Appearing on Fox News earlier this week, host Jesse Watters made headlines when a guest suggested on his show that the Pentagon’s psychological operations unit — or PsyOps — has turned Taylor Swift “into an asset” due to the fact that she encourages young people to vote. The Pentagon has now denied those claims.
Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh tells Politico, “As for this conspiracy theory, we are going to shake it off. But that does highlight that we still need Congress to approve our supplemental budget request as Swift-ly as possible so we can be out of the woods with potential fiscal concerns.”
And the CEO of Vote.org, Andrea Hailey, chimed in on social media, “Our partnership with @taylorswift13 is helping all Americans make their voices heard at the ballot box. Not a psy-op or a Pentagon asset. Just the biggest nonpartisan platform in America helping young people register & cast their vote.”
On January 9, Stuart Kaplan, identified as a former FBI agent, appeared on Watters’ show and claimed that “around four years ago, the Pentagon’s psychological operations unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset.”
Kaplan then added, “It’s possible that Taylor Swift does not know that she’s being used in a covert manner to swing voters. But … the Biden administration is savvy, identifying how many voters she can influence with either right information or misinformation.”
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