Sometimes People Are Just Stupid

on psy-op theories and Occam's Razor

One thing I love about YouTube is the way its algorithms will, if you listen to music there, give you more music that you’ll like.

Yesterday, the YouTube gods fed me a song that was so dramatically against the cultural zeitgeist that it almost made me tear up.

What A Lovely Surprise

A girl likes a boy, but he’s already got a girlfriend. His girlfriend is a girly-girl, who does a much better job of living up to feminine stereotypes and expectations than the girl telling the story does. The girlfriend is a cheerleader who dresses in revealing clothing, seeming to locate her power in showing skin. The girl telling the story is much more down-to-earth, dresses for comfort and not showing off, and locates her power very differently: in knowing herself, being true to herself, and patiently waiting for the boy to figure his shit out.

Part of me cringed, waiting for the revelation that the girl telling the story is nervous about telling the boy she’s a boy like him and wants to be his best bro. Or that she’s about to come out as a non-binary they/them. Or, at best, for her to go into a head-to-head competition with the girl, trying to steal the boyfriend instead of waiting for him to recognize his mistake and take the initiative to fix it himself.

None of these things happen. She stays true to herself throughout the story, in no way changing her values to be more like the girly-girl who has, at the beginning, successfully secured the boy’s interest.

I was fed this song by the algorithmic gods after, in a wistful mood and feeling a bit lonely, I played a song by the same artist—a sweet love song about a love story leading to a wedding—traditional in every way, including the boy getting the dad’s permission (not both parents…the dad’s) and the girl wearing a white dress.

A Surprisingly Difficult Mystery

If you had to guess, what might the cultural response to this artist be? Who loves her? Who hates her? Who thinks the influence of her work is good for young women and who despises her values? I’m not the biggest fan of her work, but from what I can tell her songs are nearly all about, like these two, love. She sings about the pursuit of love, the pain of lost love, the desire for lasting love—always in the context of a woman (who knows that she is a woman) in a relationship with a man (who knows what a woman is, and that he isn’t one). Some of them are about how deep the wounds go when love goes bad, but she never stoops to rejecting love entirely, never telling her audience that happiness is found in booty calls or the “empowerment” of sleeping around. Her deepest feelings and desires are always invested in trying to have a relationship. Even in her edgier songs, acknowledging how fucked-up the dating scene is these days, she is still fully oriented towards a desire for love and permanence, never giving up this desire and pretending that commitment—forever—is not what she wants: “I love the players, you love the game….it’s gonna be forever or it’s gonna go down in flames.”

Clues

If you’re not sure yet about who loves this artist and who hates her, let me give you a little more context. She’s a successful entrepreneur who has provided many people with jobs and benefits. She’s known for generosity, including giving $100,000 bonuses to truck drivers who work on her tours. She’s made the news much more recently, however, for spending a lot of time playing the dutiful helper: cheering on her boyfriend, who is highly successful in his own right in a meritocratic field—demonstrating excellence in a pursuit where there is nothing she or anyone else could do for him, no strings to pull or favors to call in. He either performs or he does not, and while I know little about his field, he seems to be performing.

To summarize, we have: a successful entrepreneur who has been pumping messages into the culture, for well over a decade now, on the value of love and relationships—specifically, traditional male/female relationships and the pursuit of lasting love. Lately she’s spending a lot of time and energy being a doting girlfriend, cheering for her man as he approaches the pinnacle of achievement in his field.

Can you guess yet who really, really hates this woman?

My Own Recent Media Consumption

In the last week, I’ve seen a recurring theme among the center-right and right-wing commentators whose work I read, listen to, or otherwise notice.

Like some kind of signal went out, they’ve all suddenly decided that criticizing this artist is the most important thing they can be doing.

This morning, one of the most popular conservative accounts on Twitter called her a selfish narcissist. Other huge conservative accounts are calling her a “sold out POS,” among other things I won’t repeat here—and still others have decided that she was required to comment on the death of Toby Keith within their self-determined proper time frame. (I spend far more time online than the typical successful entrepreneur in a romantic relationship could ever spend, and they expected her to comment with such speed that I was literally alerted to his death by reading one of their disgusted denouncements that she hadn’t commented yet.)

A conservative radio show host whose show I love, about a week ago, declared that the problem with the world is that young women know who this artist is, but not who her boyfriend is.

Another right-leaning commenter I read has put out several pieces of content criticizing her body of work as corporate and “fake.”

Is It About the 2024 Election?

I’ve read several fearful expressions (all from male conservative influencers) that this artist would endorse Biden in 2024 and thus sway the election.

Many of the comments I’ve read from this section of the discourse seem to think that a celebrity endorsing a Democrat would be a game-changer, a noteworthy event that would make an enormous difference.

I’m not sure what world they live in. In the world I live in, Democrats are endorsed by celebrities with such regularity that I was surprised to learn that the endorsement they fear hadn’t happened yet.

One conservative influencer said that an endorsement from this artist would result in “a tsunami that will be very difficult to thwart.”

I’m not sure how they all managed to miss the demographic facts, but the voting bloc over whom this artist has real influence, young women, already vote for the Democrats in overwhelming numbers.

So…apparently all this brouhaha is because they fear that young women voting for the Democrats in a percentage in the high 90s, instead of the lower 90s, might sway the election?

Really?

They think young women are that powerful? I don’t, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe young women are that powerful. Many conservative influencers seem to believe this.

And their response to this belief is….

—to pile on the pop culture idol most beloved of young women

—to mock her relationship as fake, and in so doing,

—send the message to the young women who’ve made her a success (the very same young women attracted to her songs about love, dads giving young men permission to marry their daughters, and white wedding dresses) that actually doing what the artist is doing and having a romantic relationship with a masculine man is so weird as to be, most plausibly, fake?

Why?

What are these conservative influencers trying to say to young women?

I’ve looked for some other message, but all I can see in this is the following: that a woman spending her time cheering on her masculine boyfriend in his meritocratic pursuit and otherwise investing time in what looks like a relationship that could be headed for the altar (and maybe even some born-within-wedlock babies) is….so weird as to be impossible to take seriously?

Or maybe the conservative influencers whose work I happen to follow are not trying to send a message at all.

Maybe the sight of single adults of the opposite sex who know what sex they are, use sex-based pronouns for each other, are successful in their respective pursuits, and are in an exclusive, serious relationship is just anathema to conservatives now.

The Turnout Theory

I’ve heard that the fear is more about turnout—that this artist is going to “pull a black swan event” not by endorsing a Democrat, but by encouraging her fans to go vote.

Well, ok. Sure. It’s possible, I guess. Of course, the fifty states have registration deadlines and rules that these young women would have to look up and abide by. Many of them are college students, which adds an additional layer of complexity, as some places let college students vote where they go to school and some don’t.

It’s possible that on nothing more than encouragement from a celebrity, the voting demographic least likely to vote could all turn out in massive numbers and vote the way that their demographic has always voted.

I fail to see this as such a massive risk that it warrants conservative influencers making enemies of this demographic now, at the beginning of their tenure as voters, but what the hell. Maybe there’s some benefit to it that I just can’t see. This could easily be the case; I’m wrong all the time.

The Theory of a Psy-op, or a Psy-op About Psy-ops

I’ve read many ordinary people on the right saying that the idea that conservatives are criticizing this artist is a psy-op created by the mainstream media. Sorry, but that’s bullshit. I don’t follow the mainstream media and I’m seeing the criticism a lot lately in the media I normally follow, nearly all center-right or right in orientation. No doubt the MSM is exaggerating it. That’s what they do, take conservative mistakes and make them much bigger and more consequential than they otherwise would be. But they’re not inventing it.

I’ve also read several prominent voices on the right suggesting that the woman’s relationship is fake—because the notion that a young woman who has spent fifteen years publicly emoting and creating art about wanting a romantic relationship might have, oh, I dunno, wanted a romantic relationship is…implausible, I guess?

The “it’s fake” people seem to think that it has to do with helping the NFL make money by getting interest in the Super Bowl to be higher this year. I don’t know anything about football (the field the artist’s boyfriend is in). I suppose that professional football players taking dives or otherwise failing to perform their best, as part of a conspiracy to help get half of a famous couple to the Super Bowl, is possible. I won’t say that it’s out of the question. It seems unlikely to me, but I know so little about football that I just now had to google whether the Super Bowl happened last weekend or was yet to occur. So, maybe. If evidence comes to light of this, I will happily admit to being wrong.

The Enemy of my Enemy Is, At Least, Not My Chief Worry

American culture is a wasteland. I am grateful that I don’t have the awesome responsibility parents face, of trying to help their kids navigate the culture and maintain their values in the face of rampant hostility. Cutting kids off entirely from the culture around them is impossible, so parents have to choose carefully and communicate extensively, which takes ongoing effort.

When parents do this well, they deserve massive respect for their accomplishment. It is a massive and profoundly difficult task.

I’m very grateful that I don’t have to worry about shaping a child’s experience of culture. But if I were facing this responsibility today, in 2024, the artist in question here would be a strong contender for least-bad option.

Bottom line? Conspiracies happen and psy-ops are a thing.

A celebrity who may or may not do what 99% of celebrities do and endorse a Democrat is not, at least not on the basis of that endorsement—if it even happens—likely to be one of them.

It is not suspicious that a woman who has been telling us all since she released her first album (during the second W administration) that she wants to be in a romantic relationship with a man, is now in a romantic relationship with a man.

This whole thing is stupid. Painfully, ridiculously, overwhelmingly stupid.

Now, here’s the link to the video so you can all enjoy a song about a girl who isn’t especially girly, but rather than scheduling surgery to remove her breasts and changing her name and pronouns, patiently stays true to herself and finds love anyway.

Imagine if that message got out to young women in 2024!

Heavens!

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About My Substack: I’m a data scientist who would rather be a math teacher but, being unwilling to brainwash kids into Woke nonsense, am presently unqualified to teach in the US. So I bring my “math is fun and anyone can learn it” approach to mathematics here to Substack in my series, “How to Not Suck at Math,” (first five entries not paywalled, links at the top of part 5, here). Paid subscribers also have access to a creative writing series in which I post a variety of things, including fiction, descriptions, and other “writing experiments,” along with personal stories that don’t relate to Larger Points I Want To Make About The World.

My other posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews, including of the Wokest novel I’ve ever read and a memoir by Rob Henderson. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.

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