The Super Psyop Bowl isn’t about winning

Let’s see if this works. (Taps microphone.)

“Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are actually pod people cooked up in a lab by Pfizer, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers and the Loch Ness Monster to get more Americans to watch the Super Bowl so that hypnotic subliminal messages embedded in the commercials will convince them to reelect Joe Biden.”

Fingers crossed — maybe it’ll go viral.

It isn’t true, of course, but Vivek Ramaswamy and Jack Posobiec and Benny Johnson and others in the Trumpian orbit don’t care about truth. They want A) attention and B) engagement. Alleging a bizarre Swift-Kelce-Biden “psyop” conspiracy is one way to get it done.

There are a bunch of people out there who already know they don’t like Swift — either because she endorsed Biden in 2020, or they just find the saturation media coverage of her exhausting. And there are a bunch of people who already know they don’t like Kelce — either because he once knelt in protest during the national anthem, or because he appeared in Pfizer commercials promoting the coronavirus vaccine, or because of the new act of Congress that requires Kelce to appear in at least one commercial during every TV break in an NFL playoff game. (Okay, that’s another false rumor, but it certainly feels that way, doesn’t it?)

Many who don’t like Swift and Kelce just want to find new reasons to not like them, and they don’t particularly care if the latest preposterous claims are accurate or not. This is about affirmation, not illumination. No one’s going to ask for any concrete, verifiable evidence that the Swift-Kelce relationship is a secret government plot designed to help Biden win reelection.

Just as no one asked for any evidence when Tucker Carlson claimed, during a recent live discussion hosted by Tim Pool at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, that he believes that what people believe are sightings of UFOs and aliens are actually signs of a malevolent spiritual force loose in the world:

“It’s my personal belief, based upon a fair amount of evidence, they’re not aliens, they’ve always been here,” Carlson said. “And I do think it’s spiritual. That’s my view. And again it’s not provable, but based on the evidence. If the U.S. government has, in fact, had contact, direct contact, with these beings, whatever they are, I’ve already told you what I think they are — and has entered into some sort of agreement with them, which is the claim of informed people — if that is true, it’s a very, very, very heavy thing.”

Yes, that would be a very heavy thing indeed — utterly transforming most human beings’ understanding of life, science and the universe. It seems like the sort of allegation you’d want to have some evidence to support, beyond not liking the decisions that people in government make.

Did you see lots of believers in the QAnon conspiracy suddenly change their minds when President Donald Trump left office, and “the storm” that they had insisted was coming, over and over again, failed to arrive? Or did the believers just move on to some newer, hotter, conspiracy theory?

There are few, if any, serious consequences for espousing a nonsensical claim with zero supportive evidence. Ramaswamy’s not going to lose any future gig in a Trump administration for speculating that the only way the Kansas City Chiefs could repeat as Super Bowl champs is because the game was rigged in favor of the Biden-Swift alliance.

In 2024, the consequences for public figures’ lying are reliably minor. But the consequences for being boring are severe.

A large swath of political discourse is based on making the listener or reader feel good, righteous or scared. What’s going on in the world is often depressing, boring and complicated. Conspiracy theories are exciting and dramatic, and they almost always come down to some version of the same simple explanation: A shadowy force is working behind the scenes, manipulating everything.

Or at least, that’s what the Loch Ness Monster told me to write.