By Chris Satullo
We’ve all seen nature videos where a school of fish or a flock of birds mysteriously changes direction, suddenly and in perfect unison. And by now, we’re used to seeing the right-wing media ecosystem do the same thing, operating on similar animal instinct.
One day, we see right-wing bloggers and talk show hosts, from Charlie Kirk to Jeanine Pirro, jointly fulminating and gesticulating about, say, a border “invasion,” all mouthing the same inane talking points. Then a secret switch flips and all the noise becomes about…well, I know this is hard to believe, but the Current Big Outrage is:
Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, the Super Bowl and the entire NFL.
Don’t you see!?! All of this happy chatter about America’s new It Couple is just a psy-op hatched deep in the bowels of the Pentagon to help doddering old Joe Biden win the next election!
(Psy-op, by the way, is short for “psychological operation,” stuff like Tokyo Rose in WWII, Hanoi Hannah during the Vietnam War, and U.S. forces in 1989 blasting heavy metal rock nonstop at an embassy where Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was holed up.)
“The NFL is totally RIGGED for the Kansas City Chiefs, Taylor Swift, Mr. Pfizer (Travis Kelce). All to spread DEMOCRAT PROPAGANDA,” social media influencer Mike Crispi tweeted in a typical eruption of baseless paranoia prior to the AFC championship game. “Calling it now: KC wins, goes to Super Bowl, Swift comes out at the halftime show and ‘endorses’ Joe Biden with Kelce at midfield. It’s all been an op since day one.”
The supermarket shelves near Mr. Crispi must be bare of Reynolds Wrap. (Or was he just a Baltimore Ravens fan unhinged by Zay Flowers’ fumbling away a tying touchdown in the fourth quarter last Sunday?)
In an instant, a horde of bloggers and hosts were on the case. Some, with a firmer grasp than Mr. Crispi, realized that neither the Chiefs’ tight end nor his intergalactically famous girlfriend would be on the field at halftime. Their versions of the nefarious scenario had Kelce proposing to Swifton the field after a (thoroughly fixed) Chiefs win. Upon which, Swift supposedly would do what any ecstatic fiancée would in such a moment: immediately endorse her favored candidate in an election eight months hence.
This is so silly it wouldn’t be worthy of comment if a) the Taylor-as-psy-op trope hadn’t immediately become the dominant topic on America’s most-watched cable “news” network and b) the frenzy with which Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro et. al. seized upon it hadn’t been both so revealing and so jaw-droppingly hypocritical.
Where to begin? A few points:
1) We all live to some degree inside bubbles – groupings of like-minded, similarly situated people. But some of us seek to be aware of our bubbles, working to expand them, making them more permeable, daring to venture outside occasionally to see how the other bubbles live.
MAGA World does the opposite – seeking to harden its bubble, so that no outside light of fact or differing viewpoint can filter in. It mobilizes to exile anyone who questions the bubble, or seeks to let sunlight in. This is why the GOP now routinely does worse than it expected in national elections, and why it can’t govern after the occasions when it does win. Much of what produces glee and high fives inside its bubble is a) ragingly counterfactual and exposed as such when required to product results in the real world and b) disfavored by the majority of Americans.
That the people in charge at Fox News, presented with the Swift psy-op claim, didn’t say, “Let’s not touch this drivel,” and instead declared a full-court press, shows how drenched in crazy their bubble has become. Defining deviance down, indeed.
2) Even the Fox hosts who went light on the psy-op nonsense leaned into their go-to stance when confronted by another instance of Democrats’ superior success at attracting mega-celebrity endorsements. Adopting an avuncular tone, they advised poor, young , gullible Taylor that, while she’s a helluva performer, she knows nothing about politics. She has no right to comment on them and will damage her brand by endorsing a doddering old fool (and socialist mastermind!) like Joe Biden.
Yes, they all did versions of Laura Ingraham’s notorious advice to LeBron James: “Shut up and dribble.”
3) Yet some Fox commentators also raced – hilariously – to trumpet that Donald Trump does, too, have some celebrity endorsers (Kid Rock!!!). They had the good sense not to mention Kanye.
Beyond that, none of them seemed to notice that they themselves – not an actual journalist or expert among them – are merely entertainers spouting ill-informed opinions about politics for fame and profit. Nor do they acknowledge that the leader to whom they swear slavish fealty was, before running the first time, little more than a philistine reality TV star with a gift for self-promotion. Nor that the president whom some of them still revere as the best ever, Ronnie Reagan, was an actor who prepped for politics by hosting Death Valley Days and plugging 20-Mule-Team Borax.
4) The frenzy to forestall Swift’s potential endorsement of Biden revealed just how deeply worried these MAGA mouthpieces are that their unstable genius is spinning out of control and blowing the election. Somehow, though, I don’t think telling this spectacular performer, brilliant businesswoman and Jedi master of social media that she is too naive and ignorant to offer any opinion about an election is a great way to persuade her not to.
5) Just from a strategy standpoint, it might not be savvy to tell fans of the nation’s most popular sport that its championship game is a fraud, with the fix based on orders from some faceless plotters in the deep state. I know that MAGA types tend to ignore data unless it arrives wearing a tin foil hat and bearing a message from “Q,” but they should really take a moment to ponder this stat: In 2023, 93 of the 100 most-watched broadcasts in the United States involved the NFL (not all of them games; some pregame shows even made the list!).
Yep, you definitely want to align your party with the claim that the NFL is a fraud and its gazillion fans are rubes and suckers.
6) Speaking of “Q,” the “Swift-as-psy-op” claim is another example of how MAGA emulates its hero’s famous penchant for projection – the habit of calling out the other side for doing exactly the thing you do all the time. Q-Anon actually is a psy-op, so tragically effective that it leads people to do things like fire an AR-15 into a random pizza shop in D.C. or, just this week in Bucks County, PA, decapitate one’s own father as “a traitor.”
The Swift nonsense itself might best be viewed as a “psy-op,” one piece of an ongoing effort to sow so much conspiracy-tinged doubt about the legitimacy of the 2024 election that those inside the overheated MAGA bubble will readily reject any Trump defeat as fraudulent.
So, the claptrap Fox News and others are peddling is not just ridiculous; it’s pernicious.
It’s almost enough to make me wish Kansas City would win the big game and Travis, my fellow Cleveland Heights High alum (Go Tigers!), would indeed propose to Taylor on the field afterward. But with no Biden endorsement…yet. Just to keep MAGA blogger anxiety at full boil, and to fray further the MAGA myth of Trump’s invincibility.
No, upon mature reflection, let’s not go there. Psy-ops seek to create a truthless landscape of shadows, where idealism is foolish and resistance futile. America needs more sunlight and good sense, not more crackpot theorizing.
(49ers 33, Chiefs 17, by the way.)
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia