Catturd Republicans Vs. Taylor Swift Democrats

Is this really the political battle we want?

Your favorite podcaster set the internet ON FIRE last week with a mere tweet. I posted: “To those who might say, ‘The Right needs its own Taylor Swift for young women to look up to!’ I answer we already have that. Her name is Lauren Boebert”

Many liberals thought my post was dead serious and melted down as a result. Multiple full-time journalists wrote articles about the tweet assuming I was not being ironic. One outlet even sought to disprove my 187 IQ (the reporter failed miserably in this endeavor). 

Clearly, the tweet was a shitpost. It’s obviously absurd to compare Boebert to Swift. But it wasn’t just meant to troll liberals. It also poked fun at conservatives who often claim that the Right has its own answers to the Left’s superstars. Most of these alternatives leave a lot to be desired. If I had changed Boebert to Riley Gaines or Brett Cooper, many conservatives would’ve unironically agreed with it. (In fact, many responded to the tweet with these two or other conservative female personalities as better choices than Boebert.)

But The Blaze offered an alternative to Swift that I hadn’t thought of. Writer Albin Sadar didn’t pick a woman as the Right’s Taylor Swift. He instead chose a middle-aged man who goes by the name Catturd. When I first read the headline, “Sure, the left has Taylor Swift, but we have Catturd,” I thought it was a joke. Moreover, I thought the site had stolen my tweet and just changed Boebert for Catturd. But I was mistaken–this article was no joke.

Sadar’s earnestly argues that Catturd and other conservative social media personalities represent a revolution of sorts:

The left controls all the big messaging outlets known as the mainstream media. But the right seems to have a whole army of rabble-rousers behind the scenes in social media. In political days of yore (Nixon in the 1970s), the term “silent majority” referred to the folks who were a strong, powerful motivating force in the culture but did not have a media megaphone. Something very similar is stirring today.

Bold, outspoken champions on the right may have been shoved to the sidelines. (Think of Tucker Carlson, whose newfound home on X is roaring like a house on fire.) But add to their continued influence rising stars like Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and mainstays like Glenn Beck and Eric Metaxas (both of whom I have worked with previously), and let’s just say that America’s personal 2024 Super Bowl, this year’s presidential election, is far from played out.

Be encouraged. Our movement is grassroots. And when we can build on the conservative clawing and scratching of a guy named Catturd, anything is possible.

This argument has some obvious issues. The first is the assumption that the Right is ruling social media. RW accounts certainly have a lot of influence on X, but most Americans aren’t on X. Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are more popular than X. The most popular content on these sites isn’t conservative. Much of it isn’t political at all, but the political content that gets the most traction is generally left-wing. Being big on X/Twitter doesn’t equal being big on Insta, TikTok, or YouTube. 

The second issue is the assumption that Catturd converts people to conservatism. That’s probably not true. Catturd offers red meat to the already converted. I seriously doubt a centrist would support Trump because of a Catturd post. There are some RW accounts that do reach new audiences and work to persuade them. But Mr. Turd is not one of them. The vast majority of online conservative content is for diehard conservatives. Taylor Swift, on the other hand, reaches millions of people. Her fans include people of many different political persuasions and those with none at all. Her widespread popularity ensures her political opinions matter to the public. Eighteen percent of Americans say they are more likely to vote for a Swift-endorsed candidate. No figure on the Right can compare to that.

None of this is meant to diminish RW social media efforts. Our side does have an effect, and it’s a huge benefit to us that the old media monopoly has been dethroned. People can now get their news from RW Twitter and numerous conservative media outlets. Shitposting has convinced the world’s wealthiest man to embrace the Great Replacement and many other right-wing views. While this is a positive, it still doesn’t compare to Taylor Swift’s massive cultural influence.

The bigger issue may be that the Right wants to adopt Catturd as its avatar in opposition to the Left’s Taylor Swift. This contrast unfortunately supports Richard Hanania’s “Taylor Swift Democrats” argument. According to Hanania:

We can understand Taylor Swift Democrats as men and women comfortable with their birth sex, eager to play the roles traditionally assigned to it, not racist but not feeling particularly guilty about the sins of their country, and who will naturally gravitate towards whichever political coalition comes across as the most normal, willing to let them go about their lives watching football or buying makeup from Sephora. People like this used to be natural conservatives, and especially given the Great Awokening, they still should today. They’re not, mostly because Republicans were able to overturn Roe and went out and created a cult of personality around perhaps the least normal politician the country has ever had.

Essentially, normal middle-class white people now reluctantly vote Democratic because Republicans are just too weird. There is a point that many college-educated white women are turned off by the GOP’s abortion moves, but Hanania overstates the normalcy vs. weirdo dynamic. The Democrats impose plenty of craziness on the people, from insane COVID restrictions to open borders. Normal people generally don’t like wokeness, and the woke party isn’t the GOP.

While many middle-class whites find the Democrats distasteful, a number of them will still vote blue. It has little to do with policies and more to do with vibes. The GOP and conservatism now have a low-status reputation. Much of this is due to the mainstream media gaslighting the public on what the Right stands for. But the Right is also responsible for this. There is a serious growth in the Insane Clown Party and how it threatens to wreck our ability to reach America’s best and brightest. 

Catturd has decent politics and he’s fine as an internet propagandist. But he also displays strong elements of the ICP. He’s a vulgar account named Catturd after all. His bio has at times read: "The MAGA turd who talks shit.” It currently reads: “The turd you can’t flush.” Most of his tweets are crude, to say the least. There is definitely a demographic for his style, but it’s not likely to attract the Cognitive Elite. It’s more representative of an ideology of downward mobility that can only express rage at its declining share of power and influence in American society. It reacts to college-educated whites’ shift towards the Democrats with poop jokes and conspiracy theories. 

Choosing Catturd as your avatar signals you stand for crudeness and downward mobility. Taylor Swift as your poster girl says something different. Swift is clean-cut, relatively wholesome, and aspirational. It’s a far cry from a MAGA turd who talks shit.

That’s why it’s not the smartest decision for the Right to declare war on Swift. It’s worth criticizing her for her liberal positions and Biden support. But to paint her as the devil does more harm to the Right’s cause than saying nothing at all. Swift is enjoyed by so many, in large part, because her music and image is far whiter and nicer than the alternatives. She doesn’t sing about graphic sex like her peers. She doesn’t date rappers like her peers. And she doesn’t have idiotic tattoos like her peers. She may have dumb politics, but her image and music are benign. It’s better if young women listen to her than rap.

The war on Swift is made worse by what the Right offers as a counter to the pop star. Instead of Swift, we’ve got MAGA rappers with face tats and 37-year-old single grandmothers in real-life Jerry Springer episodes. It’s hardly an appealing alternative. Scanning the conservative “counter-culture,” a middle-class normie would conclude the Right is now the Insane Clown Party. These people may otherwise back the Right’s policies, but they don’t want to be on the same side as Lauren Boebert and “Gucci Granny.”

The Right doesn’t have an answer to Taylor Swift. But it doesn’t really need one. Our side just needs to not be conspicuously stupid and/or insane. Celebrities and pop stars have supported liberal causes for years. The Right has still won elections in the meantime. We only face a serious problem when we lose people who should be voting for us. Touting Catturd as our answer to Taylor Swift is a good way to make that problem worse.