National security officials are used to shaking off absurd conspiracy theories, but the latest rumor that’s gripped MAGA world just hits different.
The claims by Fox News and far-right influencers that pop star Taylor Swift is part of a Pentagon “psychological operation” to get President Joe Biden reelected, and somehow rig the Super Bowl to benefit Kansas City Chiefs tight end (and Swift’s boyfriend) Travis Kelce, has been met with forehead slaps in the national security world.
“The absurdity of it all boggles the mind,” said one senior administration official, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly on the matter. “It feels like one of those ‘tell me you are a MAGA conspiracy theorist, without telling me you are a MAGA conspiracy theorist’ memes.”
I’m gripped by a strong urge to start anonymously sending some Taylor Swift / KC Chiefs merchandise to family members and acquaintances who have been guzzling the red-hat Flavor Aid for the last decade. It’s probably not the most productive use of time and money but this whole thing is just goddamn ridiculous.
There’s probably a Taylor Swift email notification service for upcoming concerts and such that you could sign them up for.
Free, and guaranteed to stir up the Trumpanzees in your life without putting a target on your own back.
Anonymous remailers exist, I’d just have to ship it to them in a package they could open and reseal before sending it on. There are some other rules involved as well, turns out there’s some risk of those being used for less than savory purposes.
I didn’t realize how much Fox News was involved with this. I guess Fox is back in with the MAGA crowd?
What they’re doing is very dangerous.
Uh… what? Fox News is the biggest right-wing propaganda platform in the world and it (still) exists to influence opinion. They’ve hosted him and his sycophants and election-denyers, etc multiple times. They might have briefly looked into how to insulate themselves after paying out almost a billion dollars for lies, but they’re still all-in for Trump and the MAGA crowd, believe it…
Well, I’m not American and I don’t watch Fox News, so I didn’t realize that they were the ones pushing this Taylor Swift conspiracy narrative. Also, it feels like it wasn’t that long ago that I heard MAGA was going to boycott Fox.
That was a thing for a bit because Fox walked back some of the more extreme narratives they pushed to shield themselves from legal liability. Some of the more extreme MAGA conspiracy nuts still swear off of Fox News in favor of Newsmax and OAN. My grandma is one of them; watched Fox News religiously all her life until 2021, when she switched to Newsmax, OAN, and various “prophets” who claim to have a direct line to God who tells them Trump is the second coming of Christ.
MAGA crowd, what you have just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
One might even say,
That Billy Madison quote applies well here.
It should be set to music and become anthemic for them (or us i guess 🤣)
That Billy Madison quote applies well to pretty much anything conservatives say.
You could’ve just said incorrect…
USA , can you please reinstate that law (that fox news got rescinded) that requires news to be actual factual news? That way, fox must rebrand itself to “fox bullshit” and you can get actual factual news again.
I think that’d help a lot. Then get rid of the 24 hours Jews cycle as that hasn’t helped anyone but investors in news corporations, and people could actually start believing in media organizations again.
Fox news classified themselves as entertainment so that law didn’t apply to them.
It would never have applied to them.
Are you thinking of the fairness doctrine? That only ever applied to broadcast TV, not cable TV like Fox News.
The reason for the distinction is that broadcast TV is over radio waves that anyone can receive with off the shelf equipment. The FCC has a lot of jurisdiction over that and can regulate what can be shown. Cable TV is relatively free of that oversight. Legally speaking, they could show hardcore porn at 5pm. They won’t because their advertisers would hate it, but they legally could.
That is quite the unfortunate typo.
Removed, “24 hours Jews cycle”, really?
News cycle, NEWS cycle, not Jews cycle. It’s a typo and I’m rather amazed that nobody thought of this.
My auto correct keeps changing news to Jews now btw, no idea why. I am not anti-Semitic, I have nothing against Jews or Palestinians or Mexicans or Caucasians or African Americans for God’s sake. It’s just a random auto correct issue. I’ll try and fix it, can you undelete this?
If that were your only problematic comment, I’d ALMOST buy that excuse. But it’s not your only problematic comment.
Sadly they’ll take the “Suspiciously specific denial” (How they’d see it) as confrimation
Nah fuck em. Let them freak out. Fucking moron shitcunts.
“Shitcunts”… I may steal this. 😂
Really? You couldn’t come up with something like that yourself?
I’m not that creative.
I’m gonna steal this.
I remember remarking over the last couple months how Swift’s rise to superstar this past year could have a real impact on Voter turnout. I was hoping she’d pop into the political sphere and boy, Republicans just made sure she will lol.
She’s been a superstar a whole lot longer than this past year.
She became a billionaire in the past year. You know how hard that is to do as an artist? She’s been at this a minute. Like 2 decades of superstar minutes.
Sure absolutely, but nobody can deny she jumped to whatever the next level is called this past year. She went from another highly successful pop star a la Lady Gaga or Katie Perry to literally the most successful of all time to the point where she inundates my feeds (pre-recent politics news) where no other pop star does.
I’ll deny it. She’s stayed pretty consistent, just because other artists have waned in popularity doesn’t mean she’s somehow more.
By pretty much every metric in terms of search trends, sales, concert tickets… She’s above her past average.
I’ve seen no evidence provided by you to suggest otherwise.
Oh please… Taylor Swift is an “artist” as much as I’m a world class chess grandmaster.
Apparently billionaires should not exist… Except for Taylor Swift.
You’ve narrowed yourself down to one of 50ish people if you earned the title the same year her first album came out.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist but if one of them happens to use their ill gotten wealth to improve society, I don’t see why I should be mad?
Taylor Swift is a prolific polluter.
We should have her stay home and just do concerts from there. Let’s instead let 1000’s of fans get plane tickets and go see her instead.
If missing the point was an Olympic sport you’d be a gold medalist for sure.
I don’t have the capacity to stop Peter Thiel or Elon musk from doing billionaire stuff. I also don’t have the capacity to stop Taylor Swift from doing billionaire stuff. I am going to feel positively toward positive social developments even if I am aware it’s not perfect.
Give me a button that deletes a random billionaire and I will fingerblast it until it breaks.
how is she not an artist?
Everything about her is meticulously curated for optimal cash flow. Her music is written mostly by a literal team of professionals whose job it is to create the broadest appeal. She’s not an artist, she’s a product line.
you seem to have a very biased perspective. even if that were true, isn’t she still a performance artist?
That’s kind of sexist, dude.
How?
… broadest appeal. She’s not an artist…
Do you figure she’s not an artist because she’s a broad?
Literally shaking right now from the pent up misogynist energy coming off your comment.
“This past year”? Did you live under a rock? She has been a superstar for a long time now.
In a way I have, and this proves my point:
Sure absolutely, but nobody can deny she jumped to whatever the next level is called this past year. She went from another highly successful pop star a la Lady Gaga or Katie Perry to literally the most successful of all time to the point where she inundates my feeds (pre-recent politics news) where no other pop star does.
So you see a couple articles and that “proves” that now she’s a superstar?
I’d say that follows as much logic as the people touting that she’s part of some liberal conspiracy.
Buddy, I think you’re taking this far too seriously.
Remember, a lot of young conservative men were convinced Taylor Swift was a white nationalist who posted with them on 4chan.
When she stsrted telling people to go vote (she didnt even say for a specific parry, but just telling people to vote is enough to convince them you’re a democrat) they took that as Taylor Swift betraying them.
So much of what conservatives engage with is completely made up and exists only instead their own heads.
High voter turnout typically means Democrat victory, as the only people who make sure to vote EVERY election is the paranoid “Keepin’ up with the Jonesses” suburban America types
These are some of the same rocket surgeons that believe(d) that Hillary was using a pizza parlor with no basement to run an international pedo ring out of the basement of the pizza parlor.
Not really known for their application of reason and logic.
I mean, those same young conservative men are convinced that Taylor Swift and Lorde both have nudes posted on 4chan, because of the “tits or gtfo” rule.
Note that the speculation has existed since Swift and Lorde were both like 16.
May I have your attention, please
Dark Brandon gives their supersolders the hardest battles.
Agencies has so many stories and gossips of coups, secret weapons and psychological experiments like MK-ULTRA, and they used Taylor telling people to vote as their psy-op?
Big scary government that can hear every your word and can even say them for you, can track and kill you at any time - uses a pop-star to make a point?
Who buys that bullshit? Is it, again, the weak but strong enemy? That’s a story even Onion wouldn’t publish.
I mean, if agencies theoretically wanted more dem votes, there are worse ways than getting a mega superstar to ask her fans for them. But if they were in the business of controlling US elections we probably wouldn’t have the entirety of the shitshow that is existence right now.
Wait for it. Win or lose, once they realize how embarrassing this episode should be, it’ll become something that none of them actually believed and besides, it was all started by some lefty trying to make fun of them. The real conspiracy turns out to be (in hindsight with the benefit of selective memory and heavy retconning) a push to drive up merchandise sales. They’ll make a reference to globalists, lizard people and something about “controlling the media” without a specific J-word for plausible deniability.
You can’t say jewelery without a J-word, don’t you? They are stupid rich and are out to get you. Hide your kids, hide your wife, as they’d come to you to take them, and dance Hava Nagila over your cold dead body. Stupid leftists think I’m insane now, but who’d they ask to help, when jewish reptiloids would take their children and farm them for adenochrome? Not me, I’d shoot them on sight as any other trespasser. God bless America.
And hide yo husband cuz they rapin’ everyone out here
The tragedy of our age is that this could totally be posted in all seriousness.
I’m in my mid-40’s and i cannot recall a time when this wouldn’t have been the case.
We live in some form of post-reality where whatever our sci-fi visionaries said years ago as a precaution gets picked as an instruction to action. I hate that, and I’m happy someone picked it without a cowardly added s/.
This way they get to hate a beautiful woman who would never fuck them
But that’s exactly what they would say if it were a psy-op, isn’t it?
I’m joking and I wish that were obvious, but nowadays it probably isn’t.
Seriously tho, can we go back to conspiracy theories about bigfoot? It’s equally bullshit, but the worst case scenario with bigfoot conspiracy theories is that people do some more hiking to try to spot him.
Does anyone actually know real people who believe any of this shit or is this just bots/media pushing a narrative
i do
I work with a couple people that I think may believe this. I haven’t specifically talked to them about this, but they believe they other conspiracy theory, so it would make sense. One is a flat Earther is that helps paint a picture.
Oh there are absolutely people who 100% believe this. This kind of shit is all I hear about whenever I talk to a lot of my family.
Yeah, and unfortunately I’m related to them. The maternal side of my family has pretty much split in two and aren’t talking to the other half nowadays because of shit like this.
Haven’t called my dad in a while but I’ll give him a ring today. He’s usually 100% on board with the mainstream maga garbage. I’ll update my comment after.
Haha how’d that go
This feels like one of those things /b/ started as a joke, and a few echo chambers took it seriously, and the media assumed or “assumed” it was far more widespread than it was. At least, I hope so
You took the word right out of my neurolink embedded keyboard…
This really is one of the most amusing panics they’ve had in recent years.
Until someone shoots up a concert again
Well sure if you want to take morbid reality into account. Yet they wonder why people call for gun laws when nutcases pull things like that.
“They are trying to take away our right to shoot up a concert!” -Q cultists probably
At work I have a regular that comes into the office and she spouts conspiracies like these and started talking about Taylor Swift vaccines and the deep state in the last week or so, so there are definitely a few true believers.
Oh no doubt, no matter how insane sounding there will be believers. It’s almost always related to undiagnosed or unmedicated mental disorders with delusions as a symptom. It’s really sad that we don’t prioritize mental health more in this country.
This woman is like 75 years old, lives in a van from '89, gets healthcare from her father being in the military or something based on what she says. She definitely has undiagnosed schizophrenia based on the way she acts and the bits of past she gives out. I feel bad for her, but she comes in, destroys our bathrooms to take a shower, then when she gets barred from using our restrooms, gets upset claiming she has no memory of causing the mess and tells us she will have to inform her doctors if that’s the case. It seems all the more tragic that she lives this way but has access to the things that could help her, but chooses not to. She says she lives in the van to save money, but she has a full retirement account. There’s a military base with her father’s name on it.
Everyday, someone new is out to get her. Government, vaccines, Democrats, CNN, George Soros. The right has effectively weaponized mental illness on a national scale.
Damn Taylor. TIL
Taylot Swift vaccines
These will never work. She’s just too infectious.
You just gotta shake it off. (Yes, I hate myself)
That pun. I knew you were trouble when you walked in.
Trump’s massive inferiority complex and narcissism is also driving it
There have always been sports fans who think that when their team loses, it’s because the ref is on the take. Now you have legalized sports gambling everywhere, with non-stop ads, and official NFL partnerships. Combine that with dozens of hyper slo-mo cameras covering every angle when a ref misses a call, and the conspiracy that the NFL is rigged has become more common the last two years.
Without getting into how absolutely stupid that is, it’s only a few more leaps in logic to get to where they seem to be: they keep showing Swift during games, because her fans tune in to see her, ergo, they’ll want her to be on screen during the biggest have of the year! The NFL wants the Chiefs to go to the super bowl. (I bartend, and I’ve had non-maga people saying this to me.) Add in the paranoia that comes with facism, and boom, a new MAGA grand conspiracy is born.
Listen, I’m a lifelong football player, coach and fan. If you’re trying to tell me the game isn’t rigged for the Chiefs to be in the Superbowl I’m telling you you’re the conspiracy Nutter!
Signed Your biggest Baltimore Ravens fan.
There actually is a confirmed government plot to keep the Bills from winning the Super Bowl, though. It was confirmed in that documentary from the 90s, “The X-Files”.
Oh fuck watching that FG go wide right the other week gave me flash backs to nam.
Woof. I felt so bad for Flowers on 1/28. They kept zooming in on him when he was rattled and you could see how bad it was getting to him.
He made rookie mistakes after not playing like a rookie all season. The offense shit the bed the second half, wasn’t just one guy Flowers doesn’t deserve as much hate as he’s getting. Deserves a good share though.
There have always been sports fans who think that when their team loses, it’s because the ref is on the take.
It doesn’t help that this has actually happened though like with the NBA in the late 90s/early aughts.
The entire alt right movement was exactly that. It was a joke on b that did this.
Like I used to think that enders game was stupid when it came to the weird internet forum starting a movement and influencing politics but that has literally happened in real life lol
Right? I remember when the_Donald started on reddit, I thought it was hilarious and just people making fun of Trump and behaving like over the top cultists. And in the beginning it obviously was only just a joke. And then it got real and people really thought what was written there was the truth. People for banned and an echo chamber formed.
Was it the same on /b/? Did anyone experience the same as me back then? I really wanna know if all of this came from dumb internet humour…
Except that in Ender’s Game they used weird internet forums to actually improve public discourse and awareness.
Sure but what’s your point? I’m saying it was weird to me that the author thought that was realistic or possible. And it happened in real life, proving that it was possible lol
Reality turns out to be much dumber than fiction sometimes. I’d say often but there’s a lot of porn.
I feel like this is how a lot of stuff starts these days. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a “psy op” (possibly created by actual children).
I love that the Pentagon is referring to dank memes.
Reality really is stranger than fiction.
I mean, people who grew up on the internet can get up in high-ranking positions too, especially as we all get older.
I’d bet the Pentagon has a huge presence on all fringe forums and memeboards.
Just think of all the tax dollars wasted paying law enforcement to surf 4chan… It’s funny because you know that’s a real job…
I don’t think it’s a waste of money. There’s plenty of pedophiles sharing CSAM on 4chan and probably a terrorist or two as well.
Yeah, at least 4chan pretends to moderate posts these days. Back when it first started, it was the fucking Wild West of the internet. You’d be scrolling, and see naked 13 year olds getting pounded by sweaty old dudes with their faces blacked out, right below terrorist beheading videos and memes about triforcing. It was like if LimeWire had a stream of consciousness.
Of all the violence, media manipulation, lies, a LITERAL coup attempt, and what the pentagon decides to crack down in is Fox slandering A FUCKING POP STAR?!
This world is insane, it has been for a while now.
