years of “woke” advertising rife with outright disdain for traditional masculinity and millionaire athletes cosplaying as anti-American slactivists by kneeling for the national anthem, Sunday’s big game was palpably and pleasantly apolitical. And at the center of the victory for old-school Americana — the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers in front of Nancy Pelosi’s face! — were power couple Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift.
Perhaps it’s the boring married lady in me, but I couldn’t help but break out into a smile when Kelce, the burly tight end as quintessentially alpha as a football star could be, beckoned his Barbie-like beau for a kiss for all the world to see. After listening to her heart be broken by a string of flighty and effeminate artsy boys for more than a decade now, Swift fans from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Singapore cheered on the Super Bowl victor and the pop music sensation.
The football star and the hot, blond prom queen caress at the heart of global capitalism: It’s a tableau as archetypally American as a vintage Norman Rockwell.
And yet, if you logged on to the vacuum of charisma and kindness that is social media, you would have walked away with the notion that public is rooting against these lovebirds.
For weeks leading up to Sunday’s game, the absolute dregs of the Right astroturfed X with lunatic conspiracy theories that the Biden administration, which can’t even secure the southern border, let alone balance a budget, had actually created the couple as some Democratic psyop and rigged the game (mind you, this was Kelce’s third Super Bowl win). Posts of the trad and alt-right variety ranged from various conspiracy theories about the CIA and Pfizer to, well, this.
But both strains of psychosis over Swift and Kelce: jealousy, pure and simple.
Here is Swift, a literal billionaire who has topped Billboard charts more than any other solo artist in history, having it all. The rest of the planet has such strong demand for her performances that world leaders have directly lobbied Swift to bring her record-breaking Eras tour to their countries, and even so, Swift made it back to cheer on her man. Kelce, for his part, hasn’t sacrificed an iota of his own masculinity through it all. If anything, his clout as both a celebrity and a man have only been enhanced with Swift at his side.
And yet, a fringe of right-wingers and left-wingers united to cope and seethe over these two equally privileged and hard-working young people having it all. Worse than simply ignoring the couple, the most unhappy people on the internet cannot believe that working hard at your career and on yourself would reap the reward of finding another attractive person with whom to build a new life, together.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The rest of the country apparently sees what I see. Seven in 10 members of the public, including 71% of football fans polled by Marist in December, think Swift’s public presence as Kelce’s No. 1 fan is having a mostly positive influence on the NFL. And according to an NBC News poll in November, only a quarter of Republicans view Swift negatively, with a mere 5% of Democrats agreeing.
After a lifetime of looking for love in all the wrong and decadent places on the coasts, the country-turned-pop star found her match in the Midwestern football hero who loves his family. Only the lonely and the miserable would consider this anything other than an all-American love story.
