What do pop star Taylor Swift and rapper Macklemore have in common? Both have found themselves criticized online for tenuous connections to the so-called alt-right.
“macklemore hair seems to be the chosen haircut of the racists now,” Twitter user Jon Hendren (@fart) said on Tuesday. “i call on @macklemore to get online and denounce his own haircut.”
“This fascist needs to be exposed for what he is!” complained Twitter user Andrew J. Henderson (@drewks), in a tweet minutes later. “@Macklemore is an alt-right Nazi! The haircut is undeniable proof! #Antifa #ThriftShop”
A little over an hour later, Macklemore himself — birth name Ben Haggerty — replied by saying he’d long since changed his ’do.
“Got rid of it over a year ago,” Macklemore tweeted in reply.
A search of Twitter for “macklemore nazi haircut” finds period references to Macklemore’s once-iconic hair style in previous years as a “Nazi” style, including a tweet from comedian Kumail Nanjiani in December, “All this Nazi normalizing started with Macklemore’s haircut.”
Macklemore has also been hit from some on the left on the charge of “cultural appropriation” for being a white artist in a traditionally black musical genre.
Meanwhile, Taylor Swift, the former country musician turned pop star, is under fire from a columnist at The Daily Beast who insists Miss Swift has a moral obligation to speak out against alt-right Twitter trolls who profess to love the 27-year-old blond musician as an ideal of white feminine beauty, an “Aryan goddess.”
After bashing Miss Swift as insufficiently feminist for failing to speak out against then-candidate Donald Trump’s presidential race in 2016, the Beast’s Amy Zimmerman complained that “it’s unlikely that she’ll make an anti-Nazi statement. Then again, the bar has never been so low.”
“No one is expecting Taylor Swift to go on the campaign trail for Kamala Harris or exhibit a working knowledge of intersectionality — just to condemn the neo-Nazi community that’s already claimed her as one of their own,” Ms. Zimmerman added, concluding her column. “Say it after me, TayTay: ’I, Taylor Swift, denounce Nazis. And I am not attracted to Eric Trump.’”
• Ken Shepherd can be reached at kshepherd@washingtontimes.com.
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