The Pentagon has dismissed claims that Taylor Swift is a ‘psyop’ working with the Biden administration.
The federal agency has now pushed back at the outlandish claims raised by Fox News’ Jesse Watters on Tuesday.
Watters aired a bizarre conspiracy theory popular among right-wing commentators that Taylor Swift’s meteoric rise is a government operation to encourage young people to vote Democrat.
Swift was mentioned in a 2019 NATO conference presentation as an example of a star with enough influence to theoretically help the government push a message, although not claiming that she had been.
The singer has taken a more political stance in recent years, releasing a song in support of the LGBTQ community and detailing her struggle with remaining silent in the face of big issues in a documentary about her life.
The Pentagon has slapped down a bizarre claim that Taylor Swift is a ‘psyop’ working with the government to encourage young people to vote Democrat
Spokeswoman Sabrina Singh dismissed the notion Swift could be a government agent a ‘conspiracy theory’ in a statement on Wednesday
Jesse Watters on Tuesday night put the conspiracy theory into the mainstream, despite admitting he ‘obviously has no evidence’
The Pentagon has slapped down the comments with a tongue-in-cheek remark paying homage to the 12-time Grammy winner’s catalogue.
‘As for this conspiracy theory, we are going to shake it off,’ Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told Politico, referring to Swift’s hit.
‘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,’ she added in another nod to the popstar’s hits.
She also told Congress ‘I Wish You Would’ grant the administration its supplemental budget request.
On Tuesday night Watters put the conspiracy theory into the mainstream, despite admitting he ‘obviously has no evidence.’
‘Have you ever wondered why or how she blew up like this?’ he asked, implying the government orchestrated Swift becoming the biggest celebrity of 2023 so she could be used as a covert Democratic Party agent.
‘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.
‘Yeah, that’s real. The Pentagon psyop unit pitched NATO on turning Taylor Swift into an asset.’
Watters dragged Swift’s boyfriend, NFL star Travis Kelce (pictured together), into the segment implying he was part of the supposed ‘psyop’ as he was ‘Mr. Pfizer’
Watters later went on to drag in Swift’s boyfriend into the conspiracy, branding him ‘Mr. Pfizer’
However, the speech referenced by the Fox News host was not by a ‘Pentagon psyop unit’, but Alicia Marie Bargar, a then-research engineer at Johns Hopkins University who now works at Shopify.
Her presentation at the International Conference on Cyber Conflict conference in August 2019 was titled ‘Challenges and Opportunities to Counter Information Operations Through Social Network Analysis and Theory.’
Bargar discussed her research on how misinformation spreads online, from ISIS to health conspiracies, and various ways to identify and counter it.
‘The first one, and the most common [example of influence], is working with famous people or influencers to share information of a particular message,’ she said.
‘I include Taylor Swift in here because she’s a fairly influential online person, I don’t know if you’ve heard of her.’
Bargar illustrated her point with a photo of Swift encouraging her millions of fans to vote on election day in 2016 – and not even saying who to vote for.
In 2020 Swift’s Netflix documentary Miss Americana covered the moment she decided to become more politically outspoken after years of refraining from publicly commenting.
It featured a clip of her begging executives to take a more political stance to speak out against Republican Senate incumbent, Marsha Blackburn, who was running on a platform of ‘Tennessee Christian values’.
The year before she released the song ‘You Need to Calm Down’ in support of LGTBQ+ rights.