Swiftly Down the Road to Serfdom
The alternative to Taylor Swift being hired for social influencing.
Recently there has been a stir about pop star Taylor Swift being employed by President Biden’s administration. The claim is that Swift has been tapped as a “psychological asset” to influence her sizable following in favor of the regime’s objectives. The Department of Defense officially denies such an arrangement – which should lead any reasonable person to suspect its truth – but in such a case, it comes as no surprise, and in a way, may actually be preferable to the alternative.
The claim surfaced on Faux News (no typo!) last month when anchor Jesse Watters discussed a document in which allegedly the Department of Defense proposed engaging Taylor Swift as a social influencer, given her considerable celebrity. First things first, the Department of Defense generates all sorts of documents, some of these mere speculation about different scenarios affecting domestic and geopolitical security. Mention of the DoD’s desire to hire Swift does not substantiate that she has been hired, but considering that DoD doomsdayers are paid to account for all possibilities, it would be irresponsible for them not to consider hiring Swift.
Since Edward Bernays’ Propaganda (1928) argued for the “engineering of consent” on a societal level, every administration has employed marketers in some capacity. Marketing 101 dictates that you acquire and contract unique assets for messaging before the competition does. It is thought that Taylor Swift may be directed to steer younger voters towards re-electing President Biden, but it is not yet known for sure. Officially Vote.org’s CEO Andrea Hailey denies Swift’s affiliation with the organization, despite Swift’s Instagram post which directed voluminous traffic thereto in September 19th, 2023, leading to over 35,000 new voter registrations. In any case, if true it is hardly the first time a celebrity has been hired to propagandize the population. Elvis Presley was used to promote the new vaccine against polio in the late 1950s, and in the 1980s Keith Richards of all people told us “just say no to drugs”! Conservatives’ objection to Swift – much like their recent vilification of the mediums of Instagram and Tik Tok – is based exclusively on the fact that she exerts influence for the left.
In the perfect Libertarian world – and the minarchist in me says that it will take a while before society is fully ready for it – government exerts no coercion whatsoever on the populace. Instead of police and prisons, government expends its resources on influencing people to obey laws and towards “social conscious” behaviors. Of course you never get everyone on board, but that’s the case even with coercive statutes. In this Voluntaryist Society, we should want someone like a Taylor Swift telling her Swifties to vote [a certain way] or to buy electric cars. We can always click passed the advertisement (i.e., change the radio station or however commercials reach you) of Taylor Swift telling us to vote Biden in 2024. The alternative is government outright debiting your bank/credit balance for the price of an electric car… and thanking you by e-mail for your automatic vote to re-elect President Biden.