Jesse Watters suggests Taylor Swift is a Pentagon asset

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

From the January 9, 2024, edition of Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime

JESSE WATTERS (HOST): Well, Taylor Swift's the biggest star in the world. Sorry, Gutfeld. She's been blanketed across the sports-media entertainment atmosphere. The New York Times just speculated she's a lesbian. And last year's tour broke Ticketmaster. A tour that's revenue tops the GDP of 50 countries. I mean, I like her music, she's alright, but have you ever wondered why or how she blew up like this? Well, around four years ago, the Pentagon psychological operations unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset during a NATO meeting. What kind of asset? A psyop for combatting online misinformation.

Mediaite reports:

However, the woman giving the presentation was not a Pentagon employee. Her name is Alicia Marie Bargar, a research engineer in applied physics at Johns Hopkins University. In fact, none of the four speakers on stage worked for the Department of Defense or the United States government at all. Bargar was joined by an employee of Mozilla, an officer in the British Army, and an assistant director at NATO.

The talks were given as part of the organization’s International Conference on Cyber Conflict, or CYCON. Watters may have gotten the idea for the misleading segment from a three-minute snippet of the CYCON video that was shared on X/Twitter on Monday by former State Department official Mike Benz, who served under Donald Trump.

“Watch the incredible moment that a rep from the Pentagon’s psychological operations research firm pitched NATO’s military psyops center on turning Taylor Swift into an asset for the Western military alliance to stop “disinformation” on the Internet,” Benz wrote.