US rightwing conspiracy theory touts Taylor Swift as ‘Pentagon asset’
Taylor Swift is a “Pentagon asset”, an “election interference psyop” who, with unnamed left-leaning forces, has conspired to “rig” the Super Bowl and then endorse Joe Biden in the presidential election.
That’s according to a raft of influential rightwing figures, who have begun to spread a conspiracy theory that Swift, a pop star, is part of a nefarious plot ahead of November’s presidential election.
Swift has found herself at the center of the rightwing commentariat’s attention in recent weeks after intense media focus onherrelationship with Travis Kelce, a star tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs football team.
She has been in the crowd as the Chiefs have progressed through the NFL playoffs: on Sunday, the team won the AFC Championship game, and will play in the Super Bowl on 11 February. The attention their romance has received has led to a number conspiracy theories.
“I think – and I’ve said this, I’ve taken a lot of crap for this online – I think they’re using Taylor Swift right now,” Jack Posobiec, an influential rightwing conspiracy theorist, said in a video posted on Truth Social on Monday.
“They’re gearing up for an operation to use Taylor Swift in the election against everything: against Trump, for Biden, they’re gonna get her and all you know they call them the Swifties they’re going to turn those into voters, you watch.”
Posobiec did not elaborate on who “they” are, but Roseanne Barr, the rightwing former actor who, for unexplained reasons, was also in the video, agreed.
“I think that’s what they’re doing too, she’s definitely somebody who’s consented to speak the way the establishment wants to be spoken of,” Barr said.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a failed Republican presidential candidate and keen spreader of misinformation, had added his thoughts on Sunday.
“I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month,” Ramaswamy posted on X, in a reply to a post from Posobiec, who a Southern Poverty Law Center investigation found had “collaborated with white supremacists, neofascists and antisemites for years”.
Ramaswamy added: “And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.”
Early in her career, Swift, 34, avoided discussing Democrats or Republicans, but she has become more political in recent years. In 2018, she supported Democratic candidates in Tennessee, where she spent some of her childhood. In the 2020 election, she endorsed Joe Biden and vowed to then president Donald Trump on X that “we will vote you out”. Her fame and influence has only grown in the past four years, which appears to have the rightwing worried ahead of what is expected to be a close Biden-Trump contest.
“I have never been more convinced that the Super Bowl is rigged,” Jack Lombardi, a rightwing influencer who unsuccessfully ran to be a Republican congressional candidate in 2022, posted on X on Sunday, after the Chiefs had defeated the Baltimore Ravens 17-10.
“With all the unneeded and unwanted Taylor coverage at the games. KC’s journey to the Super Bowl – totally scripted. Next … Travis and Taylor together at the Super Bowl, appearing happy, and in love. Then KC wins. And then later announcing their support for Biden.”
Lombardi’s post, which had 35,000 likes as of Tuesday morning, continued:
“Coincidental? No.Bought and paid for couple. SMH.”
Lombardi later posted that Swift and Kelce’s relationship – the pair have reportedly been courting for several months – “has one purpose, to capture and manipulate the feelings of American women”.
The hysteria has been building for weeks. In early January, Jesse Watters, a Fox News host, devoted a segment of his prime-time show to claiming that Swift was a “Pentagon psyop asset”, whose fame and success has apparently been encouraged by leftwing operatives.
“Have you ever wondered why or how she blew up like this?” Watters said.
“Well around four years ago the Pentagon’s psychological operations unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset, during a Nato meeting. What kind of asset? A psyop for combatting online misinformation.”
Watters played a video showing part of a speech by Alicia Marie Bargar. In the video, Bargar, then a research engineer at Johns Hopkins university, gives a presentation on how online communities could work with famous people “to counter covert campaigns”.
Bargar, who does not, as Watters claimed, work for the Pentagon’s “psychological operations unit”, nor for the US government, gave the speech at the Nato Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, a research organization of 25 nations based in Estonia.
In the video, from August 2019, Bargar spoke for more than 20 minutes. She used Swift as an example of a “fairly influential online person” who could potentially spread messaging around misinformation.
Fox News and Watters were ridiculed for the segment, including by a Pentagon spokesperson, who said: “as for this conspiracy theory, we are going to shake it off”, but for now it seems that the Swift-Kelce-Democrats-Bidenpsyop movement is not going anywhere.
“The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open,” Laura Loomer, a strange, Florida-based far-right activist who has described herself as a “proud Islamophobe”, wrote on X.
Loomer, who has reportedly grown close to Trump in recent months, continued: “It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their proabortion GOTV Campaign.”