On Jan. 9, 2024, Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime” discussed the possibility that Taylor Swift is in cahoots with the Pentagon. Personally, I’d say that’s pretty unlikely, but that doesn’t mean Swift, one of the most influential celebrities globally and TIME magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year, is in any way separated from our country’s obnoxious political culture wars. Nor is she spared from becoming at least tangentially related to the upcoming 2024 election media cycle.
In 2023, Fox News continued its reign as the most-watched cable channel for an impressive eighth year. The network garnered an average of over 1.2 million viewers across their 24-hour day. According to Deadline, January 2024 saw Jesse Watters’ show on Fox News take the number two spot for the most-watched news program in the U.S., coming in second only behind another program produced by Fox News, “The Five.” “Jesse Watters Primetime” replaced the primetime 8 p.m. slot for “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
However large of an audience Fox News has, its viewership still has nothing on Deadline’s count of nearly 113 million viewers on Fox who tuned in to see the Kansas City Chiefs win their fourth Super Bowl versus the San Francisco 49ers in Las Vegas this past Sunday at the most televised and marketed event of the year in the U.S.
If you’re someone, unlike me, who really cares about Swift and the Kansas City Chiefs, this year’s Super Bowl probably marked a good moment for you in the extremely publicized relationship between Swift and the Chiefs’ tight end Travis Kelce. The relationship between these two has had more eyes on it than probably any other celebrity relationship in January 2024, which makes perfect sense given the intersection of these two at some of the most profitable heights of American entertainment: football and pop music. And it’s the fact that football and Swift are so ubiquitously popular in the United States that makes it strange that the right-wing American political establishment has been trying to make a blonde-haired and blue-eyed woman and her football boyfriend “liberal-coded.”
Charlie Kirk, founder of the right-wing group Turning Point USA, and Ben Shapiro, founder of and contributor to the Daily Wire, along with many others in the conservative media sphere, have all clipped together dozens of videos of stories like Watters’ Fox News segment. Most of these pundits have cited how many allies of former President Donald Trump are wondering about Swift’s media presence. Former Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller wrote last month, “What’s happening with Taylor Swift is not organic.” Jeffrey Clark, a defendant along with Trump in the racketeering case in Georgia, called the musician a “Trojan horse” and responded affirmatively to a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, by far-right commentator Jack Posobiec that said, “Swift’s girlboss psyop has been fully activated.”
On his show “Jesse Watters Primetime,” Watters noted a video posted by Jeffery Clark on X in which he claimed that “the Pentagon psychological operations unit float [is] turning Taylor Swift into an asset during a NATO meeting.” William Vaillancourt of The Daily Beast said that the video was “an excerpt from the 2019 International Conference on Cyber Conflict, which was held in Estonia and was organized by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre. The speaker is Alicia Marie Bargar, a research engineer at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, who appears to simply mention Swift as an example of the power of influencers with large followings.” Watters, at the end of his segment, rhetorically asked the audience, “So is Swift a front for a covert political agenda? Primetime obviously has no evidence — if we did, we’d share it. But we’re curious.”
For the record, I neither care about nor dislike Swift. I’m generally indifferent to her, but even for someone like me, who’s never actively listened to her music, it’s impossible to understate her absolutely absurd global prominence over the last few years. Swift’s “Eras Tour” has become the highest-grossing music tour in history and the first tour to make more than $1 billion. It’s also impossible to deny the amount of influence she has. In 2018, Swift sparked a flood of new voter registrations after posting on Instagram urging her 112 million followers to register to vote ahead of upcoming elections. In an article from Jan. 29, 2024, titled “Inside Biden’s Anti-Trump Battle Plan (and Where Taylor Swift Fits In),” the New York Times floats that Biden aides are drafting wish lists of potential endorsements from elected officials, union organizers and celebrities and influencers. Why wouldn’t the Biden admin want the endorsement of the globe’s foremost celebrity, Taylor Swift? However, just because she endorsed Biden in 2020 doesn’t necessarily mean she’ll endorse the president again, or that Biden is going to appear at an “Eras Tour” stop.
So, is the government doing an arranged courtship of Swift and Kelce to induce mass psychosis in the American people to promote Biden in 2024 because Swift got people registered to vote and Kelce did an advertisement for the Pfizer vaccine? I don’t think so, but it would be really funny. But as long as there are eyes on Swift, people will make content about her, and maybe the conservative media in this country has decided that outrage over Swift is better than any kind of praise.
Andrew McDonald, FCRH’26, is a history and political science double major from Sacramento, Calif.
