While there are plenty of things the 34-year-old singer deserves credit for — like her “Eras Tour” being the first one to gross over $1 billion or recently breaking a chart record held by Elvis Presley — there are so many conspiracy theories being spun with her perfect red-lipped mug at the center.
Between that world tour, her exhausting workouts for it, releasing her blockbuster concert film, rerecording albums, being in a long-distance relationship, supporting her female friends, being a cat mom and attending awards shows, we’re not sure how she’d have the time to conspire with the government or write a spy novel that’s being turned into a major motion picture. Those are some of the working theories circulating on the internet.
On Tuesday’s Jesse Watters Primetime, Watters asked if viewers wondered how Swift “blew up like this,” referring to the pop star being among the most famous people in the world. While admitting he had “no evidence,” he went on to say: “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 psy-op for combatting online misinformation.” (A psy-op is a person who secretly participates in psychological operations — usually recruited by the government, military or the police — to influence the beliefs, emotions and behavior of the masses.)
Watters played a video clip of someone talking about Swift’s influence saying, “Yeah, that’s real. The Pentagon’s psy-op unit pitched NATO on turning Taylor Swift into an asset” to help the Biden administration.
Only the video was from an academic conference on misinformation, organized by NATO, in 2019. The woman speaking — Alicia Marie Bargar — was not a Pentagon employee or connected to NATO but a data engineer at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Bargar told Business Insider her comments were taken out of context. She was discussing cybersecurity challenges and used Swift as “an incidental example of a famous person to explain a social network analysis concept to the audience.”
A Pentagon spokesperson has since issued a statement via Politico, saying, in part, “As for this conspiracy theory, we are going to shake it off,” a nod to the hook from one of the star’s songs.
