The Right Has Truly Outdone Itself With This Taylor Swift Football Stuff

The right wing online has done something few groups have ever come close to achieving: In the past few days, MAGA influencers and hangers-on have officially out-crazied Swifties.

For a few years now, it’s been hard to ignore certain similarities between the most militant factions of both the Republican Party and Taylor Swift’s fandom: Both share a disposition for elaborate conspiracy theories and also finding evidence for said theories lurking everywhere. Swift fans’ obsession with numerology and Easter eggs was the original QAnon.

But the right’s latest flight of fantasy blows Taylor Swift fans out of the water. While Swifties have devoted the past few weeks to proving she is the author of a mystery novel she seems to have nothing to do with, the right has been busy speculating that she’s involved in a plan to rig the Super Bowl to deliver the presidential election to Joe Biden. Sorry, Swifties: If you thought you had the market cornered when it came to pushing outlandish narratives about your fave, you have been outclassed.

This particular right-wing meltdown was prompted by Sunday’s football game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Kansas City Chiefs. As you probably know, the Chiefs won, clinching them a spot in February’s Super Bowl. As you likely also know, Taylor Swift was in attendance, because her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, plays for the team. You’d think conservatives would embrace an all-American tale of a blond pop star falling for an NFL star, but they’ve instead developed a huge chip on their shoulders about the couple. To the extent that their resentment is rooted in anything factual, Swift is considered an enemy because she has endorsed Democratic politicians in the past—including Biden in 2020—and Kelce, because he did a commercial for Pfizer vaccines last year. Thus, some MAGA types have decided it’s only logical that the Chiefs win was part of a deep-state conspiracy.

While Swift’s politics have long been a lightning rod, her romance with Kelce has pissed off conservatives since almost the moment it began. These latest theories have been building since at least December, when her Time Person of the Year selection led to a wave of right-wing grousing: Before they had the Super Bowl rigging to galvanize them, conservatives were just generally aggrieved about how she and her success represented everything that’s depraved about liberal America and therefore had to be propaganda. This latest election-rigging thing is simply the newest iteration.

After Sunday’s game, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s post on X, formerly Twitter, seems to be what got everyone’s attention.

What followed was like an intra-MAGA round of exquisite corpse, that game where you write a story by passing a piece of paper around the room and having each person add a line. With each plot development, the story grew increasingly unhinged. Onetime presidential candidate Jack Lombardi II wrote that Kansas City’s whole football season and path to the Super Bowl must have been scripted. Podcaster Mike Crispi predicted an official endorsement of Biden during halftime at the big game. Far-right activist Laura Loomer added that the Super Bowl and surrounding events were a “psyop” and the Democrats were going to “use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion GOTV Campaign.” Conservative influencer Rogan O’Handley chimed in to say that if the Chiefs won, it would inevitably result in World War III and millions of deaths.

As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump has explained in detail, none of these theories make a lick of sense. Why would Biden and/or George Soros, who is of course part of this, need to rig the Super Bowl in order to ensure an endorsement from Taylor Swift? The Chiefs don’t need the help—they’ve made it to three of the past four Super Bowls. Biden doesn’t need to make a grand gesture; Swift, again, endorsed him in 2020, so it’s likely she would do so again. And her endorsement, though valuable, is hardly make-or-break: Candidates she has endorsed in the past have lost their elections. It’s all controversy for controversy’s sake.

Say what you will about the Swifties, but when they run wild with a conspiracy theory, they at least try to back up their conjecture with close reading and other attempts at methodology. They sometimes get a bad rap for going overboard, like when they decide they have definitive evidence that their idol is gay, or they predict rapture-like events because a bunch of numbers add up to 13. Though conservatives have shown that they can outdo them in the wackadoo department, that’s actually a good thing for the Swiftie cause, because it suggests how harmless they are in comparison. At least when they take it too far, it stems from some appreciation of Swift and her work, and for the most part, they’re not hurting anyone. Swift herself apparently sometimes finds it annoying that her fans are pestering her about another book she didn’t write or that some celebrity lip reader is speculating about something she said, but that’s got to be endlessly preferable to being accused of being a weapon of the deep state.