Very often in recent years, all that’s been necessary for either political party to gain or maintain a political advantage is to follow some basic political advice: be normal. But time and time again, they’ve failed.
The most recent example is the conspiracy theory offered by some supporters of the GOP regarding America’s current celebrity power couple: chart-topping pop singer Taylor Swift and NFL star Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs. The couple (their power name is yet to be determined — is it Traylor? Kelswift?) began dating last summer, and Swift has attended several of Kelce’s games. And because she is the biggest pop star on the planet, network coverage of those games has featured frequent cuts to Swift reacting from the luxury suite with Kelce’s family members and teammates’ spouses.
But the conspiracies didn’t flourish until the Chiefs earned a berth to the Super Bowl last weekend. That’s when the theory arose that Swifce was actually a psychological operation, or psyop, directed by … we’re not entirely sure, but someone who wants President Joe Biden to win, in cooperation with the National Football League and the music industry.
According to the X account End Wokeness (2.2 million followers), “What’s happening with Taylor Swift is not organic and natural. It’s an op. We all feel it. We all know it.”
“I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month,” pondered former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. “And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall.”
I am one of those curmudgeons who, wearing an unbuttoned flannel over a T-shirt for a band that hasn’t had a hit since the Cowboys won the Super Bowl, will roll my eyes when I hear Swift called a poet. Still, I like a couple of her songs and appreciate that she’s one of the least offensive major pop stars in decades. If Madonna gave her one of her cone-shaped bras, Swift would put it on her head and sing some Devo.
But the conspiracy theorists point out that Swift has supported Democrats in the past (including Biden in 2020) and that George Soros helped buy her music catalog — a claim made by Swift herself, though she wasn’t happy about it. As for Kelce, he’s viewed with suspicion mainly because his approximately seven-dozen commercial spots this season have included ones for Bud Light and the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.
With this evidence, the theorists posit that the NFL will rig the Super Bowl for the Chiefs and that during post-game celebrations, Kelce will propose to Swift. After which, presumably, they’ll add insult to injury by looking into the camera and declaring, “We’re going to Disney World!” From there, it’s simple: This fall, they’ll endorse Biden and thereby brainwash young and low-information voters into supporting the reelection of the octogenarian-in-chief.
You’ll notice that this theory assumes a level of intelligence and coordination that few governments or presidential campaigns possess. The most brilliant thing Biden’s people did to get him elected in 2020 was keep the old man in the basement and plop him down for Zoom interviews between episodes of Matlock. What about the Biden administration makes anyone believe it’s capable of Manchurian match-making?
Fortunately, Tayvis-gate is only a fringe theory: More stories report the theory than propound it. It is nonetheless remarkable to compare this instance of what Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style in American politics” to what conservatives were more reasonably bemoaning less than 10 years ago.
In the innocent days of 2016, many of us were upset when NFL players sat or knelt during the pre-game national anthem as a form of political protest. Ironically, the main culprit was Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback for the San Francisco 49rs — the same team that, by this conspiracy theory, conservatives should be rooting for in the Super Bowl to thwart the sinister plot.
At about the same time, conservatives also expressed frustrations with ESPN’s growing attention to liberal politics through the pronouncements of figures such as Dan Le Batard and Jemele Hill.
Then, the NFL’s viewership dropped. ESPN got a new president. They changed their approaches. Conservatives won that skirmish in the culture war.
Nearly a decade later, the teams have switched sides of the field. There’s no doubt that the NFL still has its political causes. But political activism is not nearly as distracting as it once was. Instead, it is the handful of conservatives who are imposing party politics where it doesn’t belong, spoiling sports and romance with ideological intrigue. According to them, if you’re rooting for the Chiefs, you’re really rooting for Biden. And if you want this supposedly happy couple to settle down and get married, you’re not actually a cultural conservative but a dupe of the 4D-chess-playing Biden administration.
These theorists would rather believe in this Rube Goldberg machine of a plot than the very basic idea that two famous people really like and want to be around each other, and that a lot of everyday people really like seeing them together in part because — and political parties, please take note — it’s all so normal.
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Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
