San Francisco 49ers' Jimmy Garoppolo walks off the field after the NFC Championship NFL football game against the Los Angeles Rams Sunday, Jan. 30, 2022, in Inglewood, Calif. The Rams won 20-17 to advance to the Super Bowl. (AP Photo/Jed Jacobsohn)
As America’s two favorite pastimes — football and intricate political conspiracy theories — collide in the run-up to Super Bowl LVIII, a strange thing has happened.
Several conservative commentators announced that they plan to root for San Francisco, a city that has long served as a bête noire to far-right America, with politicians and media outlets alike usually vilifying it as an acrid emblem of progressivism run amok.
The nascent 49ers fans declaring their unlikely allegiance are hardly driven by Bay Area devotion or Candlestick Park nostalgia. Rather, they are vocally sticking it to Taylor Swift, the nation’s biggest pop star and new-ish girlfriend of Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, who will be facing off against the 49ers on Sunday.
Swift has been at the center of a series of sprawling but unfounded right-wing conspiracy theories that allege she is somehow in cahoots with the NFL to hurt Donald Trump’s chances in the 2024 election and hand victory to President Biden in November, among other things.
Swift endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 and her Super Bowl-bound boyfriend has appeared in Pfizer advertisements encouraging Americans to get COVID-19 vaccines. There is no evidence that she colluded with the NFL to guarantee her boyfriend a spot in America’s biggest sporting event, nor is there any evidence that she plans to endorse Biden at the end of the big game, as some theories allege.
