The Pentagon on Wednesday dismissed a wild idea being kicked around in conservative circles—that pop musician Taylor Swift is a part of a government “psyop,” with the agency’s spokesperson quipping, “As for this conspiracy theory, we are going to shake it off.”
The wild idea went mainstream after being shared with Fox News’ primetime audience Tuesday by host Jesse Watters, who falsely claimed that several years ago the “Pentagon psyop unit pitched NATO on turning Taylor Swift into an asset for combating misinformation online.”
Yet Watters didn’t explain what he believed to be the connection between the Pentagon and the conference speaker in a video he showed viewers—and gave little evidence for the theory beyond one clip shared without context. At the end of the segment, Watters did acknowledge that he had “no evidence” that Swift is “a front for a covert political agenda.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh countered with another reference to one of Swift’s songs:
“But that does highlight that we still need Congress to approve our supplemental budget request as Swift-ly as possible so we can be out of the woods with potential fiscal concerns,” she said in a statement to Politico.
Swift herself hasn’t spoken out about the baseless rumors, which have been fed in part by right-wing outrage over her partnership with Vote.org to promote civic engagement.
That organization’s CEO, Andrea Hailey, did push back.
“Not a psy-op or a Pentagon asset,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter, “Just the biggest nonpartisan platform in America helping young people register & cast their vote.”
