Jesse Watters on Tuesday aired a profoundly weird conspiracy theory about Taylor Swift that has been gaining traction in right-wing circles: that she’s not just a pop musician, but part of a government “psyop.”
On Jesse Watters Tonight, the Fox News host took an interest in how some allies of former President Donald Trump are wondering whether there’s something deeper going on when it comes to Swift.
Former Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller, for instance, wrote last month, “What’s happening with Taylor Swift is not organic.” Jeffrey Clark, a co-defendant of Trump’s in the Georgia racketeering case, called the musician a “Trojan horse” and responded affirmatively to a post by far-right commentator Jack Posobiec that said Swift’s “girlboss psyop has been fully activated.”
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And so Watters broached the subject Tuesday by calling attention to a video that Clark had re-shared on X, formerly Twitter, which he claimed showed “the Pentagon psychological operations unit float[ing] turning Taylor Swift into an asset during a NATO meeting.”
That video was an excerpt from the 2019 International Conference on Cyber Conflict, which was held in Estonia and organized by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCD COE). The speaker in the clip is Alicia Marie Bargar, a research engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who appears to simply mention Swift as an example of the power of influencers with large followings.
“You came in here wanting to understand how you just go out and counter the information operation,” she says in the clip. “The idea is that social influence can help encourage or promote behavior change,” she goes on. “So, potentially as a peaceful information operation… I include Taylor Swift in here because she’s a fairly influential online person. I don’t know if you’ve heard of her.”
Watters did not explain Bargar’s alleged connection to the Pentagon, yet he nevertheless falsely declared: “Yeah, that’s real: the Pentagon psyop unit pitched NATO on turning Taylor Swift into an asset for combating misinformation online.”
Watters then admitted that he “obviously has no evidence” that Swift is “a front for a covert political agenda.”
“If we did, we’d share it,” he said. “But we’re curious.”
