America has always been a society of paranoids, famed for its persecution of imaginary subversives, from witches to commies hiding under the bed. But that history almost seems quaint today when disinformation experts agree we now live in the Golden Age of Conspiracy Theories. This mania has even swept up pop idol Taylor Swift and the 2024 election, as you may have heard, into only the latest reductio ad absurdum of the era.
There’s a lot going on at the moment. UFOs are now mainstream, and it’s only a matter of time before Bigfoot gets a congressional hearing. We all know someone who sputters about climate change being a hoax, the 2020 election being stolen or microchips being in vaccines. As the Associated Press noted in January, “conspiracy theories and those who believe them seem to be playing an outsize role in politics and culture.”
Swift would no doubt concur. The global pop icon is, according to right-wing media pundits and political figures, at the center of a Pentagon plot to rig the Super Bowl and help Joe Biden get reelected. This bonkers conspiracy narrative—with election deniers now openly rooting for the San Francisco(!) 49ers against the heartland’s Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl—recently broke the Internet and was mocked by Jimmy Kimmel, Saturday Night Live and a Biden administration official who told Politico, “The absurdity of it all boggles the mind.”
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Perhaps, but scholars who track the spread of online disinformation say that the viral story springs from a familiar playbook in the MAGA media ecosystem. “It’s a play for engagement,” Joan Donovan, a Boston University journalism professor, told NPR, with Trump-supporting pundits angling to capture and…
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