We Deserve Better Conspiracy Theories

Here’s my hypothesis: Nobody was ever actually upset about Taylor Swift attending her boyfriend’s football games. 

I know people were allegedly complaining about this all season long, but I have never actually encountered a person making these complaints. Thirteen different times this year, Swift showed up to a Kansas City Chiefs game to cheer on Travis Kelce and the gang, and every time there were supposedly people OUTRAGED at her attendance, even though celebrities show up to major sporting events all the time. I have heard about such newly outraged people, and I have certainly consumed a number of Takes aimed AT those people…

…but I am not sure these people actually exist. Perhaps some people rolled their eyes when she was on the screen — not everyone is a Swiftie, after all — but it’s hard to imagine anyone getting worked up over this. Swift was only ever on screen for a few seconds at a time, never totaling more than a few minutes per game. Obviously people get mad about irrational things all the time, but the only people I ever saw display actual emotion about this were conservative members of the media desperate for engagement.

It would be a mistake, though, to take these people at their word. By the time you hear the whirrings of the conservative outrage machine, it’s usually been on for a long time already. The conservative freakout about the Travis Kelce/Taylor Swift romance is really just leftover anger about other things. In this case:

• Kelce’s work as a sponsor for Pfizer, where he starred in a commercial for the company’s Covid-19 vaccine, and Bud Light, which are both objects of ire on the American right now.

• Swift’s endorsement of Joe Biden in 2020. 

• The NFL “going woke,” which has been a concern of the American right for some time now, going back at least to the Colin Kaepernick protests,* and possibly all the way to the drafting of Michael Sam in 2014. 

*You might ask: why would conservatives be mad about how the league handled the Kaepernick protests? Wasn’t he blackballed from the league and didn’t the league ban these protests? Well, yes, but some owners made vague gestures at the need for racial justice and teams painted “End Racism” behind some endzones, so conservatives count that as a loss….

When you put these things together, the Kelce/Swift relationship is really just a swirl of preexisting conservative grievances, and occasionally these come together in their most pure form: The conspiracy theory that their relationship is a fake, staged by Pfizer and/or the Biden Administration as a way of promoting the Covid-19 vaccine and/or setting up an endorsement of President Biden that will swing the 2024 election and/or make the cover story more plausible when the Deep State inevitably steals the election again.

All those “and/or” clauses are important. Any good conspiracy theory gives believers a lot of options, so that people concerned about different things can come together. It also means that almost anything can be used as “evidence” of the conspiracy theory, since you can likely connect anything that happens to at least one iteration of the theory.

Getting back to my original hypothesis, though, I think this is really what the phony outrage over Swift’s attendance at these games was really about: Conservative media wanted to indulge these conspiracy theories — and in its crazier corners, it said so outright. But more respectable outlets couldn’t say this stuff explicitly, so the closer you got to the mainstream, the more “Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift are agents of the Deep State engaged in an elaborate deception to promote poisonous vaccines” turned into “I don’t like when Taylor Swift goes to football games.” This is how conspiracy theories work in politics now — they get turned into weird media culture war obsessions.

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Personally, I love conspiracy theories. I can’t honestly say that I believe most of them, but I find people who do far less annoying than those who smugly dismiss them. But it bothers me that conservatives get all the big conspiracy theories. The left hates Big Pharma and is skeptical of official government narratives, too! And yet we’re stuck with this nonsense about two celebrities being Biden Secret Agents? We can’t do any better than that?

But conspiracy theories are an inherently conservative phenomenon. There is this tendency to treat them as an issue that plagues both sides of the political spectrum equally — and certainly there are people of all stripes and ideologies who have conspiratorial suspicions — but “conspiracy theories” as a political phenomenon have always played a particularly important role on the far-right. This has been true and well-understood for over 50 years, dating back at least to 1964, when Richard Hofstadter first wrote, “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” about a strain of political thinking that has been around since the eighteenth century.

In that essay, Hofstadter gets at why this kind of thing is particularly important to far-right, anti-communist political movements:

“The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).”

In other words, conspiracy theories like this are specifically a rejection of materialism, of the idea that people are shaped by the modes of economic production or the political system in which they live. World events are not shaped by class struggle or hegemony, but by powerful, shady actors in secret rooms. Most people, of any political valence, have a healthy suspicion of powerful people. But conspiracy theories end up channeling those feelings into a conservative historical narrative: that any social problem is the result of a small group of bad actors — whether that’s the Masons, or the Papists, or the Illuminati, or the Deep State — having hijacked the levers of power, and if they could only be vanquished, we could return to whatever society conservatives are nostalgic for at the moment.

The standard liberal response to these theories is to just smugly dismiss them as untrue, but this is its own kind of political fantasy. For one, many things that were once considered “conspiracy theories” turned out to be true: FBI surveillance and infiltration of the Civil Rights Movement, mass NSA surveillance, lies to justify the war in Iraq, etc. It’s just that whenever these things get confirmed, they get silently moved out of the category of “conspiracy theory.” Meanwhile, everyone insists that NOW the category surely contains no true allegations.

But more importantly, “conspiracy theories” exist in that realm of uncertainty between true and false. This can make them sound slippery and ridiculous — they have a way of never getting precisely pinned down — but it’s also why “disproving” them never fully dispels them. They simply evolve as more facts come out, and nobody really believes they have ALL the facts about the world.

 It would be lame to end this post with something like “the real conspiracy is capitalism”... but that IS the issue I always bump up against when it comes to conspiracy theories. As someone who DOES believe that people are products of their material reality, I can’t ever fully get on board with the idea that a secret cabal of evil people is running the world and sending Taylor Swift to NFL games. Some conspiracies ARE real, and sometimes shadowy figures DO gather to cause evil… but it’s usually just for boring capitalist reasons.

Take the Covid-19 vaccines. There was, in fact, ALL KINDS of shady shit surrounding their development and distribution, and Bill Gates WAS a prominent figure. But it was just standard stuff about the for-profit medical industry stifling important innovation in favor of profits and screwing over the Global South. You could read about it in the New York Times, but it’s honestly pretty dull. 

The Travlor conspiracy isn’t a good one, but it at least holds your attention. Someday we will get a conspiracy theory that is actually good… one that doesn’t rely on a bunch of silly, right-wing grievances and doesn’t reject historical materialism. I haven’t found it yet, but I truly believe it’s out there…