Welcome to the Tin Foil Hat Era.
On Sunday, the Chiefs and 49ers clinched their Super Bowl berths — and the locker-room champagne spray was barely dry before some folks on the right started floating crackpot conspiracy theories online connecting Taylor Swift to Joe Biden via the pigskin bonanza.
Follow this if you can: the NFL rigged this Super Bowl match and are rigging the Super Bowl itself so that Swift, who is involved in a sham relationship with the Chiefs’ Travis Kelce will be at the height of her power to endorse bumbling Joe Biden for re-election. It’s all a CIA psyop.
Never mind that, entirely without Travis Kelce or the National Football League, she very publicly threw her support behind Biden in 2020.
Remember when the right wanted to keep politics out of sports?
This conspiratorial match was lit by alt rightie and pizzagate (yes, it’s another conspiracy theory) promoter, Jack Posobiec, who wrote on X, “Thinking about when Taylor Swift called out the Soros family in 2019 for buying the rights to her music and then how she came out a super liberal in 2020.”
Then former presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy poured on accelerant by responding with this reality-bending thought bomb.
“I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month,” he wrote on X. “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.”
Inevitably, the online conversation devolved into a scrum of stupidity, cheering on this imaginary unholy trinity of Swift, the NFL and the DNC.
It was the manifestation of the famous Charlie Day meme from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”
Sure, we all have that one friend who sits on the couch spewing a cornucopia of machinations, until his battery depletes.
In your living room, it’s funny or annoying. But harnessed online — where many of this cabal of conjurers have large followings — the lunacies take flight like a flock of predatory birds.
It goes far, fast… and leaves droppings everywhere.
Provocateurs are peacocking online on both (far) sides. Sitting congresswoman Rashida Tlaib went all 9/11-style trutherism, not backing down on debunked claims Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza.
In 2019, John Cusack removed a tweet that promoted an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
And of course Kanye’s various anti-Jewish ramblings are hung in the antisemitism hall of fame. The Chabad tunnel story spawned a myriad of bizarre ideas.
Unlike most conspiratorial ideas, which require an esoteric study of obscure CIA agents or frequent trance-inducing visits to some dark corner of the web to even begin to understand, this Super Bowl whopper can be fully absorbed, with minimal effort.
The world’s biggest pop star, footballs most famous tight end, the entire NFL and the president, are already colossal cultural figures. It’s a pop conspiracy and you don’t need to do your own research.
It’s also peak stupidity. What will the 49ers, the Ravens, the Lions, and every other NFL team, gain as a consolation prize for allowing themselves to be sacrificed on the altar of a Joe Biden presidency?
The theory is not only preposterous, it doesn’t seem like a winning strategy for the right to turn America’s sweetheart into a political litmus test.
But Ramaswamy isn’t really about the party he ran to lead: he’s a look-at-me attention-seeker — and who better to use than Taylor Swift, who’s currently got complete command of the culture?
I understand both her allure and why her televised rookie-luxury-box season annoys many diehard fans.
But my neutrality on Tay Tay is waning.
For the first time ever, I’m excited to put football season in the past — so we don’t have to keep seeing every aspect of our world through the prism of Taylor Swift, including turning reality into WWE-style scenarios.
And I’m just spitballing here, but an idea: let’s make common sense great again.
