Taylor Swift is a Pentagon ‘asset’ to boost Joe Biden? Come on, Fox News | Opinion

Leave Taylor Swift alone.

I know the pop superstar isn’t technically a resident of Kansas or Missouri, but c’mon. We’ve all heard about her dating life. Ad nauseum. It’s very Kansas City-centric these days! Folks in this region are thrilled — and they seem to have claimed Swift as one of their own. She’s a guest here. We feel a bit protective of her.

Well, now she needs some protection.

Because Swift’s popularity apparently is too much for Fox News conservatives. The network on Tuesday night ran a segment on the “Jesse Watters Primetime” show featuring a former FBI agent named Stuart Kaplan.

Who bizarrely suggested that Swift might be a “Pentagon psyop” — as in, a psychological operation on the public conducted by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Why? Because she encouraged her millions of followers to vote.

No really.

“When she posted the link to Vote.org, hundreds of thousands of Taylor Swift fans all of the sudden registered to vote,” Watters chuckled, and then added darkly: “I wonder who got to her, from the White House or from whatever?”

“Now it is possible that Taylor Swift doesn’t realize she is being used in a covert manner to swing voters,” Kaplan responded.

C’mon.

Where I grew up, encouraging people to vote was simply good civics.

Now? It’s the stuff of feverish conspiracy theories.

Only the fringe stuff is now a message embraced and amplified by the semi-official cable network of the Republican Party — folks who apparently can’t stand that a powerful and accomplished woman is using her influence to help her fans become good citizens. It’s nuts, and it’s wrong.

So the following message bears repeating, especially because it sure seems that same network has a lot of fans in the deep red states of Kansas, Missouri and elsewhere:

Fox News is not in the business of telling you the truth.

Tucker Carlson on Trump: ‘I hate him passionately’

That’s been obvious for years, but the truth became inescapable last year when the election machine company Dominion Voting Systems turned up behind-the-scenes emails and texts showing that Fox News hosts such as Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and now-fired Tucker Carlson knew that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

Did they tell their viewers? Not exactly. Instead, they entertained — and even promoted — false and deranged conspiracy theories suggesting Trump had actually won.

Why? Not because they liked Trump. “I hate him passionately,” Carlson wrote in one text.

No, the problem was that a Trump loss was bad for business, with right-wing viewers fleeing to even more extreme networks like Newsmax that were happy to traffic in nonsense after Fox called the election for Joe Biden. On-air comments that reflected reality were “measurably hurting the company,” Carlson wrote in another missive. “The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

Fox News paid for its falsehoods, a record $787 million settlement to make Dominion’s defamation charges go away.

You’ve probably heard all this. But the recent history is worth remembering — we forget so easily — when the network pops up with yet another deranged theory.

Watters, in fact, barely bothered to pretend he was telling his viewers the truth on Tuesday night.

“So is Swift a front for a covert political agenda? ‘Primetime’ obviously has no evidence — if we did, we’d share it,” he told his audience. “But we’re curious. Because the pop star who endorsed Biden is urging millions of her followers to vote.”

It’s the old “just asking questions” routine.

That’s not journalism, though. Real journalists try to find out if their questions have answers before they put allegations before a national audience. They don’t ask leading questions in prime time and then shrug at the lack of evidence.

It’s how propagandists and hucksters work, though.

Truth is, Taylor Swift can probably take care of herself. She’s rich and famous and has a rich and famous boyfriend. We should all be so lucky.

But if you do want to protect her, if you do think she’s a guest here in the Kansas-Missouri region, then do yourself a favor.

Stop giving folks like Jesse Watters your eyes, your ears and your attention. Leave Fox News alone.

Joel Mathis is a regular Wichita Eagle and Kansas City Star Opinion correspondent. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas, with his wife and son. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.