Taylor Swift is not Hitler

Rolling Stone magazine reports on fake controversies over Taylor Swift's new album:

Soon, online discussion of the album turned extreme in ways that many found bewildering. There were social media posts accusing Swift of implicitly endorsing the MAGA movement, trad-wife gender norms, and even white supremacy with dogwhistle references. While the far-right have been known to claim the singer as an icon of “Aryan” greatness despite her record of championing Democrats and liberal values — and President Trump himself has blithely and disingenuously shared AI-generated imagery depicting her as a supporter — this was a noticeably divergent trend, an apparent attempt to cancel Swift for those presumed affiliations. The attacks largely focused on specific word choices (her use of the term “savage” on the song “Eldest Daughter” was interpreted as racist) and symbols (a necklace for sale on her website stirred up Nazi comparisons because its lightning bolt charms bore a passing resemblance to the bolt pattern worn by the SS). ...

What Swift’s defenders didn’t realize, however, was that they were pushing back against a false narrative that had been seeded and amplified by a small network of inauthentic social accounts. Worse, they were helping to disseminate those bad-faith allegations by earnestly engaging with them.

A lot of these controversies are fake. Anonymous online comments pretend to be offended, when they are really just stirring up attention.

Here is another fake controversy.

The reconstruction of Beachy Head Woman’s skull before, right, and after the latest DNA results, left

The London Sunday Times reports:

For a time she was hailed by historians as the earliest known black Briton, a woman who lived and died on these islands during the Roman occupation but whose ancestry was thought to lie in sub-Saharan Africa. New DNA evidence tells a different story. The skeleton known as Beachy Head Woman was not a long-distance immigrant. ...

In 2016 a plaque was put up to mark her significance. The sign, erected in East Dean, East Sussex and now taken down, read: “The remains of ‘Beachy Head Woman’ were found near this site. Of African origin, she lived in East Sussex 2nd-3rd Century AD.” ...

“By using state-of-the-art DNA techniques we were able to resolve the origins of this individual. We show she carries genetic ancestry that is most similar to other individuals from the local population of Roman-era Britain,” he said.

It was all a big hoax. She probably looked like the one on the left.