The Revolt of the Bobblehead Dolls

Armchair Civil Warriors Freak Out Over Taylor Swift

History repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce - Karl Marx.

Last week, right wing channels and Fox were breathless about reports of convoys of anti-Biden ex-Navy Seals and associated “patriots” headed down to Texas to defy the feds on the border and start a civil war over immigration. Twenty-five Republican governors had pandered up, and sent national guardsmen too.

But it only took a few days before the propaganda battle-stations forgot about the new confederacy and coalesced around fighting another, apparently more dangerous enemy: Taylor Swift.

Leading the lurch from tragedy to farce are the Bobblehead Doll conservative influencers and their legion of followers. Besides their ability to turn political extremism into big bucks, the Bobblehead Dolls share a physical anomaly in which their heads appear to be too large for their bodies. They are Charlie Kirk, rightwing nepo-baby whose dad founded Turning Point USA for young conservatives, which the younger Kirk now runs; former Steve Bannon protege at Breitbart, and founder of the Daily Wire Ben Shapiro, and Jack Posobiec, white nationalist with a podcast and 2.4 million Xitter followers.

As the Texas border defense spectacle commenced, the Bobblehead Dolls cosplayed Army, with Shapiro and Posobiec sporting Zelensky-esque beards and olive drab t-shirts on their vodcasts and pods. But by Sunday, something strange had happened to the battle plan. The miniature information corporals were diverted toward an apparently more urgent front: a psyop using the Super Bowl and a gorgeous blonde all-American global pop superstar.

Taylor Swift was triggering the Bobbleheads long before she was named Person of the Year and hooked up with Travis Kelce. Her influence on billions of young women was bad enough, but now she’s bewitched the NFL’s tightest tight end. What could be more threatening to the security and future of the nation than a sexy, prochoice woman invading toxic masculinity’s signature sport?

Before we get into the insane TayTay conspiracy theories, a little history. The Bobblehead Dolls have treated her as Feminist Enemy Number One since summer 2018, when she recorded a pre-midterm election video urging Tennessee women to vote against Sen. Martha Blackburn on the grounds that she was anti-choice and had failed to support reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.

When Time named her person of the Year, Jack Posobiec proposed that she was a liberal operative, perhaps the most successful secret agent in human history. Her “girlboss psyop has been fully activated,” he tweeted, predicting that she would spearhead a “2024 voter operation for Democrats on abortion rights.”

Re-posting video of Swift’s 2022 statement to Tennessee voters, he wrote: “Here is Taylor Swift, a Northeasterner from Pennsylvania, pretending to cry and attacking Republicans, claiming they don't stand for 'Tennessee Christian values.’

'“The day the op was born.”

Charlie Kirk flipped out too, announcing on his podcast that Taylor Swift is “going to hell” for registering young progressive voters. He then launched a tirade against the poster, suggesting that she was infertile "Does Taylor Swift have any eggs left?" he asked, calling her "bitter" and "angry."

Ben Shapiro runs Swift material on his podcast regularly. “As her songs get worse she gets more woke,” said the millionaire podcaster - whose bizarre high-speed speech pattern is one twist of the dial away from Alvin and the Chipmunks.

In 2015, Shapiro went off on a Swift music video called The Man, in which Swift dresses in male drag. The video, he said, is “about feminism - what is feminism really about? It’s about why women are victimized by men. In this video she dresses up as a man and the basic suggestion of this video is that her life would be better if she were a man. The reality is that if she were a man she’d be living in a van down by the river. Because there are lots of men who write songs like Taylor Swift,” but who aren’t making it because … there is something to a sexy woman singing songs to you.”

Something to a sexy woman …

It is probably no coincidence that the sexually explicit AI-generated images of Taylor Swift went viral on Twitter the same week as the NFL playoffs, after jumping from 4chan and a specific Telegram group “dedicated to abusive images of women,” according to the investigative site 404 Media, which tracked the images to their source. According to 404 Media, the group uses a free Microsoft text-to-image AI generator called Designer. AI’s geniuses play whack-a-mole protecting the public from racist, misogynistic shenanigans: the weirdos who craft the porn deepfakes find workarounds and share prompts to help others circumvent the protections Microsoft, for example, put in place.

According to the 404 Media report:

The 4chan thread where the [Swift] images appeared also included instructions on how to make Microsoft's Designer make explicit images. For example, 404 Media’s testing found that Designer will not generate an image of “Jennifer Aniston,” but we were able to generate suggestive images of the actress by using the phrase “ jennifer ‘actor’ aniston.” Prior to the Swift AI images going viral on Twitter, a user in the Telegram group recommended that members use the phrase “Taylor ‘singer’ Swift” to generate images. 404 Media was unable to recreate the type of images that were posted to Twitter, but we found that Microsoft’s Designer would not generate images of “Taylor Swift,” but did generate images of “Taylor ‘singer’ Swift.”

(Today Microsoft closed that prompt loophole, according to reports.)

The Bobblehead Dolls aren’t - as far as we know - making deepfake porn. But there is clear lineage from the parental basement-dwelling trolls and incels with nothing better to do than make fake Taylor Swift sex videos, the millionaire Bobblehead Dolls’ anger at young women, and billionaire tech bros like “pronatalist” Elon MusKetamine, who amplifies, if not the imagery (Twitter shut down searches for Swift a few days after the images went viral) then certainly the explicitly anti-feminist ideology behind it.

The Bobbleheads make bank trolling their female contemporaries who aren’t eager to choose the Breeder/ Betty Crocker /Pole Dancer road to happiness. Charlie Kirk last summer hosted a TPUSA “Young Women’s leadership Summit” and spewed a firehose of idiotic life coaching tips at women. “Go try to spend a couple days with babies, and if it doesn't move you to want to have some of your own, then go do the surgeon thing,” he said in part. The “radical left,” he warned, is mostly “run by childless young ladies” on antidepressants. When a member of the audience rose and told him she hope to be both a mother and an orthopedic surgeon he retorted: “I just want to caution you: A reality is that there are a lot of successful 35-year-old orthopedic surgeons that have cats and not kids. And they're very miserable.”

Over at his podcast, Human Events Daily, Posbiec has hosted discussions like “Do Women Even Know what They Want?” to “get to the heart of what American women want versus what they’re told to strive for by mainstream culture and third wave feminism.”

Shapiro, who is married to a doctor, outed himself a few years ago as a terrible lover after he shared dubious gynecological opinions in response to Cardi B released her explicit song about vaginal lubrication, WAP. Shapiro has devoted whole podcast segments to “Out of Control Women.” When Barbie was released he complained on Xitter that “Women used to build society. Now they dress in pink and bring a bottle of wine to an air conditioned theater to cry in solidarity with an actress lecturing America about how hard it is to be a woman, then ragetweet at people who don't like Barbie."

After the KC Chiefs won last night, the manosphere lit up with a conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce would endorse Biden at Super Bowl halftime next week, stealing the election away from their Dear Leader. Posobiec added a George Soros frisson to the theory, claiming to his million plus Xitter followers that Swift only turned “super liberal” after complaining that Soros had bought up the rights to her music. No less a personage than Vivek Ramaswamy replied to that, to share the right-wingers’ Superbowl halftime nightmare. Posobiec RT’ed him with a comment “Everyone can see it.”

Not really, Jack.

The Swiftie Op theory capped a hysterical week for the Bobbleheads and their fans in which a New York jury slammed Trump with an $83 million verdict for defaming E. Jean Carroll over her claims of sex abuse.

Is the Man-pocalypse finally at hand?

Matt Schlapp predicted as much on Steve Bannon’s war room show. "This $83 million -- this is just the beginning,” Schlapp says. “All of us will be paraded down this gangplank. We won't have our resources, we won't have our homes, we won't have our livelihood." (Editors note: Schlapp has been publicly accused of groping a man, Bannon of domestic violence by an ex-wife.)

This has been said before but worth repeating: whatever happens to Trump, his legacy will be that he drew the worst out of people, and drew the worst people out of their hidey-holes, so they could connect with like-minded goblins, amplify ugliness, and gather more unhappy men into the fascist blob. Until the Fat Man came along, the misogynist wing operated - like all the deplorables - on the QT, pretending to go along with the tide of progress while privately seething about their perceived loss of power. IRL, many would never encounter one another. They operate from far-flung bases - billionaire Dr. No redoubts, mom and dad’s basements, podcast “war rooms” with, in Steve Bannon’s, a painting of Jesus on the wall, or a cross or a Glock as desk decor — or jail. In the Bobblehead Dolls’ cosplaying army they find camaraderie, encouragement and material support crafting and sharing profound insults to women, and of course, basking together in the warm swamp of conspiracy thinking.

404 Media on deepfakes

Schlapp and Bannon on the coming Man-pocalypse

Shapiro ranting on Swift

Kirk at the Women’s Summit

The birth of Posobiec’s Swift op theory