How everything became a ‘psyop’ for conservative media

Lately, it’s become popular in conservative media circles to brand certain things as a psychological operation, or “psyop.”

Climate change, for example. Or covid. Or the media coverage of Donald Trump. Or even the prosecution of Hunter Biden.

Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post.

Technically, “psyop” is a U.S. military term, referring to various kinds of campaigns to get inside the heads of adversaries. In a classic psychological operation during the Vietnam War, the U.S. government blasted messages over loudspeakers that were meant to urge Viet Cong soldiers to defect. Ahead of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it was millions of leaflets dropped on cities to undermine support for then-President Saddam Hussein. “Who needs you more? Your family or the regime?” one flier asked.

But conservative media personalities have begun using the term in vaguer and wilder ways, seemingly to allege government conspiracies targeted at American citizens - something that would be illegal, even if any of these theories were remotely plausible.

Actual experts in real-life psyops are unconvinced by this latest wave of claims.

“Most people realize it’s just baloney,” said Herbert A. Friedman, a retired sergeant major who worked in psychological operations for the Army.

Fox News host Jesse Watters is perhaps the most influential superspreader of the term. In January, Watters used a just-asking-questions formula to suggest that Taylor Swift is a psyop asset of the Defense Department. How so? He didn’t exactly connect the dots for viewers, but he did note that Swift, who endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, had urged her fans to vote.

The Pentagon shot it down with a punny statement: “As for this conspiracy theory, we are going to shake it off.”

Watters acknowledged that his show “obviously has no evidence” for the claim, but he tied it tangentially to a comment made at a 2019 NATO cybersecurity conference, where a speaker mentioned Swift’s social media influence. However, the speaker never claimed that the pop star was a government asset, and the event was not held by the U.S. government.

On other occasions, Watters has seemed to repurpose the word into a fancy way to call something a myth or a falsehood or simply a sinister PR campaign he happens to disagree with. Last summer, he claimed that climate change is “a psyop against the American people by big business and the Democratic Party to worry you into giving you more of their money,” and separately referred to a “decades-long liberal media social psyop that marriage is a broken and dated institution.”

In November, though, it was an even murkier argument about how “control freaks” in the FBI and liberal-leaning Twitter employees constituted an anti-Trump psyop of some kind - though he not only presented no evidence, but he also failed to explain what any of that meant.

Watters’s Fox News colleague Greg Gutfeld has also expressed concern about psyops. In November, he asked panelists on his nightly show whether media coverage of Trump’s potential second term is a “psyop,” though he acknowledged, “I hate using that word, because it puts you in a conspiracy realm.” Nonetheless, a month later, he declared on the panel show “The Five” that social media is a “psyop.”

In appearances in late December, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy spoke of both “the trans psyop” and “the covid psyop” but without any context or explanation of what these things are supposed to mean.

The fact that none of these personalities seems particularly committed to any firm definition of the word may be the point.

“It has connotations of malign influence, and so it’s a scary word they can use to negatively brand the things they want to negatively brand,” said Todd C. Helmus, a senior behavioral scientist at RAND.

The term is also popular on two conservative cable-news channels that have tried to outflank Fox. Newsmax anchor Rob Schmitt recently referred to the federal indictments against Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Hunter Biden and a federal investigation into Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) as a “psyop” to “dupe everybody” into thinking that the criminal charges against Trump are “somehow normal and credible and not strange.” In late January, a host on One America News said that sexually explicit artificial-intelligence-generated images of Swift that circulated online are “another psyop.” A few days earlier, conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who hosts a show on Salem Radio, said he doesn’t really watch movies “because they’re all CIA psychological operation programming.”

Mike Rothschild, an expert in conspiracy theories who wrote a book on QAnon, sees a profit motive in conservative media’s use of the term, which he said is on the rise.

“There’s a desperate need to get people churning through content and terrified of things they don’t understand or don’t know much about it,” he said.

The cynical genius of calling something a “psyop” is that such accusations “don’t really need to have any evidence, because there’s not going to be any evidence: It’s a secret operation.”

A poll released by Monmouth University last week suggests that at least one so-called “psyop” claim is catching on, with 18 percent of Americans saying that they believe in the existence of “a covert government effort for Taylor Swift to help Joe Biden win the presidential election.”

Helmus said he expects the term to continue being used widely in conservative media, even though it does not align with the actual meaning of the term.

“The problem with these conspiracy theories is that they sound crazy to begin with, but they gain legs, and people will continue with them, and there will be people that believe it because there are always believers for these conspiracy theories.”

But, he added: “It would be good for Taylor Swift, and for truth in general, if they died out.”

Related Content

They take kratom to ease pain or anxiety. Sometimes, death follows.

Haley’s nearly all-White high school lacked lessons of racism, some say

They found spiritual joy. They won’t have it taken away.