Where gullibility is a virtue
[Signal weak this a.m., making it a slog to load web pages, but here goes.]
Back in the hippie-dippy days of the Jesus Freak movement of the early 1970s, Moses David (David Berg) and his Children of God used, um, “alternative” methods for sucking in members to their religious cult that included (IIRC) seductions and “lying for Jesus” about the nature of group and its founder.
Evangelicals around these parts thought this behavior a lie of the Devil, no matter the Jesusy pretensions and trappings. So like the adoption over the last decades of propaganda techniques conservatives decried in the 1960s as tools of the “commies,” the vacant-eyed embrace by nald Trump’s MAGA minions of stupidly obvious lies is just as confounding. WTF Real American™ values do they think they stand for?
Case in point No. Gajillion:
An image depicting former president Donald Trump wading through floodwaters alongside a fellow disaster responder went viral on social media this week.
But there’s one tiny problem: the image is an AI-generated fake, as multiple publications have confirmed.
The image, which shows Trump wearing a lifejacket and blue jeans as he marches through thigh-high waters, first picked up steam on Facebook last weekend.
And it doesn’t hold up to virtually any degree of scrutiny. Trump’s right hand is distorted, and the lettering pictured on either man’s clothing is completely illegible.
The former president has visited some areas impacted by the storm, but there are no credible reports of the candidate physically going into floodwaters in blue jeans, making it only the latest instance of highly politicized AI slop ahead of the presidential elections next month.
Like the conspiracy fantasies about Hurricane Helene recovery efforts I’ve heard this week, removal of faked photos by social media sites is itself treated as a dark conspiracy against free speech by, you know, THEM.
As of publishing this article, the image has garnered over ten thousand likes on Facebook.
“I don’t think FB wants this picture on FB,” the poster wrote in a caption, implying the social media giant may have been removing the post for political reasons. “They have been deleting it.”
Despite alleged censorship, the image was shared roughly 160,000 times in just two days, according to a fact check from USA Today. (The photo is still live on Facebook, though has been flagged with an “altered photo” warning and a link to an independent, third-party fact check.)
The image quickly spread to other corners of social media, where users captioned the synthetic image with notes about how “they don’t want you to see this side of Trump” and messages to leaders to “not tell me how much you care about Americans… show me though [sic] your actions.”
The fake image of Trump is one of many AI-generated fake photos to circulate in the wake of the deadly storm, which wrought extensive damage throughout parts of Appalachia.
It’s not as if there aren’t people on the left willing to suspend disbelief outside a movie theater. That is, lefties who fantasize access to secret knowledge concealed either by the Deep State or the Illuminati. But those people were never numerous enough to elect a Jill Stein or an RFK Jr. Or to suspend the Constitution and install a wannabe dictator bent on revenge where the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave once stood.
Former Mesa County, Colo. Clerk Sue Peters is headed to nine years in jail for her embrace of stupid MAGA lies. They have consequences. They won’t if Trump wins reelection this November.
Other AI-generated images of alleged hurricane devastation have depicted scenes like flooded homes, abandoned, sad-looking dogs on roofs, and men in knee-high water barbequing.
Most notably, a widely-shared AI image showing a crying young girl clutching a puppy while evacuating in a canoe has made its rounds on X-formerly-Twitter, where it’s been repeatedly shared by right-wing influencers and close Trump allies.
As far as the health of our information world goes, the apparent believability of these images is troubling. The fact that so many netizens are taking clearly AI-generated images at face value is a damning indictment of the extent of media illiteracy plaguing the US today.
But this is more than media illiteracy. Willingness to repeat Trump’s Big Lie is a requirement of membership in the Trump cult. It’s male infant circumcision of the rational brain, accepted willingly by those seeking the phony embrace of the world’s greatest con man, the edjudicated-rapist protector of women, etc. The Republican Party is gone. In its place, a conspiracy of dunces. Dangerous ones at that.