As America’s two favourite pastimes — soccer and complex political conspiracy theories — collide within the run-up to Tremendous Bowl LVIII, an odd factor has occurred.
A number of conservative commentators introduced that they plan to root for San Francisco, a metropolis that has lengthy served as a bête noire to far-right America, with politicians and media shops alike normally vilifying it as an acrid emblem of progressivism run amok.
The nascent 49ers followers declaring their unlikely allegiance are hardly pushed by Bay Space devotion or Candlestick Park nostalgia. Fairly, they’re vocally sticking it to Taylor Swift, the nation’s greatest pop star and new-ish girlfriend of Kansas Metropolis Chiefs tight finish Travis Kelce, who shall be dealing with off in opposition to the 49ers on Sunday.
Swift has been on the middle of a sequence of sprawling however unfounded right-wing conspiracy theories that allege she is one way or the other in cahoots with the NFL to harm Donald Trump’s probabilities within the 2024 election and hand victory to President Biden in November, amongst different issues.
Swift endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 and her Tremendous Bowl-bound boyfriend has appeared in Pfizer commercials encouraging Individuals to get COVID-19 vaccines. There isn’t any proof that she colluded with the NFL to ensure her boyfriend a spot in America’s greatest sporting occasion, neither is there any proof that she plans to endorse Biden on the finish of the massive recreation, as some theories allege.
On Sunday, conservative sports activities pundit Clay Travis took to Fox Information and declared he can be “proudly supporting the San Francisco 49ers, America’s crew, on Sunday in opposition to Kansas Metropolis, Patrick Mahomes, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.”
The brand new love for San Francisco, which has been echoed on right-wing social media in current days, is especially stunning given how town is usually depicted on the airwaves of Fox Information and different conservative shops: as a putative Sodom and Gomorrah, the place the streets are coated with feces and fentanyl, and good old school American values come to die (however solely after they’ve donned a pleasant leather-based harness and marched in Pleasure).
“We don’t want their help. We don’t need their help. San Francisco shall be simply nice with out them,” state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) — a neighborhood firebrand and former chair of the California Legislative Lesbian, Homosexual, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Caucus recognized for his efforts to legalize psychedelics, permit bars to remain open until 4 a.m. and construct extra housing — stated of the most recent 49ers followers. “Conspiracy theorists are very, very unhealthy vitality. We don’t want that unfavourable vitality.”
Assemblymember Matt Haney (D-San Francisco), who plans to attend the Tremendous Bowl along with his father on Sunday, conceded that it was “a bit of unusual to see individuals who normally hate San Francisco now cheering for San Francisco.”
“They hate Taylor Swift much more, I suppose,” he stated.
Proper-wing commentator and journalist Nick Sortor seems to have jump-started the unlikely MAGA-S.F. lovefest with a tweet final Saturday, after the Chiefs secured their place within the Tremendous Bowl.
“I haven’t given a crap in regards to the NFL since all their ‘Black Lives Matter’ BS,” Sortor stated. “However I’m now a 49ers fan particularly to see Taylor Swift and that Pfizer man go down.”
In a barely inconvenient element for Sortor, the 49ers have been additionally the longtime house of Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who famously took a knee through the nationwide anthem to protest police violence in opposition to folks of colour.
One other far-right influencer, Rogan O’Handley, who makes use of the nom de guerre DC Draino on the platform X, added gasoline to the hearth for his greater than 1 million followers the following morning.
“I do know we’ve all been roasting your metropolis for years, however I’m providing a 2 week truce,” O’Handley wrote. He and his brethren would curb their anti-San Francisco commentary, he stated, whereas “99% of America” turns into short-term 49ers followers, as a result of in the event that they didn’t, “Mr. Pfizer and his girlfriend are going to tour the nation as ‘world champions’ serving to elect Joe Biden.”
The irony is deepened by the very fact of the Chiefs’ personal geographic provenance: Kansas Metropolis could also be a small city island of relative blue, however President Trump defeated Biden in 2020 by greater than 15 factors within the surrounding state of Missouri. Apart from Illinois, house to the divisional cellar-dwelling Chicago Bears, each different state surrounding Missouri additionally backed Trump within the final presidential election.
California, in contrast, favored Biden by practically 30 factors, whereas a mere 12.7% of San Franciscans marked ballots for Trump in 2020. (It will be remiss to not word at this level that the San Francisco 49ers really play within the metropolis of Santa Clara, about 45 miles southeast.)
“That is the détente that Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis have been in search of,” San Francisco political advisor Peter Ragone quipped with amusing in regards to the newfound right-wing San Francisco fandom.
Ragone, a former Newsom advisor, was referring to the Florida governor’s obsession with town. The fixation figured broadly in DeSantis’ ill-fated GOP presidential bid and his November prime-time debate with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the place DeSantis proudly wielded a “poop map” of town and declared that the previous San Francisco mayor had made it “a template for California’s collapse.”
Alas, a détente between the rival governors doesn’t look like within the playing cards simply but, no matter what’s taking place in sure corners of the right-wing web. DeSantis held a information convention Monday the place he stood in entrance of a podium emblazoned with the phrases “Don’t permit Florida to change into San Francisco.”
Newsom, a Democrat who has been touring the nation to marketing campaign for Biden, tapped into the furor over the weekend, calling GOP criticism of Taylor Swift “unhappy and pathetic” throughout an MSNBC interview.
He’s nonetheless pulling for the Niners, although, as he at all times has.
