By: Jocelyn Knorr

Valentine’s Day coincided with another very important date this year, but the leadup to the Super Bowl wasn’t all excitement. Instead, there was a very odd undertone to the festivity as people on social media pushed one of the oddest conspiracy theories to ever cross the internet.

Speculation surrounding the billion-dollar pop star Taylor Swift is nothing new—I still have distinct memories of the week everyone went crazy over the theory that she and Formula One driver Fernando Alonso were dating—but this has been taken to a new level by proponents of the “rigged Super Bowl” theory. It’s based off of two things. 1) Taylor Swift has a very large audience. When she called on her fans to register to vote in an Instagram post, vote.org, the website she directed them to recorded a 1,226% jump in registration. 2) Since December of 2023, Swift has been publicly dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. Since then, she has been spotted at many of his games to cheer him on.

This is where we get into corkboard-covered-in-red-string territory. Because of the link between Swift and Kelce, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy suggested on Twitter that the Super Bowl was going to be rigged in the Chiefs’ favor. This ensuing attention would facilitate Swift throwing her support behind sitting president Joe Biden, who is up for re-election in 2024. In Ramaswamy’s theory, Swift’s legion of fans would heed her call, and vote for Biden in the next election. Ramaswamy himself has a sizable audience; people began to regurgitate this story across platforms, leading to a significant subset of the American population that legitimately believes in a rigged Super Bowl.

Biden has responded to these accusations by making jokes on TikTok and releasing merch that depicts himself with glowing red eyes. Specifically, he calls this alter ego “Dark Brandon;” a reference to Let’s Go Brandon, a euphemism for “F***Joe Biden.” He’s been using this alter ego to poke fun at the people who believe these theories, most notably by posting “just like we drew it up” as Dark Brandon on Twitter after the Chiefs win.

It may seem all in good fun, but one has to remember that humans are prideful animals. When someone makes fun of us, we tend to discount them out of hand—sour grapes, and all that. This is a largely polarized conspiracy, spreading mostly through the far- and alt-right and even several sitting members of the government. When the leader of the Democratic Party decides he’s going to make fun of these people on a major public platform, he pushes them further away. It jeopardizes our already-imperiled ability to work across the aisle. I’m not saying that we have to agree with the things these people say, but we do need to remember that there are people on the other side of the screen. If we choose to engage, we should do it kindly. It’s like having a coworker who sucks; vent away in private, but don’t humiliate them on Twitter.