Taylor Swift and the Super Bowl – a tale of America’s alternative universe

Meet the other Taylor Swift – not the global music superstar but the combatant in a psychological warfare operation to keep former US president Donald Trump from winning the 2024 elections.

For those unfamiliar with the increasingly bizarre alternative universe inhabited by millions of Americans whose views are shaped by the former president, social media tweets and influencers, here is a brief guide to the role supposedly played by psy-op Taylor Swift in an operation designed to culminate at next Sunday’s (Feb 11) Super Bowl in Las Vegas.

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The biggest event in US sports, last year’s Super Bowl had a television audience of just over 115 million. This year it may well be more because Taylor Swift is scheduled to attend to watch her boyfriend Travis Kelce play for the Kansas City Chiefs against the San Francisco 49ers.

According to tweets and a video seen by hundreds of thousands, psy-ops warriors have planned to rig the game so that the Chiefs will win after a dramatic finish. To celebrate, Swift and Kelce will announce their engagement, soon followed by the celebrity couple’s endorsement of Joe Biden for another four years in the White House.

Inhabitants of what has become known as Trumpworld have pointed to a variety of participants in the scheme, including the CIA and the Pentagon. Speculation on the latter was so persistent that the Pentagon felt it necessary to issue a denial through its deputy press secretary, Sabrina Singh.

“To set the record straight,” she told the newspaperPolitico, “Taylor Swift is not part of a DOD (Department of Defense) psychological operation. Period.”

Conspiracy theorists distrust government and tend to interpret official government denials as a form of confirmation, so the exasperated “period” exclamation is unlikely to kill speculation of a well-planned plot.

Not long after TIME magazine made Taylor Swift 2023 Person of The Year, prominent FOX News host Jesse Walters told his viewers that “it’s real. The Pentagon psy-op unit pitched NATO on turning Taylor Swift into an asset.”

Also on record to fuel speculation was Vivek Ramaswamy, a presidential candidate until he dropped out of the race for the Republican party’s primary elections in mid-January. “I wonder whether there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped up couple this fall,” he said, alluding to an endorsement for Biden.

Ramaswamy did not explain what he meant by “artificially propped”. Record-breaking tours, music royalties and a movie on her concerts turned Swift into a billionaire last year,Bloombergreported.

On Sunday’s Grammy Awards, she was awarded for Album of the Year, becoming the only artist to ever win that category four times.

Her successes and devoted fans – she has 300 million followers on social media -- reminiscent of the Beatlemania of the late 1960 and 1970s, has done little to impress those on the far right who have pegged her as a supporter of Joe Biden and thus an enemy of Trump.

The paranoia in Trumpland about a romance between a superstar singer and a football player makes some wonder about the sanity of Republicans who, as the Wall Street Journal put it in an editorial “demonise two of America’s healthier entertainments".

It had a question for those fanning the conspiracy: “If they believe defeating Mr Trump is so easy that Mr Biden can do it merely by getting an endorsement from a singer who backed him in 2020, doesn’t that suggest the GOP might be making a mistake by nominating such a weak candidate?”

The National Football League (NFL) has been quiet about the affair which is keeping trolls busy. But it is a reasonable bet that the NFL would not be unhappy if the number of Super Bowl viewers would be boosted by thousands of “swifties,” as the singer’s fans are called.

Why the United States is such fertile ground for conspiracy theories has puzzled historians, social scientists and pundits for decades – more so since the Internet allowed for weird ideas to spread worldwide and instantly.

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In 1964, a ground-breaking essay, later turned into a book, by the late Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter provided an explanation that still stands.

“It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant," he wrote in The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

The “more or less normal people” he cited in a tour of conspiracy theories going back to the 18th century included Samuel Morse, the celebrated inventor of the telegraph. Morse wrote that the government of Austria had sent Jesuit missionaries to America and supplied them with ample funds with the aim of installing a scion of the House of Hapsburg as emperor of the United States.

Among the most durable conspiracy tales alive in the alternative universe: The landing of American astronauts on the moon. The theory claimed it was filmed in California studios to convince the world of the USA's superiority in space. No American set foot on the moon.

More recently: The January 6, 2020assault on the Capitol in Washington to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from the loser, Donald Trump, to the winner, Joe Biden, was fostered by the FBI.

According to a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll, a quarter of Americans think the FBI instigated the attack. That belief has been repeatedly denied – but in America’s alternative universe that just amounts to confirmation.

Just like Taylor Swift’s secret role in undermining Trump.

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)