The Pentagon has dismissed claims that Taylor Swift is a “psyop” working with the Biden administration.
The federal agency has now pushed back on the bizarre claims made by Fox News’ Jesse Watters on Tuesday.
Watters advanced a bizarre conspiracy theory popular among right-wing commentators that claims the meteoric rise of Taylor Swift is a government operation to encourage young people to vote Democrat.
Swift was mentioned in a presentation at the 2019 NATO conference as an example of a star with enough influence to theoretically help the government get a message across, although she did not claim 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 silence in the face of major issues in a documentary about her life.
The Pentagon has dismissed a bizarre claim that Taylor Swift is a ‘psyop’ working with the government to encourage young people to vote Democrat
Spokeswoman Sabrina Singh in a statement Wednesday dismissed the idea that Swift could be a government agent as a “conspiracy theory”
Jesse Watters took the conspiracy theory mainstream on Tuesday night, despite admitting he ‘clearly has no evidence’
The Pentagon dismissed the comments with a tongue-in-cheek remark in tribute to the 12-time Grammy winner’s catalogue.
“As far as this conspiracy theory goes, we’re going to shake it off,” Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said Politicsreferring to Swift’s hit.
“But that does emphasize that we still need Congress to pass our supplemental budget request as quickly as possible so we can get out of the way of potential budget problems,” she added, in another nod to the pop star’s hits .
She also told Congress, “I wish you” would grant the administration its supplemental budget request.
On Tuesday night, Watters took the conspiracy theory mainstream, despite admitting he “obviously has no evidence.”
“Have you ever wondered why or how she blew up like that?” he asked, implying that the government arranged for Swift to become the biggest celebrity of 2023 so she could be used as a covert operative for the Democratic Party.
“Well, about four years ago, the Pentagon’s psychological operations unit came up with the idea of making Taylor Swift an asset at a NATO meeting.
‘What kind of property? A psyop for combating online disinformation.
‘Yes, that’s real. The Pentagon’s psyop unit pushed NATO to turn Taylor Swift into an asset.”
Watters dragged Swift’s boyfriend, NFL star Travis Kelce (pictured together), onto the segment, implying he was part of the so-called “psyop” because he was “Mr. Pfizer’
Watters later implicated Swift’s friend in the conspiracy, calling him “Mr. Pfizer’
However, the speech the Fox News host is referring to was not from a “Pentagon psyop unit,” but from 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 into how misinformation spreads online, from ISIS to health conspiracies, and different ways to identify and counter it.
“The first, and the most common (example of influence), is collaborating with famous people or influencers to share information about a certain message,” she said.
“I’m including Taylor Swift here because she’s quite an influential person online. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of her.’
Bargar illustrated her point with a photo of Swift encouraging her millions of fans to vote on Election Day 2016 — without even saying who to vote for.
In 2020, Swift’s Netflix documentary Miss Americana focused on the moment she decided to become more politically outspoken after years of refraining from public commentary.
It included a segment in which she implored executives to take a more political stance and 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.