Taylor Swift: Was it a Dog Whistle?
The thing about a dog whistle is that it lives inside a house with its roommate’s “plausible deniability” and “it’s not that deep.” What one person sees and hears could be a dog whistle or could just be a total coincidence. Dog whistles thrive in their ambiguity.
Life of a Show Girl and the necklace released by Taylor Swift exist in this ambiguous state. Is she being racist towards Travis Kelce ex-girlfriends Kayla Nicole? Did she mean for the necklace to look like the Nazi SS bolt symbol? Is it just a funny coincidence that there are eight of them and eight points to the star just like 88 which is numerical code for “Heil Hitler?”
Taylor Swift can’t be a mastermind (often likened to Shakespear himself) at dropping easter eggs for her fans and also be just a girl who didn’t know. Typing “Taylor Swift easter eggs” into google can send into a rabbit hole of the various clues she’s been known for since her debut album. Everyone knows a new album means new easter eggs, it’s part of the adventure. Her albums come with a code you need to decipher—which is why you have to buy all 24 variants or otherwise how will you participate in the scavenger hunt? Either she is the master of the hidden language within her brand or she isn’t. Either she knows that every word she says and every piece of merch she puts out will be scrutinized for that hidden message or she just carelessly, mindlessly released songs like Opliate and Eldest Daughter and Opilate’s companioned necklace. Which is it?
In 2017 Megan Herning wrote a think piece on Taylor Swift titled Swiftly to the alt-right: Taylor subtly gets the lower case kkk in formation, in which Herning broke down the dog whistles existing within the song Look What You Made Me Do. Herning said, “The idea that Taylor Swift is an icon of white supremacist, nationalists, and other fringe groups, seems to finally be getting mainstream attention. But the dog whistles to white supremacy in the lyrics of her latest single (Look What You Made Me Do) are not the first time that some have connected the (subtle) dots.”
And Taylor Swift response? Swift decided the best course of action was to attempt to Sue Herning for this article. She said nothing about the claims that she was a symbol for white supremacy. She said nothing to denounces the presence of dog whistles in her song. She didn’t even attempt to sue any atl-right individuals online using her image or calling her an “Arabian princess.” Instead, Swift chose to sue a woman calling out her behavior or in the case of being used as a symbol of white supremacy—her silence.
Dog whistle’s do not exist without their context. When it comes to Taylor Swift there is plenty of context. We can’t forget the time she posed with a man wearing a painted Swastika, smiling without a care in the picture. Someone who doesn’t want to be associated, even remotely with white supremacy or Naziism would probably not be so quick to snap a picture with a man proudly wearing the Swastika.
Another incident, one that really seemed to be a reach for many people, was the coincidence of her Midnight’s album variants. There were four variations to the ‘Midnights’ album which when collected would solve a jigsaw puzzle of a clock on one side and on the other side—well it just so happen to accidently look like a Swastika. Of course, this was because of one fan on reddit happen to lay the albums in a specific way. This was entirely out of Swifts hands; it was the fan that saw it not her team. It certainly wasn’t what she meant it to look like, or at least that’s what we are left to assume since she never said anything about the image.
Taylor Swift’s Netflix documentary, “Miss Americana”, featured a very emotional conversation in which Swift described her journey with activism. It’s in this documentary where she seemed to have finally made a stance, she stated in what seemed to be a very determined voice that despire the warning of her dad and team to not be involved in politics— “I need to be on the right side of history.” And then she proceeded to do nothing to back up this statement with actions. This was back in 2020 and now it’s 2025 and her new album has songs like Opalite and Eldest Daughter containing microaggressions towards the black woman Travis Kelce previously dated.
This is a woman who knows the power of words, after all she’s a mastermind, the Shakespeare of our time. But when she wrote lyrics using words primarily associated with black woman, she suddenly forgot words could contain multiple meanings and connotations?
When you hear the words “bad bitch” and “savage” in Eldest Daughter what do you think of? More specifically who do you think of? Those words are not devoid of meaning. There’s a clear history tying them to black woman. When she’s talking about an opalite sky being better than an onyx night in Opilate what, who is she really talking about there? Just a coincidence that Swift is comparing Kelce’s ex-girlfriend Kayla Nicole is a black woman and Swift chose to use to use lyrics describing just how much more superior whiteness is compared to blackness.
Sure, a necklace with eight lightning bolts and an eight-point star could just be a cool necklace, that goes along with the lyrics “you were dancing through the lightning strikes.” It could be a slight mishap the bolts happen to look eerily similar to Nazi symbolism.
This necklace and the album The Life of a Showgirl do not exist within a vacuum, not even just within the large historical context just within in Swift’s who history with dog whistles and white supremacy. Swift couldn’t bring herself to denounce alt-right people calling her an Arabian princess, but she could find the time to try to sue a writer merely making the connections to patterns of Swifts on making. She could say she wants to be on the right side of history but stay silent about the microaggressions in her album or the dog whistles in her necklace.
Where it stands, whether you wanna say people are “reaching” or that it’s not that “deep” the loudest sound in the room is Taylor Swifts own silence. Time and time again Taylor has had the chance to stand up and be on the right side of history, as she so emotionally claimed she wanted to be in Miss Americana. Yet, time and time again it seems that there are these little incidents, flukes, mistakes, coincidences, and she says nothing to denounce their not-so-subtle symbolism or connotation. The necklace disappeared quietly off the site. The disappearance can’t even be traced to the necklace selling out or it being removed it was seeming not available anymore. How convenient.
