Taylor Swift stays inescapable. Tales of her reign are legion, as are her followers. Next to Beyoncé, her energy and affect have reached heights so unbridled it’s nearly unfathomable. Her Eras Tour made nearly a billion dollars in 2023, and the live performance movie of that tour has introduced in nearly $250 million worldwide. When rumors began swirling within the fall that she was dating Kansas City Chiefs tight finish Travis Kelce, they upended American football. Still, when Time named her Person of the Year, conspiracy theorists noticed just one rationalization. They allege Swift is a psyop.

If you’ve lived on the web lengthy sufficient, you should have heard this sort of factor earlier than. Back in 2016, when she was largely apolitical in her public life, Swift was a hero of the so-called alt-right who some believed was actually red-pilling America to additional a racist, conservative agenda. When she piped up about politics in 2018, some individuals on-line (considerably jokingly) theorized she’d been replaced by an NPC. The newest twist? “The regime has plans to weaponize her just in time for 2024,” the @EndWokeness account posted on X Wednesday, including that for those who didn’t discover this believable “you clearly have not been paying attention.”

@EndWokeness has 1.9 million followers, and, as of Monday morning, the put up had greater than 788,000 views. On Telegram, a QAnon influencer account posted that “we need to wake the next generation up to the occult forces colluding with their favorite celebrities.” Right-wing commentator Jack Posobiec posted on X that “the Taylor Swift girlboss psyop has been fully activated.”

Last week’s Person of the Year honor was additionally adopted by resurfaced allegations that Swift is performing witchcraft to additional her success and that the left is utilizing her to affect the 2024 US presidential election. Stephen Miller, a senior adviser throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, posted a message on X saying that “what’s happening with Taylor Swift is not organic.”

All of this occurred the identical week WIRED reporter David Gilbert printed an investigation right into a pro-Russia marketing campaign that used pretend Swift quotes in a sequence of Facebook and X posts trying to seed anti-Ukraine sentiment, reinforcing—in a completely totally different manner—that celeb is a robust instrument for manipulation. Just a few days later, Microsoft researchers revealed a similar effort by an unknown Russian group to change Cameo movies by celebs like Elijah Wood and Mike Tyson to make it appear to be they had been being crucial of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Swift exists as a singular instance of the intersection of celeb and politics, and the way it operates globally, says Jonathan Dean, a professor of politics at the University of Leeds. “An important feature of culture and politics over the past 10 years, certainly in the UK and the US and I think probably more broadly as well, is that there’s been a significant convergence in the grammar and style and mode, if you like, of pop culture fandom and political citizenship,” he says, referencing the same methods fandoms and political events can function. “Taylor Swift is interesting in that sense because I think she’s a real embodiment of those convergences.”