REPUBLICAN VOTERS HAVE LIVED IN AN AI-SLOP FANTASYLAND SINCE BEFORE THERE WAS AI

Did you know that Zohran Mamdani is Jeffrey Epstein's son? Alex Jones says he might be, so it must be true.

A major investigation is underway to determine if reports are true that the current New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani
Is the biological son of Jeffrey Epstein? pic.twitter.com/2bd2E7RT7A

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) February 1, 2026

As a reader noted, the image is AI generated, but the tweet has twenty thousand likes.

This follow-up isn't even AI:

Analyze these faces @grok and tell us the probability they are related pic.twitter.com/IrBX4OPwdp

— USA NEWS 🇺🇸 (@usanewshq) February 2, 2026

I don't see any resemblance there. Do you? Does anyone?

But I don't think this is intended to be carefully scrutinized. It's intended to be wish fulfillment for right-wingers: We hate Mamdani -- who might be the secret son of the most notorious pedophile of all time!

A Hannah Arendt quote, from her last public interview, is often invoked in discussions of Republican mendacity:

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

This may be applicable to other authoritarian states, but it's not applicable to 21st-century America. GOP voters -- who are the only citizens Republicans care to persuade -- never reach a point where "nobody believes anything any longer." They continue to believe whatever they're told by Republican propagandists, or at least they're willing to give credebnce to whatever contradicts accepted truth if it reinforces their priors and prejudices. Zohran Mamdani's father isn't really a Columbia professor, but, rather, a demon who walked among us? Sure, that's believable! Or at least it's a satisfying story.

And most Republican lies don't "have to be changed." Consider this one:

Trump: "These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally. The Republicans should say, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize voting. We have states that I won that show I didn't win. You're gonna see something in Georgia."

[image or embed]

— Molly Ploofkins (@mollyploofkins.bsky.social) February 2, 2026 at 1:08 PM

Republicans have been telling us for decades that ineligible immigrants routinely vote Democratic in large numbers -- this despite the fact that no one can actually find these unqualified voters, including right-wing think tanks:

A database maintained by the right-wing Heritage Foundation found "fewer than 100 examples of non-citizens voting between 2002 and 2022, amid more than 1 billion lawfully cast ballots."

The Heritage Foundation!

But the culture of lying in right-wing media conditions Republican voters to believe that anything could be true if it contradicts an official narrative they don't like. These voters aren't conditioned to believe that there's no such thing as truth -- they're conditioned to believe that there's no such thing as a truth they'd prefer not to believe.

There are influencers on the right who specialize in creating imaginary worlds where everything that upsets and enrages Republicans is shown to be a lie. These are AI-slop worlds in verbal form, and they existed before there was AI slop. Remember this, from 2018?

Republicans can't get enough of this sort of thing, to this day:

The Melania documentary had a more successful opening weekend than a lot of us expected, but its audience is about what you'd expect demographically:

Audience members were largely white (75%), women (70%), and 55 or over (72%). Dallas, Orlando, Tampa, Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta and West Palm Beach were among the top markets over the weekend, according to data from Amazon MGM Studios.

Even if the intended audience doesn't fully believe the Nick Adams tweet, and didn't believe the Jacob Wohl tweet, the tweets nevertheless conjure a world in which no American is really as anti-Trump as "they" want you to believe. The Big Lies that Donald Trump and other Republicans tell us -- that the 2020 vote was phony, that protesters in Minneapolis and elsewhere are in the streets only because George Soros and his son are paying them to protest -- get reinforced.

Hannah Arendt was thinking about societies in which the majority of the populace needed to be manipulated by lies. In America, GOP control of enough states to nearly win the Electoral College and Senate in every electoral cycle means that the Republican Party cares only about persuading its own voters. And those voters live in a fantasy world.