Jesse Watters Runs Fake Story About the Pentagon Wanting to Turn Taylor Swift into a PsyOp: ‘That’s Real’
Fox News host Jesse Watters played a video that he said showed a Department of Defense official suggesting that Taylor Swift could be used in a government psychological operation.
However, that is not what the video showed.
“I like her music,” he said on Tuesday’s Jesse Watters Primetime. “She’s all right, but I mean, have you ever wondered why or how she blew up like this?”
The host then made a striking claim.
“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.”
Watters aired a 2019 clip of a woman on a stage giving a presentation.
“You came in here wanting to understand how you just go out and counter the information operation,” she said. “The idea is that social influence can help– can help encourage or promote behavior change… So, potentially as like a peaceful information operation… I include Taylor Swift in here because she’s– she’s, you know, a fairly influential online person. I don’t know if you’ve heard of her.”
After the clip ended, Watters told viewers, “Yeah, that’s real. Pentagon’s PsyOp unit pitched NATO on turning Taylor Swift into an asset.”
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.
A community note attached to the post notes that the claim is false and provides a link to the entire presentation.
The tweet was subsequently re-shared by Jeffrey Clark – the former Trump Justice Department lawyer who was indicted with Trump in Georgia over the president’s efforts to overturn the election in the state.
Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Watch above via Fox News.
