To find a musician who garners as many amateur code breakers as Taylor Swift does, you’d have to revisit the peak of Bob Dylan’s cultural relevance, when a critic-turned-stalker rummaged through his garbage seeking clues to his lyrics. Swift fuels this intrigue by suggesting that her songs, liner notes, and social media contain hidden meanings. In a 2022 interview with The Washington Post, she revealed that she and her fans delve into color coding, numerology, word searches, elaborate hints, and Easter eggs.
The hunt for hidden meanings can sometimes lead enthusiasts down paths the singer may not endorse, such as the “Gaylors” who seek clues suggesting Swift is secretly queer. Now, a new subgroup is joining the fray: Some within the GOP are fabricating supposed evidence that Swift is part of a deep-state psy-op, even suggesting, without evidence, NFL involvement.
This theory gained initial mainstream attention recently when Fox’s Jesse Watters aired a video purporting that “the Pentagon’s psychological-operations unit considered Taylor Swift as an asset.” However, the individual in the video was not affiliated with the Pentagon and merely used Swift as a generic example of celebrity influence. Moreover, this occurred years after Swift had already achieved widespread popularity. Nonetheless, Watters speculated on whether this could explain Swift’s rise to fame. He further interviewed a former FBI agent who suggested that Joe Biden’s presidential campaign sought Swift’s support (which is true), claiming she could sway significant votes in Biden’s favor (contrary to the historical impact of pop-music endorsements in American politics).
The psy-op rumor took on a more notorious guise a few weeks later. Vivek Ramaswamy, a recent presidential candidate, 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.”
Indeed, that was a reference to Swift and her boyfriend, Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs. Over the years, I’ve encountered numerous speculations about rigged elections and rigged Super Bowls, but this could be the first instance where someone suggests that election rigging could occur through manipulating the Super Bowl.
Apart from this new twist, however, none of this is without precedent. In fact, as peculiar as the psy-op narrative might seem, it’s not far removed from a rather prevalent perspective on culture. According to some, virtually all pop culture is viewed as a form of manipulation.
Conspiracy theories surrounding the music industry vary widely. One particularly unsavory example from a century ago involved Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, which asserted that a “Jewish combine” was suppressing non-Jewish music while promoting jazz. In a 1921 article, the paper claimed, “Popular music is a Jewish monopoly… Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, the slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.”
You didn’t need to harbor Ford-style prejudices to entertain the notion of a secretive group orchestrating the music you found disagreeable. In 1958, Vance Packard, renowned for his critique of the advertising industry in “The Hidden Persuaders,” testified before the U.S. Senate that “the public was manipulated into liking rock and roll” and that “the rock and roll, hillbilly, and Latin American movements were largely engineered, manipulated for the interests of the [music-licensing group] BMI.” When a senator from Michigan objected, citing genuine appreciation for hillbilly music among his constituents, Packard concurred, saying, “I like some of it too, but I think the quality of it lately has been degenerating.”
During the psychedelic era of the 1960s, pamphlets like David A. Noebel’s “Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles” alleged that the Kremlin used the Fab Four to induce “artificial neurosis” in American children. Similarly, Gary Allen’s “That Music: There’s More to It Than Meets the Ear” speculated that the Beatles’ music was crafted by behavioral scientists in a clandestine “think tank.” This paranoia escalated in the 1980s with the backmasking panic, during which ministers, educators, broadcasters, and lawmakers fervently believed that conspirators were embedding satanic messages into rock records played backward, subtly leading impressionable listeners toward Lucifer.
Perhaps the most pervasive devil theory about music is the suspicion that the entire industry is a vast conspiracy, a notion fueled by a kernel of truth. Indeed, the music world is rife with clandestine dealings, although they’re often more petty than grandiose: individuals have colluded over the years to bribe DJs, cheat artists out of royalties, manipulate streaming service statistics, and engage in various unsavory practices to manufacture hits and maximize profits. Moreover, the industry’s PR machinery is notorious for its penchant for deception. Thus, it’s undeniable that music marketers work behind the scenes to craft and sell images, sometimes bending ethical boundaries in the process.
These realities have fostered a more skeptical belief, one that perceives the public as merely passive recipients of the culture industry’s offerings, mindlessly consuming whatever products are thrust upon us. When Packard conversed with those senators, a considerable portion of his testimony revolved around credible assertions regarding behind-the-scenes business dealings. However, he also asserted that the industry possessed the capability to “make us all start humming chants of zinc miners or marching tunes from the War of 1812.” In this narrative, marketers are not merely shrewd but omnipotent, controlling every aspect. It’s operations all the way down.
If you subscribe to the notion that marketers possess the means to generate demand for undesired products, it’s easy to broaden the narrative’s scope to include the national security apparatus, the White House, or any other perceived villain. In reality, covert entities occasionally attempt to infiltrate popular culture, such as when the Pentagon grants filmmakers access to its resources in exchange for script approval. Awareness of these genuine propaganda efforts widens the spectrum of clandestine operations people are willing to contemplate.
However, these puppet-master narratives significantly overestimate the audience’s susceptibility. From Viva Brother to the Cats movie, there are numerous examples of heavily promoted musical projects that failed to resonate, akin to the New Cokes of the sonic realm. Moreover, it’s implausible that the industry would excel at selling non-musical products, such as presidential candidates.
Even the most sophisticated Pentagon program cannot reliably dictate which cultural products we will embrace or the messages we will derive from them. If Taylor Swift were truly a covert operation, she likely wouldn’t be particularly effective. While it’s true that sharing a link to Vote.org on National Voter Registration Day last year resulted in a spike in registrations, the magnitude of that spike is often exaggerated. Swift did not single-handedly cause over 35,000 people to register. Moreover, there’s a disparity between encouraging online form submissions and actually mobilizing voters to the polls, let alone influencing their voting preferences.
A more pragmatic assessment of Swift’s probable impact emerged recently when a Newsweek survey revealed that 18 percent of voters claimed they were more inclined to support a candidate endorsed by Swift, while 17 percent said they were less likely to do so. Given the one-point gap, which falls within the margin of error, it’s unwise to rely on Swift’s endorsements to sway elections. While I won’t presume to advise the Illuminati on their operations, surely there are more compelling reasons to rig the Super Bowl than this.
