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Taylor Swift Will Sue You If You Associate Her With White Supremacists

Once upon a time, in the heady days of about two months ago, give or take, a blogger for the site PopFront wrote a really dumb story about how Taylor Swift is racist because her songs have racist lyrics endorsing white supremacy, like “I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time.” Seriously, that’s a thing an adult human asserted earnestly about a song about how Taylor’s no longer fucking the guy who plays Loki in the Marvel movies.

Well, Taylor Swift is clearly determined not to let the woman who wrote this 2,000 word affront to critical thinking be the stupidest person in the room. It turns out Taylor Swift’s lawyer’s sent a letter to the owner of the blog, which threatened a lawsuit unless the article was removed and a retraction was issued, something Swift apparently does a lot, being the super litigious sort. It also, hilariously, asserted that the contents of the letter were protected by copyright and could not be shared.

This is a confidential legal notice and is not for publication. Any publication, dissemination or broadcast of any portion of this letter will constitute a breach of confidence and a violation of Copyright Act. You are not authorized to publish this letter in whole or in part absent our express written authorization.

Let’s see what notable lawyer and first amendment blogger Ken White has to say about that.

There’s a few reasons this was the absolute worst way Swift could have dealt with this, but the biggest one is the Streisand Effect, something that gets brought up a lot on social media when celebrities try these kinds of frivolous legal action.

Barbara Streisand once tried to make a photographer remove a photo of her house from the internet, a photo that had been viewed 6 times, 2 of those by her own lawyers. That photo is now the cover photo for the Wikipedia entry on a term that gets thrown around a lot on the internet.

PopFront is likewise a tiny blog with a handful of readers that updates perhaps once a month with something equally pants on head stupid to their “Taylor Swift is a Nazi because some racists like her and she hasn’t told them not to buy her pizza loudly enough” article. So Taylor Swift owes us all an apology for bringing it to our attention and making me skim it for this article; I think reading it may have given me some sort of brain damage, like if Lovecraft’s Necronomicon was really insipid and politically uninformed.

The ACLU, who were briefly held up as heroes by the anti-Trump #resistance until they found out the ACLU thinks Republicans have rights as well, came to the defense of PopFront, because it turns out that even the worst takes have First Amendment protections.

I say good on the ACLU for defending this woman and her terrible, terrible ideas. The entire field of literary criticism is basically a joke, but like most jokes it’s protected by the First Amendment. And it’s nice to know someone is standing up to rich assholes looking to squash people who criticize them.

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