I’m no Swiftie, here to defend my girl Taylor Swift. I don’t like her music, or how she influences the culture. Frankly, while the pop princess does have a good set of pipes, I find her to be overrated and over-exposed.

But she is not a Pentagon Psy-Op, despite what Jesse Watters said.

On his Fox News program Tuesday evening, Watters floated an idea as to why Swift is so darn popular:

She’s all right, but I mean, have you ever wondered why or how she blew up like this? Well, around four years ago, the Pentagon psychological operations unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset during a NATO meeting. What kind of asset? A PsyOp for combatting online misinformation.

As a result, Taylor Swift could become “a front for a covert political agenda.”

Joining Watters was former FBI special agent Stuart Kaplan (hold on, don’t the MAGA folks like Watters hate the FBI?) who echoed the theory:

Now it is quite possible, frankly, that Taylor Swift does not know that she is being utilized in a covert manner to swing voters. But the bottom line is that the Biden administration is savvy, identifying how many followers and how many voters, potentially, she can influence. With either right information or misinformation, she can swing the voters.

Is Taylor Swift a Pentagon PsyOp asset? pic.twitter.com/yHp8WywKh8

— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) January 10, 2024

Watters backpedaled a bit, saying he had “no evidence” that Taylor Swift is “a front for a covert political agenda.” And if they did, he’d share it. “But we’re curious.”

You know, just asking questions. 

Giphy.com.

Yeah, of course you are. Anything for eyeballs on the screen.

Squelching the Taylor Swift Conspiracy

You’d think the brass at the Pentagon have more important things to do than to squelch a conspiracy about a pop singer. After all, their top man went to the hospital for surgery without telling anyone — they’ve got bigger problems. But Taylor Swift as a Psy-Op princess was a bit too much, so on Wednesday the Pentagon pushed back. Spokesperson Sabrina Singh said “as for this conspiracy theory, we are going to shake it off,” adding:

But that does highlight that we still need Congress to approve our supplemental budget request as Swift-ly as possible so we can be out of the woods with potential fiscal concerns. 

Don’t quit your day job, honey. Standup comedy just isn’t your thing.

However, the milblog Task & Purpose weren’t so amused. Senior staff writer Patty Nieberg did acknowledge Swift’s massive influence on the culture. She also noted that the singer uses “easter eggs” in her music to drop hints to her fans through her clothing and her social media comments. So in that sense, Watters wasn’t entirely wrong.

However, Nieberg also did what Watters didn’t do — research. Nieberg wrote:

The clip that Waters referred to was from a 2019 conference in Estonia which was organized by a multinational and interdisciplinary NATO cyber defense group. The speaker, Alicia Marie Bargar, a research engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, mentioned the singer as an example of the power of influence online.

Plus, unlike Watters, she actually spoke with Alicia Marie Bargar, who told Nieberg this:

I have no connection to the Pentagon. Taylor Swift was an incidental example of a famous person to explain a social network analysis concept to the audience.

Business Insider also questioned Bargar, who told BI:

This was an academic presentation at an open conference for discussing cyber security challenges … an incidental example of a famous person to explain a social network analysis concept to the audience. This is a commonly used approach in academia to make theoretical concepts easier to understand. 

And no, as she had also told Task & Purpose, she has no connection to NATO or the Pentagon.

This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

I’m old enough to remember the urban legend that Beatle Paul McCartney was dead, and the band was using a lookalike. The rumor grew legs in September, 1969, after a college newspaper in Iowa published an article asking “Is Paul Dead?” McCartney himself permanently put the kibosh on the conspiracy a few weeks later through an interview and cover story in Life magazine.

But that was then. Now any rumor can fly on streaming services, internet channels, X, Tik Tok — you name it, there is no shortage of wacky ideas and places where they fester. What’s even worse is that there are those who flog disinformation in order to push their political agendas — on both sides of the political chasm. People eagerly lap it up when it confirms their beliefs.

For example, after the school shooting in Iowa, conspiracists were quick to label it a “false flag” operation. It was the Deep State attempting to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein documents, they explained.

On social media, disinformation bots put out fake information in order to hook the gullible — sometimes even popular accounts on both the right and the left who disseminate it to their large followings. There are also posters who maliciously put out disinformation in order to attack a political enemy.

Finally, there are popular names like Jesse Watters on news channels — he of the perfect hair, unserious attitude, and the chutzpah to promote an inane tale about Taylor Swift being a Pentagon pawn. He doesn’t bother to investigate deeper. After all, he’s “just curious.” But he gives his fans what they want because it confirms their biases.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Oh, and one more bit of advice for the Swifties: sorry, but Taylor Swift is not giving away Le Creuset cookware. Yep, it’s an old school scam, updated with AI audio to mimic Swift’s voice.

Featured image: Photoshop/Brand X Studio.