The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued a press release on Monday, November 6, blasting Taylor Swift and her legal team for making "threats against a local blogger" who recently called on the pop singer to denounce white supremacy.
On October 25, PopFront editor Meghan Herning received a cease and desist letter from Swift's attorney that ACLU is calling a "meritless" attempt to intimidate the pop culture critic. The letter addresses an editorial that Herning penned on September 5, titled, "Swiftly to the alt-right: Taylor subtly gets the lower case kkk in formation." In the piece, Herning addresses the favor Swift has apparently garnered from an audience of White supremacists thanks to her having been coveted over the years by voices on the fringes of the far-right media.
At one point in the PopFront piece, Herning quotes a writer for the now defunct propaganda site The Daily Stormer as having written: “it is also an established fact that Taylor Swift is secretly a Nazi and is simply waiting for the time when Donald Trump makes it safe for her to come out and announce her Aryan agenda to the world.” Herning goes so far as to liken imagery from Swift's "Look What You Made Me Do" video to historic photographs of Hitler overlooking his Nazi army, and she charges Swift with playing up to White nationalist narratives with lyrics like: “I don’t like your kingdom keys. They once belonged to me. You asked me for a place to sleep. Locked me out and threw a feast.”
The letter from Swift's attorney, William J. Briggs, II, accuses Herning of spreading "a malicious lie" and propagating "hideous falsehoods" after demanding that "PopFront immediately issue a retraction of a provably false and defamatory story about Ms. Swift, as well as remove the story from all sources." ACLU has fired back by calling the letter "a completely unsupported attempt to suppress constitutionally protected speech,” and gives Swift and her lawyers up until November 13 to retract their threat to pursue legal action.
Source: rawstory.com
