'You don’t need to serve up politics': Fox host rants at Taylor Swift to 'just perform'
Fox News host Harris Faulkner recently launched into an unprovoked rant directed at pop star Taylor Swift while discussing the singer's latest on-stage prop.
In a Wedneday segment tweeted by Media Matters for America's Lis Power, Faulkner was discussing with a guest whether a silhouette seen onstage during Swift's performance of her song "The Man" is meant to represent Vice President Kamala Harris. Faulkner complained that while her 16 year-old daughter is a "huge fan" of Swift and that tickets for her live shows are expensive, she had a separate complaint about the megastar's political views.
"If we're gonna pay that much money as consumers, you don't need to serve up politics for that," Faulkner said. "Why can't you go to a concert without that? She can vote any way she wants, she can talk about it offstage. When people pay to see you, just perform."
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Despite Faulkner's rant, Swift is not likely to ease up on communicating her political views to her millions of fans. Prior to the 2020 election, Swift endorsed President Joe Biden's candidacy. In 2021, the pop singer went viral for singing the lyric "f— the patriarchy" in the extended 10-minute version of her song "All Too Well." And young voters in the must-win battleground state of Pennsylvania said earlier this year that Swift endorsing the Democratic ticket could be what motivates them to vote.
"The change we need most is to elect a president who recognizes that people of color deserve to feel safe and represented, that women deserve the right to choose what happens to their bodies, and that the LGBTQIA+ community deserves to be acknowledged and included," she told V Magazine in 2020.
Swift was notably apolitical prior to 2018 out of a desire to not alienate her audience, many of whom have followed her rise from a Nashville, Tennessee-based country singer to a global pop icon. But in the 2020 Netflix documentary Miss Americana, Swift is shown describing her desire to use her platform in a more politically strategic way after being groped by a DJ in Denver, Colorado, and regretting that she didn't start speaking out sooner. While the DJ sued her for millions after he was fired, Swift successfully countersued him for just one dollar.
“You walk into a courtroom,” Swift recalled, “and then there’s this person sitting in a swivel chair staring at you like you did something to him. … Then he has a lawyer get up and just lie. There were seven people who saw him do this, and we had a photo of it happening. And I was so angry. I was angry that I had to be there. I was angry that this happens to women. I was angry that people are paid to antagonize victims.”
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“I really couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she added. “And I just thought to myself, ‘Next time there is any opportunity to change anything, you had better know what you stand for and what you wanna say.”
Swift's eras tour is ongoing, though several upcoming concerts in Vienna, Austria were recently cancelled after law enforcement uncovered a terror plot allegedly planned by a 19 year-old who had aligned themselves with ISIS. All ticket holders are being refunded within the next 10 days.
Watch Faulkner's rant below, or at this link..
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