National security officials are used to shaking off absurd conspiracy theories, but the latest rumor that’s gripped MAGA world just hits different.
The claims by Fox News and far-right influencers that pop star Taylor Swift is part of a Pentagon “psychological operation” to get President Joe Biden reelected, and somehow rig the Super Bowl to benefit Kansas City Chiefs tight end (and Swift’s boyfriend) Travis Kelce, has been met with forehead slaps in the national security world.
“The absurdity of it all boggles the mind,” said one senior administration official, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly on the matter. “It feels like one of those ‘tell me you are a MAGA conspiracy theorist, without telling me you are a MAGA conspiracy theorist’ memes.”
MAGA crowd, what you have just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
That Billy Madison quote applies well here.
It should be set to music and become anthemic for them (or us i guess 🤣)
If we’re being super loose with it (and “we” are) you could literally use the opening theme for Billy Madison and it could sort of work out lol
How amazing would it be if they could get Biden or Dems in one chamber to say this to their repub terrorists?
That Billy Madison quote applies well to pretty much anything conservatives say.
One might even say,
You could’ve just said incorrect…
These people just can’t handle anything, just anything, not being exactly as they like it, and if it isn’t, it has to be some sort of conspiracy.
That’s my dad. Trump is a god to him, and anything negative said about him is a liberal plot to stop him from his patriotic duty. The cognitive dissonance that man shows is baffling!
My stepfather is like that. I even tried to use his own logic to help him see most of these conspiracies are dumb; “you said yourself that the gov’t is incompetent. So how can they pull off a conspiracy at this scale if they can’t run the country?” - stuff like that.
It doesn’t matter, he’s fully drank the Kool-Aid, so I just keep him at arm’s distance now.
Rules of fascism
#3: “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
#4: Disagreement is treason.
#8: The enemy is both strong and weak.
Thank goodness my Dad never went down that path, but honestly if he did I might just punch him straight in the face.
Violence is bad and you should rethink your attitude towards people on the Kool-Aid. Anyway go ahead and explain me the paradox of intolerance like I haven’t seen it a thousand times, I don’t care.
I need to advise you sir that your half-arsed attempt at virtuous shaming has utterly failed. Please return to your seat
“Violence is bad” is pretty basic stuff mate
That’s so sad
Yeah. We no longer talk. I had to block him from calling/emailing me.
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Gray rock?
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And now that there’s a denial, from a “senior administration official,” it’s proof-positive of a vast conspiracy. “Why would they deny something that’s not real?”
xD
Why would they deny something that’s not real, indeed.
God damn.
Guys the best quarterback in the league made it to the superbowl again, it’s a conspiracy against us. No other way to explain this.
Also some of them say, “the 49ers need to win to save the country”…but like the big conspiracy is that Taylor is supposed to make a half-time endorsement of Joe Biden… So like, how would either team eventually winning the game have any impact on the half-time show?
At this point it almost seems like more than that. It’s like they need to manufacture some outrage to keep everyone angry about something.
This feels like one of those things /b/ started as a joke, and a few echo chambers took it seriously, and the media assumed or “assumed” it was far more widespread than it was. At least, I hope so
At work I have a regular that comes into the office and she spouts conspiracies like these and started talking about Taylor Swift vaccines and the deep state in the last week or so, so there are definitely a few true believers.
Oh no doubt, no matter how insane sounding there will be believers. It’s almost always related to undiagnosed or unmedicated mental disorders with delusions as a symptom. It’s really sad that we don’t prioritize mental health more in this country.
This woman is like 75 years old, lives in a van from '89, gets healthcare from her father being in the military or something based on what she says. She definitely has undiagnosed schizophrenia based on the way she acts and the bits of past she gives out. I feel bad for her, but she comes in, destroys our bathrooms to take a shower, then when she gets barred from using our restrooms, gets upset claiming she has no memory of causing the mess and tells us she will have to inform her doctors if that’s the case. It seems all the more tragic that she lives this way but has access to the things that could help her, but chooses not to. She says she lives in the van to save money, but she has a full retirement account. There’s a military base with her father’s name on it.
Everyday, someone new is out to get her. Government, vaccines, Democrats, CNN, George Soros. The right has effectively weaponized mental illness on a national scale.
Damn Taylor. TIL
Taylot Swift vaccines
These will never work. She’s just too infectious.
You just gotta shake it off. (Yes, I hate myself)
That pun. I knew you were trouble when you walked in.
I feel like this is how a lot of stuff starts these days. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a “psy op” (possibly created by actual children).
You took the word right out of my neurolink embedded keyboard…
This really is one of the most amusing panics they’ve had in recent years.
Until someone shoots up a concert again
Well sure if you want to take morbid reality into account. Yet they wonder why people call for gun laws when nutcases pull things like that.
“They are trying to take away our right to shoot up a concert!” -Q cultists probably
Trump’s massive inferiority complex and narcissism is also driving it
The entire alt right movement was exactly that. It was a joke on b that did this.
Like I used to think that enders game was stupid when it came to the weird internet forum starting a movement and influencing politics but that has literally happened in real life lol
Except that in Ender’s Game they used weird internet forums to actually improve public discourse and awareness.
There have always been sports fans who think that when their team loses, it’s because the ref is on the take. Now you have legalized sports gambling everywhere, with non-stop ads, and official NFL partnerships. Combine that with dozens of hyper slo-mo cameras covering every angle when a ref misses a call, and the conspiracy that the NFL is rigged has become more common the last two years.
Without getting into how absolutely stupid that is, it’s only a few more leaps in logic to get to where they seem to be: they keep showing Swift during games, because her fans tune in to see her, ergo, they’ll want her to be on screen during the biggest have of the year! The NFL wants the Chiefs to go to the super bowl. (I bartend, and I’ve had non-maga people saying this to me.) Add in the paranoia that comes with facism, and boom, a new MAGA grand conspiracy is born.
There have always been sports fans who think that when their team loses, it’s because the ref is on the take.
It doesn’t help that this has actually happened though like with the NBA in the late 90s/early aughts.
Listen, I’m a lifelong football player, coach and fan. If you’re trying to tell me the game isn’t rigged for the Chiefs to be in the Superbowl I’m telling you you’re the conspiracy Nutter!
Signed Your biggest Baltimore Ravens fan.
There actually is a confirmed government plot to keep the Bills from winning the Super Bowl, though. It was confirmed in that documentary from the 90s, “The X-Files”.
Oh fuck watching that FG go wide right the other week gave me flash backs to nam.
When we look back on this era what are we going to say drove them to this? Like, we explain the Salem witch trials by saying that there was ergot in the water which likely had them hallucinating.
What is it now? Is TikTok this much of a problem? Is there ergot in the water? What the hell is happening…
Maybe lead and micro-plastics? But that’s just a guess.
Lead in the water, micro plastics in the food, Reagan in the air.
Plausible. It seems apparent that this is something that’s been introduced into basically all humans water supply in the last 50 years. I’m sure it’s been getting worse and worse as time has gone on, and it could be that we are at a critical mass where it is starting to affect behaviors en masse.
Yeah “deliberately making ourselves too stupid to survive” sounds about right for some shit we’d pull off.
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I mean, bro, we had fucking witch trials.
Witch trials.
We actually believed in witches and we burned people at the stake.
This is not the most lunacy humanity has ever seen. Not by a long shot. It’s just the most lunacy that we’ve seen with modern tools to help suss that lunacy out.
There is certainly an explanation for what’s going on. We just haven’t identified it.
We actually believed in witches and we burned people at the stake.
Only a matter of time before the cult starts talking about publicly executing LGBTQ+ people and women who have had abortions or miscarriages. Possibly by burning them at the stake.
Or federal employees…they’re also called the deep state.
Where’d I hear that in the news recently?
A deranged MAGA cultist recently CUT OFF HIS DAD’S HEAD and posted about it online because of the dad apparently being a federal employee 😬
I’d find you a link to an article about it but frankly I dread what other search results I’d get for THOSE keywords!
I do not disagree. But we are not there yet, it has been crazier before. It does appear that we are on track, that’s why I’m so concerned and curious as to what the fuck is causing this shit, but we’re not there yet. Probably because of those modern tools that we have, I feel like if whatever is going on right now is going on in the 1700s we would be done for.
They joined the war on disease on the side of the disease. There’s nothing else to say, at that point. They are bereft of joy, logic, life, survival instinct, humanity, anything good you name it.
Is staring into the abyss similar to staring at an eclipse? Are these things related?
"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. "
Basically : tread carefully on your crusade lest you become the thing you hate
It’s a Nietzsche reference
Nah, I’d say it has broad appeal.
Nietzsche has some broad appeal, well, amongst those that read philosophy. You can’t get past the post-modernists without summiting that intellectual mountain. I suppose existentialism is somewhat Niche-ey…but what do I know, I read Zarathustra at 16. Ymmv
it’s a pun, son
Tiktok? If you find someone who isn’t a swifty on Tiktok, they probably won’t survive long.
This nonsense comes from Fox and truth social.
Didn’t Andrew Tate rise on TikTok?
Possibly how all the different crises like inequality, climate, capitalism, pollution all converged. People sought quick solutions and some leaders gave them solutions that were ready, quick and wrong. Blaming others went to cult like heights. Until it all collapsed.
All of these things contribute to it, yes, but I do think that there is a level of absurdity to what we are witnessing that is not adequately explained simply by coercion. Perhaps I’m wrong.
Humans do whacky shit on a regular basis, certainly if they don’t really understand what’s going on. Cargo cults come to mind.
shaking off
Heh
Imagine how they were rolling around the newsroom off of that zinger
I’ve worked in the newsroom. And yeah, they do love a pun more than is healthy…
They didn’t even make it to the end of the headline before including one.
I’ve always known maga people are dumber than shit, but now they’re just running the world’s worst D&D session online and on Fox.
This looks like a job for a gazebo.
I am surrounded by dipshits in this country…
Dark Brandon gives their supersolders the hardest battles.
Agencies has so many stories and gossips of coups, secret weapons and psychological experiments like MK-ULTRA, and they used Taylor telling people to vote as their psy-op?
Big scary government that can hear every your word and can even say them for you, can track and kill you at any time - uses a pop-star to make a point?
Who buys that bullshit? Is it, again, the weak but strong enemy? That’s a story even Onion wouldn’t publish.
Wait for it. Win or lose, once they realize how embarrassing this episode should be, it’ll become something that none of them actually believed and besides, it was all started by some lefty trying to make fun of them. The real conspiracy turns out to be (in hindsight with the benefit of selective memory and heavy retconning) a push to drive up merchandise sales. They’ll make a reference to globalists, lizard people and something about “controlling the media” without a specific J-word for plausible deniability.
You can’t say jewelery without a J-word, don’t you? They are stupid rich and are out to get you. Hide your kids, hide your wife, as they’d come to you to take them, and dance Hava Nagila over your cold dead body. Stupid leftists think I’m insane now, but who’d they ask to help, when jewish reptiloids would take their children and farm them for adenochrome? Not me, I’d shoot them on sight as any other trespasser. God bless America.
And hide yo husband cuz they rapin’ everyone out here
The tragedy of our age is that this could totally be posted in all seriousness.
We live in some form of post-reality where whatever our sci-fi visionaries said years ago as a precaution gets picked as an instruction to action. I hate that, and I’m happy someone picked it without a cowardly added s/.
This way they get to hate a beautiful woman who would never fuck them
I mean, if agencies theoretically wanted more dem votes, there are worse ways than getting a mega superstar to ask her fans for them. But if they were in the business of controlling US elections we probably wouldn’t have the entirety of the shitshow that is existence right now.
“They add that she’s not, in fact, part of a psychological operation to sway voters to Joe Biden.”
MAGA - “Yeah, but that’s just what they WOULD SAY! THIS PROVES IT!!!”
I’m gripped by a strong urge to start anonymously sending some Taylor Swift / KC Chiefs merchandise to family members and acquaintances who have been guzzling the red-hat Flavor Aid for the last decade. It’s probably not the most productive use of time and money but this whole thing is just goddamn ridiculous.
There’s probably a Taylor Swift email notification service for upcoming concerts and such that you could sign them up for.
Free, and guaranteed to stir up the Trumpanzees in your life without putting a target on your own back.
I didn’t realize how much Fox News was involved with this. I guess Fox is back in with the MAGA crowd?
What they’re doing is very dangerous.
Uh… what? Fox News is the biggest right-wing propaganda platform in the world and it (still) exists to influence opinion. They’ve hosted him and his sycophants and election-denyers, etc multiple times. They might have briefly looked into how to insulate themselves after paying out almost a billion dollars for lies, but they’re still all-in for Trump and the MAGA crowd, believe it…
Well, I’m not American and I don’t watch Fox News, so I didn’t realize that they were the ones pushing this Taylor Swift conspiracy narrative. Also, it feels like it wasn’t that long ago that I heard MAGA was going to boycott Fox.
That was a thing for a bit because Fox walked back some of the more extreme narratives they pushed to shield themselves from legal liability. Some of the more extreme MAGA conspiracy nuts still swear off of Fox News in favor of Newsmax and OAN. My grandma is one of them; watched Fox News religiously all her life until 2021, when she switched to Newsmax, OAN, and various “prophets” who claim to have a direct line to God who tells them Trump is the second coming of Christ.
The Qtards should be treated like Al Qaeda or ISIL operating in the United States. All their communications should be monitored. They should be infiltrated and any time one of them make threats or start making plans to do anything illegal, as many as possible are arrested, locked up and embroiled in the justice system as much as possible - prison time, time in court, etc.
There are more incidents of them killing innocents over dumb conspiracies. Like that son and his dad being beheaded.
Some of them very likely are foreign intelligence operatives attempting to influence locally.
Why not just give them the Al Qaeda or ISIL treatment and send a drone to blow up their house?
Some would say “what about innocent bystanders in the house?” but the chances of others in the household not being exactly the same are miniscule
Or just declare them as the Clear And Present Danger that they are and treat them exactly how union labor was treated by the military and East Indian Fruit Company
MAGA world to Pentagon: la la la la la la la la la neener neener neeeeeener la la la la
I’m sure that’ll put it all to rest
Remember, a lot of young conservative men were convinced Taylor Swift was a white nationalist who posted with them on 4chan.
When she started telling people to go vote (she didnt even say for a specific party, but just telling people to vote is enough to convince them you’re a democrat) they took that as Taylor Swift betraying them.
So much of what conservatives engage with is completely made up and exists only instead their own heads.
High voter turnout typically means Democrat victory, as the only people who make sure to vote EVERY election is the paranoid “Keepin’ up with the Jonesses” suburban America types
These are some of the same rocket surgeons that believe(d) that Hillary was using a pizza parlor with no basement to run an international pedo ring out of the basement of the pizza parlor.
Not really known for their application of reason and logic.
