When the Kansas City Chiefs romp to a Super Bowl victory on February 11, tight end Travis Kelce will bring his superstar girlfriend onto the field, drop to one knee, and propose. Their engagement will unleash a media maelstrom and create the conditions for Taylor Swift’s hugely significant endorsement of embattled president Joe Biden.
That is, according to a network of prominent conspiracy theorists, the plan hatched inside the Pentagon to keep the president in power.
The far-right broadcasters behind this very specific prediction have offered no proof for it, nor do they have the most sterling track record. Jack Posobiec, a longtime booster of white supremacist and neo-Nazi figures and a key figure in the outlandish Pizzagate theory, tweeted in December that Swift and her “vaccine shill boyfriend” were being weaponized by the Democrats to ensure Biden’s victory.
Posobiec had a very specific way of describing it: “The Taylor Swift girlboss psyop has been fully activated.”
Swift may not have actually waded into the 2024 election cycle, beyond a generic appeal to register to vote, but the fury around her supposed deep-state-backed influence operation has the Trump campaign plotting “holy war” against the “Blank Space” singer.
The allegation that Swift is a “psyop” is ludicrous, and it showcases a complete lack of understanding of what psychological operations actually are and how they work.
If there is a psyop going on, it’s being run by those crying wolf.
Fixation on psychological warfare dates back at least to Sun Tzu: “The opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.”
But the field really came into its own in the 20th century, when the great powers turned to modern psychology to understand and defeat their adversaries through propaganda and trickery.
As Paul Linebarger explained in his seminal 1948 book on psychological warfare, there are two main types of psychological operations: white propaganda, which is honest and direct, and black propaganda, which “purports to emanate from a source other than the true one.” Linebarger, who died in 1966, served in the Office of War Information during the Second World War and helped establish the US Army’s psychological warfare section.
“The Army focused on the white and gray,” Jared Tracy, the deputy command historian at the US Army Special Operations History Office, tells WIRED. Initially, the military’s psychological operations focused on how best to deliver information—”leaflet warfare” and “loudspeaker propaganda,” he says. But the military soon found creative new ways to speak to the enemy. That included the tactical, meant to gain a specific and immediate benefit on the battlefield; and the strategic, which has a longer-term, more general aim.
Black propaganda can be effective, but it is notoriously hard to do right, Linebarger writes, as it “needs to be written so as to fit in with what the enemy is reading, listening to, or talking about in his home country.”
During the Vietnam War, Trịnh Thị Ngọ—known commonly as Hanoi Hannah—delivered regular broadcasts aimed at American GIs. Her shows, written by the North Vietnamese Army, mixed popular Western music with clunky and clumsy propaganda about the futility of the war. While Hanoi Hannah’s shows may have contributed to low morale, it is unlikely she prompted any more than a handful of desertions or defections. The US later scaled up this technique through Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which broadcast news and culture behind the Iron Curtain, with some covert help from the CIA—millions listened to the jazz programs and news broadcasts, but the broadcasts utterly failed at spurring open rebellion.
Public perception of psychological operations soured in a big way in the mid-1970s, when details of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program were first released, detailing a plot—more based in science fiction than science—to brainwash subjects using psychoactive drugs. Further revelations that the US had supplied Nicaraguan death squads with psychological warfare guides would not help that public relations problem.
A lot of the paranoia about psychological operations stems from “misapprehensions of what it is, what it is capable of,” says Tracy, who wrote one of the definitive books on the subject.
While there may be grandiose ambitions of changing “hearts and minds,” Tracy says, the actual effect of this work is more modest: “Really, what you’re looking to do is affect peoples’ decisions of what to do and what not to do.”
In 1994, reports emerged of one particularly musical innovation from the Pentagon: During the Gulf War, the US military would boost morale by cranking up Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” when responding to Iraqi SCUD missile attacks, for example.
These techniques would later be adapted by the CIA to torture inmates captured in the War on Terror, a program now widely regarded as a complete failure.
“Which is more effective: Tokyo Rose, in lovely, clear English, but … very much falsehood-based; or Voice of America and Radio Free Europe?” asks Christopher Paul, USMC chair for information at the Naval Postgraduate School and a senior social scientist at RAND Corporation. He answers his own question: “You can also be effective and persuasive with the truth.”
In recent decades, the Pentagon has even tried to rebrand these operations with a more mundane, but more accurate, name—Military Information Support Operations, or MISO. The name hasn’t caught on.
Paul has spent years studying the effectiveness of psychological and information operations, particularly nefarious and covert propaganda efforts. Fears over how these techniques could be used against Americans are long-standing, he notes, and are exactly why this work is forbidden domestically.
“The Department of Defense has an influence capability,” Paul says. “But by statute, law, habit, authorization, and permission: It is only ever pointed at selected foreign audiences.” Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, for example, are expressly prohibited from broadcasting to domestic audiences in the US.
Tracy and Paul agree that psychological operations work when they are targeted, clear, and—ideally—honest.
Paul points to the Russian effort to sway the 2016 presidential election. “Did it change electoral outcomes? No, not as far as we can tell, Did it cause or prevent conflicts? No, not as far as we can tell,” Paul says.
It was equally ineffective when the Pentagon tried it.
In 2022, social media companies identified a far-reaching campaign, run by the Pentagon, to use dummy social media accounts to spread propaganda targeted at Tehran, Beijing, and Moscow. The effort prompted a backlash and led to a full-scale review of these operations. (That, seemingly, hasn’t prevented the Pentagon from exploring the possible use of deepfakes.)
But when researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory and social media monitoring firm Graphika looked at the campaign, they found this astroturf social media campaign was wildly ineffective.
“The vast majority of posts and tweets we reviewed received no more than a handful of likes or retweets,” the researchers found. Fewer than one in five of the dummy social media accounts had managed to amass more than 1,000 followers, with most of the content receiving no interaction at all. “Tellingly, the two most-followed assets in the data provided by Twitter were overt accounts that publicly declared a connection to the US military.”
The US government has certainly tried to use popular music for its own ends. And it wasn’t always forthright about its efforts—as Linebarger noted: “The conviction of the propagandist that he is not a propagandist can be a real asset.”
In the early Cold War, the Congress on Cultural Freedom—a CIA front group—bankrolled American musicians’ tours, including jazz legends Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, in hopes of countering Communist influence and promoting American values.
“Those who already have established credibility can be a real asset [in psychological operations],” Tracy says. “If your purposes align.”
But Gillespie and Armstrong made clear that the CIA couldn’t even control its own people: Frustrated with Jim Crow laws back in the US, Gillespie refused to attend briefings with US officials. Armstrong quit one of his tours in disgust. “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” Armstrong said in 1957.
In 2020, journalist Patrick Radden Keefe investigated the possibility that the CIA had a hand in writing “Wind of Change,” an enormously popular song by a West German band called the Scorpions that became an anthem for independence movements in the USSR. (The Scorpions deny the theory.)
So there is ample history of the US government leveraging, or at least trying to leverage, celebrities and cultural icons to amplify its message. But Tracy laughs off the idea that there is a shadowy psychological operations unit inside the Pentagon managing musicians from obscurity to stardom for nefarious ends—and rigging the NFL playoffs while they’re at it.
“That’s not a thing,” he says. Organizationally, practically, logistically, the theory falls apart at every turn. Someone in the Democratic Party may well approach Swift for an endorsement, and they don’t need the Pentagon’s help.
The real psyop may have been staring us in the face all along.
For years, Trump’s supporters have levied the accusation of psyop at anything that contradicts their worldview. Q, the pseudonymous leader of QAnon, cryptically asked their followers in 2017: “What is brainwashing? What is a psyop?” Former White House adviser Steve Bannon has told listeners of his War Room podcast that by listening “you will never succumb to psychological warfare.” Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who helped Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, has said that efforts to deny that the 2020 election was stolen are “all a psyop.”
Mike Benz, a former Trump official who has a history of posting racist conspiracy theories under a pseudonym, helped popularize the Swift theory. He alleges psyops are everywhere, from the Covid-19 vaccine effort to anti-disinformation programs to climate change education campaigns. He has become a go-to voice for some Republican politicians, including Representative Jim Jordan.
In that respect, Benz has stumbled onto one of the most effective psyop tactics: Discredit everything.
Linebarger, in his book, offers a prime example of this strategy: “The dropping of a few hundred tons of well counterfeited currency would tend to foul up any fiscal system.” This kind of black propaganda doesn’t seek to convince anyone of anything, but merely hopes to foment distrust of everything.
Paul says Moscow is particularly good at this kind of work. “Russian propaganda can be characterized as a war on information, this kind of nihilistic campaign to make everyone skeptical of everything.”
While influencers like Posobiec have a habit of sharing Russian disinformation, there’s no reason to think they’re being directly managed by the Kremlin. More likely, they’ve simply picked up on the same tactics.
So while Swift may well be an excellent psyop if America ever goes to war with Gen Z, it is more likely that the real psychological operation was the distrust we fomented along the way.
