By: Kiersten Sipe

On August 7th, 2024, the CIA helped Austrian authorities arrest two men, with more to follow, for a planned terrorist attack on Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour. The arrested individuals were teenage boys, reportedly involved with ISIS, whose goal was to kill as many people as possible in Swift’s crowd of 170,000. 

 

The main suspect is a nineteen year old boy who is proven to have interacted with propaganda from the terrorist group Al Qaeda. He was found to be in possession of manuals for bomb building, along with homemade explosives. The boy confessed he planned to kill himself and as many members of the crowd as possible using knives and explosive devices. Arrested along with him was a seventeen year old boy found possessing ISIS propaganda.

 

The current explanation for such a heinous attack is that these boys aimed to attack America through Swift, hopefully killing American Swifties in the audience. However, this attack is just one more, large, link in the chain of Taylor Swift-related violence that culminates to form an attack on girls. 

 

Swifties, who are a majority female demographic, have always known this anger. From innocent complaints about Swift attending football games, to men outright posting about how they wish Swift fans were dead, the hatred of Swifties has become thinly veiled misogyny rebranded as fake-woke, anti-popularity discourse. Taylor-hatred has gone beyond disliking her music or thinking she is overrated, and crossed into the territory of wishing violence towards her and the women and teenage girls who look up to her. 

 

Prior to the Vienna threat, three girls, aged 6, 7, and 9, were murdered in a stabbing taking place at a Taylor Swift-themed yoga class, the perpetrator also being a teenage boy. Almost instantly, social media was filled with men saying they deserved it, that they wished the kids had died, or just celebrating this tragedy. In a social media post about an adolescent Swiftie who passed away due to cancer, the post was bombarded with comments such as “1 down, heaps more to go”, “GREAT NEWS”, “Finally, one less swifter to worry about”, “who cares”, and “LETS GOOOOO”. 

 

These are not isolated incidents. Swiftie hate is on every platform, on every website. After the Vienna threat, social media filled up with comments such as: “why is [every] thing so unlucky”, “L officers who arrested [the potential terrorists]”, and “Wish they didn’t get caught”. The hatred of Taylor Swift has extended to a violent hatred of Swifties, and as communities form around this hatred, it becomes glaringly obvious that as men celebrate the deaths of children, they are not celebrating because they are fans of a woman they do not even know; they are celebrating because these fans are women. Disliking Swift and Swifties is not altogether toxic, but the normalization of misogyny and violence when it comes to this fanbase is concerning, and something all women- Swiftie or not- should be wary of. It’s important to mention that the accounts who are violent with their Swift hatred do not support their hate with any real criticism of Taylor Swift: her carbon emissions never seem to come into play when men wish upon Swiftie death, but merely her repetitive lyrics and football monopolization. If all it takes for men to feel comfortable and supported cheering on the death of young girls is a famous woman whose lyrics and dating habits slightly annoy them, what is stopping them from expanding this normalized misogyny once there’s a new despised woman trending? 

 

The world is in a very unique place with celebrity culture at the moment: for the first time in a long time, a woman is the most successful pop culture name, a woman who has climbed to heights in the music industry that are, whether you believe it deserved or not, unmatched. And as pop culture and as the music industry centers more and more around a woman, a platform is created for insecure and bigoted men to be vile in a way that is nearly universally accepted. When you take an almost ubiquitously hated man from this year like Drake and compare him to Swift, contrasts emerge. No one is trying to blow up Drake’s shows or cheering on fans’ early deaths. Swift has reached a point in her career where she is resented enough that she has become an outlet for misogyny that can cleverly dodge that label. It’s very easy to dodge; in fact, if someone calls you out, they’re called a rabid Swiftie, and the accusation is quickly dismissed. 

 

The Swiftie-hating problem has grown into a terrorist threat that genuinely endangered the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of girls and women; the dislike of an artist has festered into unchecked misogyny; and it has all combined into an attack on girls.