Are Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Plotting Against America?

The right’s urge to reject control is so strong that it applies to attempts at control that don’t even exist.

This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.

“I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.” —Vivek Ramaswamy on X, formerly known as Twitter, regarding Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift

Until recently, right-wing media personality Vivek Ramaswamy was a Republican candidate for president. Since he was very young and largely unknown, it was widely believed during his campaign that his main intention in running was to draw attention to himself in order to become more highly paid as a right-wing media personality. This seems to have been correct. After spending his time on the trail annoying most of the other candidates but celebrating the race’s front-runner—he showed up outside the courthouse during multiple Donald Trump legal proceedings—he dropped out as soon as the Iowa caucus was over. And now, he is around to do stuff like this on X/Twitter:

Ramaswamy is responding to Jack Posobiec, another far-right media person whose stock in trade is claims that are never confirmed and predictions that never come true. In recent months, for example, Posobiec has been warning that President Joe Biden and the Deep State will be reinstituting the military draft in order to send troops abroad to fight Russia and, I think, Iran.

Posobiec, in this case, had brought up an idea that is gaining purchase across right-wing media: That singer Taylor Swift—who is dating tight end Travis Kelce of the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs—is in some way involved in a plan to rig the Super Bowl to promote the pro-Joe Biden agenda of liberal donor George Soros. The evidence, such as it is, is that Soros was financially involved in purchasing the “master rights” to Swift’s recordings in 2019, that Kelce has appeared in public-service ads urging Americans to take the COVID vaccine, and that on Sunday the Chiefs won their conference championship game, thus becoming one of the teams that will compete in the Super Bowl on Feb. 11.

The theory here—again, I guess—is that Swift and Kelce’s relationship is connected to a scheme to give the Chiefs an unfair advantage in NFL games in order to build public support for Biden’s presidency, vaccines, and war abroad.

The conspiratorial speculation does have a distant connection to political reality. The New York Times has reported that Biden’s campaign is hoping Swift will endorse him, as she did in 2020, and Rolling Stone reports that Trump advisers are discussing how to attack Swift if she does this. Posobiec and Ramaswamy are the kinds of GOP voices who’d be deployed as part of such a response: Ramaswamy held an event Monday night in Columbus, Ohio, with Trump-endorsed Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, while Posobiec was at a Turning Point Action event on Tuesday in Las Vegas, Turning Point being the right’s most prominent group dedicated to the persuasion of younger voters.

But do any of these people really believe that a Swift endorsement would be the result of a conspiracy so powerful as to have coopted the NFL, a sports league whose involvement in government propaganda operations had previously skewed conservative? Who knows. But resentment about being controlled—whether by health authorities, Democratic officials, or politically correct social media mobs—is what motivates the ascendant faction of the Republican electorate. In such an environment, influence accumulates to figures who can explain every event—no matter how obviously the result of normal human behavior or basic cause and effect—into one that has been orchestrated by the global elite. This week, for instance, the right-leaning publication Tablet alleged that migrants from Africa and the Middle East are being “imported” to the U.S. by Democrats in order to create a new base of voters, as if the movement of populations in response to war and economic catastrophe isn’t something that happened before there was a political party that needed to improve its margins in the Pennsylvania suburbs.

Is it suspicious that a football player who has already won two Super Bowls, and had a reputation for being a ham, would end up dating a celebrity and making it to another Super Bowl? Not to most people. But in this subfield of math, the only rule is that nothing ever adds up.