On Tuesday, Sept. 10, minutes after the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, Taylor Swift took to Instagram to endorse Harris as her pick for president.

“I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them,” Swift wrote in the post’s caption.

Swift posted a link to vote.gov, and close to 400,000 fans visited the page within the first 24 hours that the link was active. As powerful and influential as this endorsement may be (look at the success of Oprah’s 2008 endorsement for former President Barack Obama; a study conducted by economists at the University of Maryland, College Park found it gave Obama a boost of 1 million votes), the widespread praise lauded to Swift as a political activist is undeserved.

Over Swift’s years in the spotlight, she has positioned herself as a feminist, but she remained infamously apolitical until 2018. During the 2016 presidential election, even as an overwhelming number of celebrities endorsed Hillary Clinton such as Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, Ariana Grande, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga, Swift remained conspicuously silent. Critics increasingly remarked on the discrepancy between her feminist persona and her lack of public comment.

“When it comes to making public statements in support of these issues, Taylor waited a relatively long time: until after Katy Perry, after Lady Gaga, after Kacey Musgraves,” New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica wrote. “Presumptions of her progressivism notwithstanding, in a time when speaking out has become a critical component of celebrity, the silence was extremely loud.”

Since then, Swift has said that her silence was influenced by the culture of country music and her lack of political education. While these have been accepted reasons for someone of Swift’s status to stay silent on politics, we are now in a social era where political advocacy is often demanded from public figures. This is perhaps why her embrace of modern political ideals feels disingenuous and like only a way to further cement her pop status. And instead of taking responsibility for her lack of political involvement, Swift victimized herself to avoid legitimate criticism, a common trope throughout her activist career.

“The worst part of the timing of what happened in 2016 was I felt completely voiceless,” Swift said in a Guardian interview addressing this silence. “I just felt like, oh God, who would want me? Honestly…. I just felt completely, ugh, just useless. And maybe even like a hindrance.”

Swift first became politically involved in 2018, a time when a large mass of celebrities openly condemned the MAGA Republican party in interviews, endorsements, award shows, and artistic endeavors. She endorsed Democrat Phil Bredesen, who was running for the Tennessee Senate seat against incumbent Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn, whom Swift condemned for her voting record, via Instagram. Instead of a traditional endorsement, Swift released a documentary film “Miss Americana,” which followed her decision to endorse Bredesen and explored her newfound passion for politics.

The documentary tactically portrays scenes in which Swift pleads her endorsement case to her management team, reflecting Swift’s insincere, calculated attempt to exploit as much social and cultural profit from a standard celebrity endorsement. In one such scene, she tearfully proclaims how passionate she is to defend reproductive and LGBTQ rights and declares how haunted she is by her previous silence.

“I wanna love glitter and also stand up for the double standards that exist in our society,” Swift says.

Around this period, Swift also released her seventh studio album, Lover, in which she established her activist career by emphasizing themes of feminism, girl power, and LGBTQ advocacy. This was the first time that Swift openly advocated for the LGBTQ community—a period when queer and trans rights were beginning to be widely accepted among celebrity circles and in liberal culture.

Particularly, the album’s single “You Need to Calm Down,” is lyrically and thematically centered around queer advocacy. Swift amassed a cast of queer celebrities to star in her music video, performed the song at The Stonewall Inn, and openly endorsed the Equality Act. During this era, the pop star faced rampant criticism from progressives, as many saw through the music video’s rainbow aesthetic to the savvy attempt to curry favor with those who critiqued her political inaction.

After this album rollout concluded, her support of the LGBTQ community mysteriously waned, though she still loves a good corporate pride month post. Despite the glittery rainbow aesthetic she intentionally uses as virtue signaling of her activist facade, she has largely stayed silent on queer and trans issues.

More significantly, Swift has prided herself on being an outspoken feminist since 2014 but often falls short of real feminist ideals. This practice is known as white feminism.

“[White feminism is] a feminism that prioritizes achieving equality for white women, insisting that their equality will open up doors for all other women,” writer Shahed Ezaydi explains in a Mashable piece.

Swift has largely carried this very narrow view of activism and white feminism and has a long history of weaponizing feminism to benefit her own brand while ignoring the intersectionality of gender and race. She has even credited her feminist education to an infamously racist white feminist, Lena Dunham, who often directs all-white casts in her movies and was accused by a coworker of being a “hipster racist.”

“It is the type of behavior that rests under the guise of feminism only as long as it is comfortable, only as long it is personally rewarding, only as long as it keeps ‘on brand,’” author and activist Rachel Cargle argued in Harper’s Bazaar.

In 2014, Nicki Minaj fans claimed that she was snubbed from the VMA nomination for Video of the Year although her “Anaconda” music video was hugely influential in pop culture.

“If your video celebrates women with very slim bodies, you will be nominated for vid of the year,” Minaj posted on X (then Twitter) in response to the controversy.

Minaj’s comment sardonically addressed the widespread exclusion of Black women or individuals with different body types from musical accolades at a time where race relations were a large talking point in pop culture. After all, this was the year that Macklemore won the Grammy for Best Rap Album and Iggy Azalea received numerous accolades for her rap album. In a common demonstration of her ignorance, Swift victimized herself even as Minaj addressed real, cultural prejudice.

“It’s unlike you to pit women against each other,” Swift responded on X. “Maybe one of the men took your slot.”

Such a tone-deaf response demonstrates how Swift views the patriarchy that both artists suffer as more pervasive and critical than the racism Minaj experiences.

More recently, in 2021, when a character on the show “Ginny and Georgia” joked “you go through men faster than Taylor Swift,” Swift angrily tweeted at Netflix to demand accountability for the misogynistic joke. When her fans stormed the show’s biracial actress with an onslaught of racist attacks, Swift remained silent and refused to denounce such deplorable language from her fan base. While Swift was quick to take offense with a misogynistic joke, she was more than happy to sit idly by as racist attacks were brought into the mix, revealing the limits of her desire to advocate against hatred.

In 2023, Swift went public with a short-lived relationship with The 1975 frontman Matty Healy, who has made blatant Islamophobic comments, performed a Nazi salute on stage, joked about how he pleasures himself to Black women being brutalized and racially and sexually degraded, and—while he was dating Taylor Swift—laughed on a podcast as the interviewer made a host of racist jokes towards Ice Spice, calling her “Inuit Spice Girl” and a “chubby Chinese lady.” Swift refused to address Healy’s derogatory comments but instead, in an attempt to salvage her widely-applauded activist image, featured Ice Spice on a remix of her song “Karma,” which was seen as a clear and blatant PR stunt to divert attention from Healy’s comments.

“Her decision to associate with him reflects her values and her alignment with the white feminism that only she benefits from,” Mehreen Syed wrote. “This further proves how several white celebrities like her and Healy choose to stay complicit rather than using their platform and white privilege to address systemic issues.”

Even when Swift proudly stands up against misogyny and gender inequality, she often only goes so far as to cement her activist image and rarely accelerates past the point of genuine advocacy work. In 2017, while hundreds of thousands of people celebrated the Women’s March with many celebrities such as Ariana Grande, Amy Poehler, Rihanna, Madonna, and Alicia Keys all attending the events, Swift’s “activism” only moved her enough to write a tweet. “So much love, pride, and respect for those who marched,” Swift tweeted. “I’m proud to be a woman today, and every day.”

Additionally, other artists have made long-standing commitments to advocacy work. Lady Gaga has publicly advocated against the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and her “Born This Way Foundation” largely focuses on eliminating the discrimination of LGBTQ youth. Similarly, Olivia Rodrigo has started a “Fund 4 Good” initiative to support reproductive rights and has handed out free Plan B, contraceptives, and information about reproductive health at her Guts world tour.

Comparatively, Taylor Swift has simply not done enough considering the magnitude of her platform. While she has openly donated to the GLAAD foundation, addressed the alarming rise of anti-LGBTQ legislation during a singular show at her Eras Tour (which she tactically only acknowledged in the month of June), and endorsed Democratic candidates, she only does so when it serves the preservation of her feminist image and her brand, still saturated in rainbows and white feminist ideals.

“She is meticulous about managing her public persona in a way that makes her both nonthreatening and appealing to as wide a cross-section of fans as possible,” Vox columnist Caroline Framke wrote.

While there is nothing wrong with Swift’s light advocacy work, to applaud her as an icon of activism is to refuse to acknowledge her long-standing ignorance of intersectionality and that her advocacy is only a way to enhance her public image. Swift has cemented herself as arguably the biggest celebrity of our millennium. She has created a $1 billion corporation out of her pop-star image and was credited in 2023 for boosting the economy during fears of a recession. Swift has unprecedented reach that she could use to productively advocate for real political change, yet she continuously hides behind feminist ideals and co-opts LGBTQ aesthetics only to promote her next album cycle or to cement her legacy as a champion of feminism and queer rights.

While Swift’s endorsement of Harris certainly has the potential to be beneficial to her presidential campaign, we must continue to look critically at the intersection of popular culture and political advocacy in an era where fans are increasingly concerned with how celebrities handle their platform and their political views. For now, Swift fails in such an assessment.

Carter Appleyard can be reached at cappleyard@wesleyan.edu.