You’d have to go back to the peak years of Bob Dylan’s cultural relevance, when one critic cum stalker started searching the songwriter’s garbage for clues about his lyrics, to find a musician who attracts as many amateur code breakers as Taylor Swift does. Swift has fed the frenzy by declaring that her songs, her liner notes, her social-media posts—basically everything around her—might have hidden meanings embedded in them. As she told The Washington Post in 2022, she and her fans have “descended into color coding, numerology, word searches, elaborate hints, and Easter eggs.”
That scavenger-hunt mentality can lead would-be decoders in directions the singer might not prefer, as with the “Gaylors” who search for signals that Swift is secretly queer. Now a different subculture is getting in on the act: A chunk of the GOP has been conjuring alleged evidence that Swift is a deep-state psy-op, and that maybe—we’re just asking questions here—the NFL is in on it.
This theory got its first burst of mainstream attention last month, when Fox’s Jesse Watters aired a video that, he claimed, shows that “the Pentagon psychological-operations unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset.” The person speaking in the video was not in fact from the Pentagon, she was citing Swift as a generic example of celebrity influence, and this all happened years after Swift became super popular anyway, but Watters still seemed to think it might explain “why or how she blew up like this.” He then interviewed a former FBI agent, who said that Joe Biden’s presidential campaign would like Swift’s support (which is true) and that she could move substantial numbers of votes into Biden’s column (which is not the track record that pop-music endorsements have historically had in American politics).
The psy-op rumor mutated into its most infamous form a few weeks later. Vivek Ramaswamy, until recently a presidential candidate himself, posted on X, “I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.”
Hellbound and Down 