Auntie Teekay’s Tea Shop And Wall Of Crazy

Taylor Swift is going through some shit right now. It’s bad. Between-1989-and-Reputation bad. Between being harassed by Trump and a portion of her fandom turning on her for mostly-imagined political reasons, her mental health is not good.

Wild-ass guess prediction:

She will go on a paparazzi blackout by the end of the year. She and Travis will split amicably and quietly after the football season. She will move, probably permanently, to the U.K. and may or may not come out as bi.

On *some* social media sites, there has been an onslaught of anti-Taylor Swift hate revolving around her supposed conservative leanings and alleged racist dog whistles in TLOAS. It is an incredibly stupid and obsessive firestorm of assumed conclusions and performative activism on behalf of black women, some of whom have accused Taylor of dogwhistling, and others who have said they disagree and don't want white people speaking for them. There's a lot of straight up denial that Taylor is the person she's shown herself to be over the years. It's a big mess. I saw someone suggest that this was troll farms at work, doing this on behalf of Donald Trump, but I don't buy that, because this is something a lot of people have believed for a while.

Then... I realized something.

Twitter was spamming it, but it's died down. Threads still is spamming it, and it flared up even more when someone decided that a lightning bolt necklace was Nazi imagery. But BlueSky wasn't, and I have no doubt the criticism that's blowing up other sites is in fact there.

This is an *algorithmic* smear campaign, and Zuck's crew is the one pushing it the hardest.

I did a bit of an experiment. I posted something on Threads on the subject, saying a very short version of what I said in the first paragraph above. I am nobody on Threads -- no reason to think anyone will see it.

Nine likes in seven hours. Over twenty in two days. It's not much, but it's a lot more than I should be getting given my profile there. Meta is using the algorithm to ragebait against Taylor Swift, and Twitter was doing the same thing but got bored. No more than a handful of people would pay attention to the discourse if this wasn't the case.

I could easily be wrong about this, so that's why I'm not saying "mark my words" or some shit, but here's the thing: Reputation was the Kaylor album. Most of the songs are love letters to Karlie, most obviously "Dress" and "Dancing With Our Hands Tied". It was written coming off a quite painful era in her life, at a point where Karlie was a critical part of her support system. It also represented a major shift in her artistic career -- burning bridges with Big Machine, moving past embracing pop into being more overtly experimental with it, getting ready for a coming out that never happened.

Kaylor is long dead. We really have no idea if they've truly reconciled and are even friends again, much less a couple -- I've maintained for a while that it's entirely possible Taylor and Travis are for real, but even if not Kaylor is still dead. But I'm calling it now -- Reputation has probably been a very painful album for Taylor to revisit, and it is very possible that RepTV will never see daylight in finished form. A few tracks may be released -- I'm pretty sure LWYMMD has been publicly previewed in an ad or something, I can't remember for sure -- but if RepTV never drops in full, we won't ever hear new versions of "Delicate", DWOHT, IDSB, "Dress", CIWYW, "Don't Blame Me", or "Gorgeous", the most Karlie-coded songs on the album. (The same might apply to Lover, except that was entirely done under Taylor's control and was never planned for rerecording anyway, so she doesn't have to relive that part.)

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