Wednesday, October 29, 2025

WHY REPUBLICANS LOVE FAKE VIDEOS

In the news section of The Washington Post -- which is still trying to hang on as a reliable source of information, even as Jeff Bezos destroys the paper's opinion section -- we find hard evidence of fakery in videos put out by the Trump Department of Homeland Security:
The Department of Homeland Security posted a swaggering montage to social media in August declaring it had triumphed in its takeover of Washington, D.C. It showed footage of federal agents fighting what a DHS official called a “battle for the soul of our nation” and working “day and night to arrest, detain and deport vicious criminals from our nation’s capital.”

There was one problem. Several of the clips had been recorded during unrelated operations months earlier, in Los Angeles and West Palm Beach, Florida. The official’s sound bite about deportations in D.C. played over a clip from May showing detainees on a Coast Guard boat off the coast of Nantucket, the Massachusetts island 400 miles away.

Officials in President Donald Trump’s administration have used similarly misleading footage in at least six videos promoting its immigration agenda shared in the last three months, a Washington Post analysis found....
The Trumpers are even using Biden-era imagery to prove how tough they are.
The White House ... post[ed] a video this month that claimed “Chicago is in chaos” and said the city “doesn’t need political spin — it needs HELP.”

The video, however, recycled footage from a months-old ICE operation in Florida, not far from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. A fact-checker at Agence France-Presse also found other clips in the video had come from operations in Arizona, California, Nebraska, South Carolina and Texas, some of which had been recorded during President Joe Biden’s time in office.
The latter video would qualify as a "swaggering montage".



But the first one actually seems more like what Milan Kudera called "totalitarian kitsch," full of sunrises and shots glorifying D.C.'s monuments, embedded in what seems like a human resources onboarding video for the New World Order.


Of course, these videos aren't as fake-looking as the AI slop Donald Trump has posted on social media since his return to the White House. Democrats and independents are appalled by those videos, according to a recent YouGov survey. Republicans, not so much.
Only around one-third of Americans say they've seen a recent AI-generated video posted by Donald Trump depicting himself dropping sewage out of a fighter jet onto protesters, but once shown the video, 70% of Americans say they strongly or somewhat disapprove of it. A new YouGov poll showed Americans this video — as well as two other AI videos posted by the president on Truth Social this year — and found that reactions were generally negative, with many viewing the videos as unpresidential, disturbing, and offensive.
After being shown the sewage video, 96% of Democrats disapprove and only 2% approve; 72% of independents disapprove and only 14% approve. But among Republicans, the numbers are mixed: 42% approve, 42% disapprove.

An AI video of Barack Obama being arrested and imprisoned is met with 96% disapproval and 3% approval among Democrats, as well as 73% disapproval and 13% approval among independents. But a plurality of Republicans (48%) approve, while only 38% disapprove.

And an AI video of a remade Gaza featuring a gold Trump statue and a Trump Gaza hotel meets with 93% disapproval among Democrats (4% approval) and 71% disapproval among independents (13% approval). But a plurality of Republicans approve (44%-34%).

We know that Republicans respond favorably to images of Trump as a young, buff action hero (or rock star or pop star or biker). Why do they like this stuff so much?

I think it's because Republicans don't like the real world.

The rest of us can imagine happiness in settings that aren't quite perfect -- say, a beautiful spring day with people enjoying themselves in a hundred different ways in a big city park. People are throwing Frisbees and hanging out with friends and having birthday parties for their kids. They're bicycling and running and walking dogs and just strolling. There might be potholes on some of the paths or dog poop on some of the lawns, but, mostly, life is good. Maybe this is my big-city worldview -- that the place where I love is scruffy and has decay and human suffering, but can be a place of joy -- but it's what I think Republicans can't appreciate. They need everything to be their way, or the world is unbearable.

I think they actually are happy in their small-town/rural bubble, but they've been conditioned to be angry about everything in the world, because it's not like their world.

There's a lot of talk in the media about liberal contempt for conservatives, even though the feeling clearly goes both ways. But beyond that, it's important to note that while some liberals dislike rural, pickup-driving, gun-brandishing right-wingers, they don't want them to cease to exist. They don't want them denied the vote. They just want to live in a country where those people don't control the government and police everyone else's lives.

Whereas right-wingers don't want anyone to be progressive, or liberal, or LGBTQ, or feminist, or vegetarian, or non-white, or non-Christian, or have dyed hair, or enjoy cities or bicycling or public transportation. They want a world in which everyone is just like them -- or at least a world in which they don't have to share political power with anyone who isn't like them. They think it's possible to imagine a world in which everyone is like them or at least agrees with them, and every human interaction is a morality tale in which they're right 100% of the time and the people they don't like are crushed underfoot because they're evil. In this world, they get all the power, all the glory, all the women. Their president is young and hot and all-powerful and God's agent on Earth. And so are they.

The rest of us recognize that this is a flawed world with moments of grace and happiness and the potential for more if we try to be better people. Republicans think this could be a perfect world if the people they hate ceased to exist and everyone did things the Republicans' way. Only in fake video can the world they seek possibly exist. The world they want is impossible to attain.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:35 AM

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