Things we can learn from Swift/Kelce conspiracies
Liberals are now claiming to be oh-sotired of the feeding frenzy they helped stoke. This would be their pushback, some of it admittedly quite witty, to far-right conspiracy theories about the lovey-dovey relationship between singer-songwriter Taylor Swift and NFL player Travis Kelce.
There’d been an avalanche of opinions lately. Late night TV hosts weighed in, as did pundits and maybe your neighbor or yourself.
But now, they’ve grown tired of it all, many people are now saying in Facebook posts. Tired of trying to understand how MAGA adherents could possibly believe the latest conspiracy theory about the global pop star and her Kansas City Chiefs boyfriend.
The theory is whack-adoodle. But that’s what conspiracy theories are, after all. And if they’re honest, liberals often hold tightly to their own.
Which is why we’d all be better off taking time to understand why latching onto conspiratorial ideas is a very human trait. Contrary to common thought, it’s one that people of varying political leanings and education levels fall prey to.
Science learns more about the human brain daily. It can help us understand how people mold conspiracies and spread them. Cognitive bias plays a role — our minds are wired to dismiss information that conflicts with what we already believe. That’s part of human hardwiring, how the brain tracks information, applying new information to previous memories.
This isn’t to argue the far-right theories initially blasted out by Fox News host Jesse Watters and other top MAGA voices hold water. They don’t.
Here’s a summary of one theory: Swift is the pinnacle in a government plot. She’s not merely dating Kelce or going to the Super Bowl to watch her boyfriend. She’s really trying to take down America.
This would be the America of their dreams where former President Donald Trump is elected again in November and everyone suddenly prospers.
The Pentagon has even clapped back at these notions lately. A Pentagon spokesperson told Politico, “We know all too well the dangers of conspiracy theories, so to set the record straight, Taylor Swift is not part of a DOD psychological operation. Period.”
Yes, there’s a tone of exasperation in that statement.
“Psy-op” is the term that people who believe in the Swift conspiracies like to use, probably because it makes it sound like they have the top secret data.
Here’s another common plot line of one conspiracy theory: Swift (a government planted agent) will take to the field during the half-time performance of the Super Bowl (with apologies to Usher who is contracted for the entertainment) and while standing in mid-field, she’ll endorse President Joe Biden.
Here’s the part that is logical: Swift has backed Biden previously. And it is not loony to think that she might do so again, or that she might also encourage voter registration, as she has done in the past.
Given her megawatt star power, she could be influential to younger voters. That is what far-right minds fear: a Biden win.
Conspiracy theories rise to the level of the threat felt by believers. This is how such an all-American love story — literally America’s sweetheart dates a football star — could take on such a twisted and sinister storyline.
Consider the magnitude of the conspiracies surrounding COVID-19 and vaccines. It was a global pandemic. Not something happening on one block in North America. COVID disrupted the world. Economies were deeply impacted as supply chains were hit, which in turn, caused panic and hardship at a scale not seen in many people’s memory.
So the explanations to place blame, to understand how it occurred, were equally gargantuan in scale. Peeled back, it’s somewhat understandable.
Addressing anxieties, yes, even some folks’ spinning monologues of imminent societal doom under a Democrat president, is one way to put the Taylor-Travis uproar in a different light.
We would be better off as a nation, though, if we could devote more time to trying to understand the fears of those who wind up believing conspiracy theories, rather than spending so much time ridiculing them.