The Taylor Swift "Psy-Op" Rumor and Why It's Not Working
MAGA influencers took a tactic in their playbook too far. Now it's tired.
For the past month, scores of pro-Trump influencers, Fox News hosts, and internet gossipers spun up a narrative that Taylor Swift and her romance with Superbowl finalist Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs was part of a government psy-op (or military-based social influencing campaign) to swing the vote towards Biden. With all the attention on Swift and the Superbowl — two institutions central to contemporary American culture — Swift could then use the moment to win America’s hearts and get them to vote. Sounds more like a psyop for the NFL, which has seen decline in viewership. The whole story is hilarious, I know.
But what does the Right get from fixating on such a rumor?
In the maxim of “Conflict is attention and attention is influence,” crafting crazy celebrity-centric narratives (particularly around government conspiracies, spycraft, or pedophilia) has been a way for previously fringe actors to find themselves in the limelight on social media and mainstream outlets. Such rumors were really good at getting national attention in an earlier iteration of our Internet.
Yet this isn’t 2016 anymore. MAGA is mainstream. While more technical conspiracies (ex. 5G is bad, vaccine-skepticism, Hunter Biden corruption tales) are more believable because they involve simplifying complexity most of us don’t have time to understand, this “T-Swift Psy-Op” is just gaining attention for attention’s sake and explains nothing.
Trump using the opportunity to claim he is more popular than her actually feels very Jeb-like SAD! (Do I still think he has a huge shot at winning, though? Obviously — odds are in his favor. But it is not from a position of strength like 2016). The fixation also could actually backfire. As one professor of “The Sociology of Taylor Swift” told POLITICO: Swifties “are a political force that I don’t think anyone really should mess with.”
All said, the storyline is dull.
Swift went from being lauded by the 2016 Alt-Right as an Aryan princess red-pilling America to become more conservative… to accused of being a government psy-op. It feels like whiplash—if it weren’t for the fact Americans are simply exhausted by years of mainstreamed conspiracies. Simply put, the story of Swift and Kelce and Democrats is boring common sense: of course a pseudo-liberal queer icon is going to have Democrats calling her for endorsements. And such a collaboration doesn’t have to involve the Pentagon for a Pop Princess to share her civic opinions or sway her fans organically. Americans are used to entertaining political storylines as part of politics and daily life. This storyline is doing nothing particularly new or better.
The lack of newness, the staleness, might show a crack in the Right-Wing influence playbook.
Anatomy of a Troll Campaign
Trolling comes from a fishing term, to put lines out in the water with bait and pull them behind a boat, thus tempting fish.
In the 2010s, the trolling playbook was as follows: create some kind of crazy rumor or narrative targeted at a major celebrity so that the celebrity addresses it, thus breaking into the mainstream news cycle. The celebrity might address it because of the humor, or because the concept was so thoroughly disgusting it had to be addressed through denouncement. Through this tactic, the periphery and the shadows found themselves in the mainstream.
Troll scholar and professor Whitney Phillips illustrates this with a classic example: a coordinated troll effort to get Oprah to say “over 9000 penises” (a Dragon Ball Z anime meme) on her show by spamming her message boards claiming to be pedofiles. The trolls felt a sense of victory at getting Oprah to acknowledge them without even knowing what she was doing. She was pulling a crazy idea into the mainstream from the shadows.
These same tactics were then used in politics leading up to the 2016 presidential election, bringing fringe and offensive interests, talking points, and memes out of the shadows and into the center of conversation. Yet once ideas that were previously at the periphery find mainstaim champions, is trolling even as fun? As new? As useful?
The “Psy-op” of the Taylor Psy-op
In the second week of January, Fox News ran a segment speculating that the Pentagon had made Swift an “asset” in a “psy-op” on behalf of President Biden. Host Jesse Waters did not push back on the former FBI agent making these claims.
This was building off of a longer social media narrative speculating Swift was part of a larger coordinated campaign to get Biden into office. Jack Posobiec wrote back in December that when Swift was announced as TIME’s person of the year in 2023, that the “girlboss psyop has been fully activated.” When Swift advertised registering to vote via the non-partisan Vote.org, that too became “evidence.”
Rightwing podcaster Benny Johnson asked, “All of a sudden Taylor Swift was everywhere!” once she showed up at NFL games with her new boyfriend… who Benny reminds us is sponsored by Pfizer and Budlight (two companies subject to vaccine conspiracies and anti-Trans campaigns).
Once you troll an organization — the Pentagon, Swift, Vote.org — you wait until they acknowledge your trolling, using it as “proof” that they are hiding something because they denied it. Example: Posobiec suggested Vote.org claiming they were not a psyop was evidence that they were. The Pentagon also issued a statement to POLITICO that Swift was not an asset.
The only person smart enough to not feed the trolls was Swift herself.
This is Red Pilling 101: get people to think that government, media, and Hollywood are not simply biased, but actively colluding to persuade the public to act (usually against its interests). Then keep harping to your audience how no mainstream institution can be trusted and they are covering up the collusion by denying it. Everything becomes proof.
When mainstream outlets responded whether it was Rolling Stone or POLITICO — ostensibly because it was funny, entertaining, and absurd — Benny Johnson reposted Sinclair Media TV broadcasters saying in AI altered video that “Taylor Swift is not a psyop” as evidence that the Right had “Broke the media.” The whole thing was fake.
Yet while this kind of crazy narratizing might have worked in the Trump years and Covid years to explain complexity — vaccine conspiracies, lockdowns, supply chain issues — the truth is Taylor isn’t really that complex and Americans know it.
She is a blond, girl-next-door-looking popstar who is musically narrating the experience of growing up as a millennial and is finally finding some love in a sexy NFL player. Famous people know famous people. They do business with famous people. They date famous people. Powerful people want to borrow each others influence.
Of course it sounds nefarious to get the Pentagon involved in the narrative — an institution the American Right still thinks probably has the power and capacity enough to conduct regime change operations effectively. Yet in the end, relying on these wild stories to explain collective institutional collusion at EVERY turn starts looking suspicious itself. That’s when the edge is lost — when the tactic is too liberally applied.
Even right-wing commentators are starting to tell their peers they have to back off, but also for more people to not fall prey to something pretty silly that is being overblown. As one Swift critic wrote in The Federalist: “I suspect that if there is a psyop here, it’s that there’s been a psyop to convince the public that large numbers of Republican voters believe Taylor Swift is a psyop.”
“Paranoid Style” or American Style?
Rich Lowry pointed out in POLITICO that conservatives are susceptible to this “way of thinking” because of the Republican party’s populist turn. Yet I feel blaming everything on populism can get a little old. Also, this isn’t about populism. This is about attention, fame, and fandom.
Why not instead blame a convergence of our political culture with our entertainment culture, with one side indulging the capitalist and stylistic affordances better than the other? Fox News was born out of Inside Edition tabloid shows afterall — far from PBS’s stylistic and structural heritage.
The truth is, almost all of the American public loves wild gossip — it has been the backbone of local news since the first broadsheet in 1690 claimed the King of France was sleeping with his son’s wife. We love salacious tabloid styles and stories that allow us “to wonder if it was so” as scholar S. Elizabeth Bird describes the style’s purpose. The wild stores are secular ways of explaining reality in a country with incredibly diverse epistemic postures, religions, and cultures.
As our country’s complexity increases, and as that complexity becomes even more visible, we will seek ways of explaining why we see, know, think, or do things with more stories and narratives that will flatten that complexity.
Yet if this tabloid-style conspiracy mongering is used too liberally and applied to every facet of life, the Right might find that one of its greatest strengths of explaining away complexity via conspiracy allegations will also become one of its greatest weaknesses. A strong suit can become a straight jacket.
It could simply become dull.
Other News…
This week I published a piece in Coda about Argentine President Javier Milei’s relationship to Judaism and the Global Far-Right, underscoring how difficult he is to pin down, box in, or classify.
Between now and my last missive, my commentary was published in an article by Stephanie Mencimer in Mother Jones about J6 influencer Brandon Straka, and how the lack of narrative (and video) around the J6 cases, despite people serving jailtime, has left a story-void in our national culture.