Super Bowl romance: Are Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce really an election-year psyop?
Psyop: a military operation usually aimed at influencing the enemy’s state of mind through noncombative means (such as distribution of leaflets).
Even if you’re no fan of pop superstar Taylor Swift, it’s nearly impossible that you have not seen her image splashed across the paparazzi mags and on television screens in the last several months.
As ZeroHedge reported, “story count in corporate media for Swift has exponentially exploded, averaging above 1,000 per day since late September.” A slim majority of US adults (53%) identified as fans of Swift, according to a recent Morning Consult survey, while 16% identified as “avid” fans of the “Anti-Hero” singer.
The singing sensation recently maximized her persona by hooking up with Travis Kelce, a tight end with the Kansas City Chiefs American football team. And as whimsical fate would have it, wouldn’t you know that the Chiefs are on the road to the Super Bowl, the most celebrated sporting pageant in the US? These days, football announcers spend almost as much time covering Swift’s zany antics from the stands cheering her man as they do covering the action on the field.
But many people on the right think there is something too contrived, too stage-managed, too polished and picture-perfect about this American Love Story, as though some powerful puppet-master was manipulating the made-for-TV saga from high above. In fact, none other than former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy suggested that Swift and Kelce’s relationship paved the way for some free Democratic Party advertising.
“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,” Ramaswamy wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
One name who has got the Republicans up in arms is George Soros, who seems to have played a part in Swift’s career, albeit briefly. In much the same way that Soros invests in liberal district attorneys in Blue states around the USA, it seems the powerful financier has a soft spot in his heart for pop divas as well. In 2019, Swift attacked Soros and the “toxic male privilege” in the music industry, alleging that the billionaire had bought out her music catalog by backdoor shenanigans.
“After I was denied the chance to purchase my music outright, my entire catalog was sold to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings in a deal that I’m told was funded by the Soros family, 23 Capital and the Carlyle Group,” Swift revealed at the Billboard Woman of the Decade awards.
23 Capital is a financing firm backed by Soros Fund Management, while in 1993 Soros invested $100 million in the Carlyle Group, the shady firm that was awarded million-dollar contracts to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure that the Pentagon destroyed during its 2003 invasion. Regarding Swift’s catalog, she reportedly won it back after she re-recorded the entire body of work. Were there any stipulations attached to Swift winning back her work, like perhaps promoting the Democratic Party, and more specifically Joe Biden? Nobody can say for sure, but theorists suspect Swift could be connected to another powerful entity as well.
Few people would expect to find the names Pentagon and Taylor Swift in the same sentence, but that’s what happened at a 2019 conference held by NATO CCD COE (officially the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence), located in Tallinn, Estonia. As it turned out, the Pentagon’s psychological unit used Swift as an example for confronting on-line ‘misinformation.’
“The most common method is working with famous people,” said Alicia Marie Bargar of John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. “I include Taylor Swift here because she’s a fairly influential on-line person…This is a cropped image but she’s standing next to a ‘Go Vote’ sign. And actually celebrities, at least in the US, will regularly post pictures of themselves with an encouragement for people to go vote and that has a measurable effect on voter turnout.”
In August 2019, just months before Swift publicly denounced Soros, who was holding the golden key to her musical fortune, the Pentagon was holding up Swift as a prime example on how to sway popular opinion towards a particular idea or agenda, and not just those related to military matters. After all, with Trump’s brash pronouncements about slashing or even terminating NATO were he voted back into the White House, there is certainly no small incentive on the part of powerful folks to make sure that Biden gets reelected. And this is where an insanely famous and influential person like Swift and her football-star boyfriend enter the picture.
Many commenters are of the opinion that the romance between Swift and Kelce (who, incidentally, featured in a vaccine promotional ad for Pfizer), is a carefully scripted love story designed to influence one or more events. Naturally, it is impossible to provide proof of such things. For the conspiracy theorists, however, the fact that the Pentagon and George Soros are mentioned together with the pop star is enough to confirm their darkest suspicions.
But let’s back up here. As far as anybody knows, Swift’s relationship with Soros ended when she won back ownership of her song collection, while the NATO psyop team only mentioned the diva as an example of someone who fits the bill as a potential ‘agent provocateur.’ What we do know is that US President Joe Biden is apparently pursuing an endorsement from Swift ahead of November’s election. And it’s not difficult to understand why.
Last year, a single social media post from Swift led to the registration of 35,000 new voters in the US, the New York Times reports, and Democrats are certainly eager to weaponize her estimated 280 million Instagram followers as Biden’s popularity continues to plummet.
Of course, these seemingly damning connections could be nothing more than mere coincidence and happenchance, the fever dreams of the conspiracy theorists. The potentially painful reality is that Taylor Swift’s sudden climb in the popularity charts, alongside her boyfriend, is due to a completely natural romance. As for Biden and the democrat-leaning media, they are only too happy to exploit the lovebirds for their own political gain, much as the Republicans would do if the tables were turned.
Perhaps the worst thing that could happen to Trump and the MAGA bandwagon at this stage is for Swift to appear in a Super Bowl commercial (which are oftentimes more watchable than the game itself) or in the half-time show, where she belts out to the fireworks and light display, possibly with Kelce at her side, or even old Joe Biden, “Get out and vote!” So long as there is no humiliating “Let’s go Brandon!” retort from the increasingly disenchanted audience, it could be the unexpected silver bullet that sinks Trump’s presidential ambitions once and for all.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
