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A bizarre conspiracy theory about Taylor Swift aired on Fox News' "Jesse Watters Primetime" on Tuesday, with host Watters suggesting that Swift is a Pentagon psy-op asset who is using her fan base to drum up support for President Joe Biden.
Let's preface this with Watters' own words, because in between throwing out all sorts of preposterous claims, he straight-up admits that the entire premise is pure speculation. “So is Swift a front for a covert political agenda?” Watters asks. “‘Primetime’ obviously has no evidence — if we did, we’d share it. But we’re curious.”
Watters first suggests that Swift's success has something to do with her being a Pentagon asset.
"I like her music. She's all right, but I mean, have you ever wondered how or why she blew up like this?" Watters asks. "Well, around four years ago, the Pentagon psychological operations unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset during a NATO meeting. What kind of asset? A psy-op of combating online misinformation."
He then plays a clip of a presentation at the 2019 International Conference on Cyber Conflict, an annual NATO conference, in which the presenter talks about how social influence can lead to behavior change, using Swift as an example of someone with influence online.
Except the person speaking was not a Pentagon employee, as Watters claimed; Mediaite identified her as Alicia Bargar, who at the time was a data scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. (Bargar did not respond to MSNBC's request for comment.)
Mediaite also traced the framing of this clip to Michael Benz, a former Trump State Department official who posted it on X early Monday. NBC News revealed in October that Benz previously ran an alt-right account that engaged with white nationalists and shared racist conspiracy theories like the "great replacement theory."
In his segment, Watters asks if Swift was "a front for a covert political agenda." "Because when she posted a link to the Vote.org, hundreds of thousands of young Taylor Swift fans all of a sudden registered to vote," he says. "I wonder who got to her from the White House, or from wherever."
A Defense Department spokesperson dismissed the conspiracy theory at a briefing on Wednesday. The CEO of Vote.org, Andrea Hailey, also responded on Tuesday night, writing on X that the organization's partnership with Swift is "not a psy-op or a Pentagon asset."
So how did a ridiculous conspiracy theory that could have easily been disproven get airtime on a highly rated cable show?
Just his like predecessor Tucker Carlson, Watters uses a "just asking questions" approach to amplify outlandish false claims to millions of viewers, night after night. It's his show's bread and butter, and viewers are insatiably hungry for it.