Swift, Psy-Ops, and Demons

Why We Are Turning Everything Into A Conspiracy

My daughter: “Dad, does Taylor Swift have a demon?”

This was the question my 7 year old daughter came home asking after school. She heard it from a friend, who heard it from—and I quote— “something called Tik-Tok?”

Taylor Swift, I told her, does not have a demon.

In the last few weeks, Swift has been the subject of all sorts of theories. She’s also endured the abuse of AI-generated pornographic images circulating on X. To some, she’s demonic, to others she’s a government asset, part of a vast “psy-op” campaign of the same “deep state” set against Trump.

Earlier this month in his Fox News segment, Jesse Walters showed viewers a clip from a 2019 training sponsored by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. (It’s worth mentioning the CCDCOE is classified as a military organization.)

Fox News viewers were shown edited clips from this lecture on misinformation activism as part of a NATO CCDCOE training session from 2019. The academic speaker used Swift as an example of someone whose “social influence could promote social behavior chains.” In other words, Swift’s celebrity status was used by an expert in mis/disinfo as an example of a particular sort of misinformation activism.

But that is not what Walters told his viewers. What Fox News told millions of Americans was that the “Pentagon psychological operations unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset during a NATO Meeting. What kind of asset? A psy-op for combatting online misinformation.”

That’s not what happened. Fox spun a training lecture on various misinformation activisms and opted to sell its viewers on the idea that the lecture was actually an intelligence community strategy session trying to recruit Swift as an asset.

In the wake of this segment, Swift is the subject of all sorts of partisan narratives converging with the already steady Tik-Tok discourse about her demonic influence.

Swift is being used like a master key to open any and every door and expose the shadowy zeitgeist and its plot against the GOP. She is “proof” the Super Bowl is rigged, a dry-run for the 2024 Election which will presumably also be rigged (if Trump doesn’t win.)

What are we to make of this? Psy-ops? Demons? Well, here are is a quick reflection followed by some “fast takes”…

Reflection:

These narratives—Swift as a psyop asset, demonic influence, both—reflects the basic ideological contours and relgious/Christian grammar of conservatism today. The shadowy world of the intel community in the political tends to align directly with a particular theological view of the “spiritual world”. Psy-ops coupled with the demonic is a common pairing.

An aside: In my PhD project, I did the deep dive on theologies of the demonic and accounts of the National Security apparatus. In short (and I hope to share more soon), the intel community is much more complex than simplistic rhetoric about the “Deep State”. On demons, in general, Christians in the West need do to deep theological retrieval on the dangerous prominence of the demonic in our grammar and speech. Christians who inherit certain theological paradigms and impulses risk talking about demons more than the Christ who disarmed them.

Depending on ideological preferences, it would be useful to highlight that the far-left is not immune from conspiracism either. Far-left reactionaries increasingly push the conspiracy theory that the Oct 7 atrocities of Hamas were a false flag just as conservatives continue to do the same on January 6.

This highlights a really important point—in dealing with the problem of conspiracism or mis/disinfo, we have to avoid coding the phenomena as “crazy” or “pathological” or “clinical”. Not only does this downplay the real clinical conditions—because yes, there are clinical diagnoses and discourses that deal with conspiratorial paranoia. But coding it as “crazy” tends to misread the problem: what we are dealing with here is less pathological (sickness and disease), and more epistemological (knowledge).

Ours is a social world supercharged by digital interactions that amplify conspiracy theory as a feature, not a bug. No one “ideology” or community (both have ways of generating “knowledge”) is sealed off from the pull of this maelstrom.

Fast Takes:

The grammar of conspiracy—whether spiritual (demons) or political (psyop)—is not going anywhere. We are not dealing with conspiracy theory as one false claim among many. We are dealing with “conspiratorial worlds” or realities that “appear” through the telling of an ever-evolving story that absorbs complex and disparate bits of information to try and keep some cohesion and predictably to chaotic and complex events. Which brings me to the next point…

Conspiracy theory is a sign of white-knuckling individualism in a complex social moment. The modern West has formed all of us in the mold of staunch techno-individualism. And the ideological contours of certain conspiracy theories aside, conspiracy theory as an act of storytelling is an attempt to keep believing individualism. It so badly wants to read the social and political world as constructed by the direct, conscious decisions of human beings. In this, conspiracy theory is actually too simplistic.

Conspiracy theory is formative. Taylor Swift is a human being. But the moment she is labeled demonic or an psy-op asset, that naming is an reductionary abstraction. One of the reasons we ought to resist conspiracism is because it tends to be so ridiculously shallow, and this ends up fueling violence based on perceived difference and curated animosity.

We need thicker accounts of our world, its exercise of power, and most of all—of human beings. Our words make worlds that form us. And the Bible can prove—in our hands—dangerous as we shatter its witness into shards to construct our own self-serving worlds. These worlds soon grow beyond our ability to control—they close us in, and (ultimately) threaten to destroy us, because we cannot imagine anything “other” than what is right in front of us. As a practicing Christian, there’s a lot of theological load-bearing walls holding up this floor here…that I’ll have to save for another time. Suffice to say: the Word of Jesus does not leave us alone with our rage, our causes, our principles, and our cherished narratives.