The Obliteration of Truth

The paradox of AI.

Yes, it’s AI.

I hope you had a lovely weekend. Mine? Thanks for asking. On Saturday, I puppy-sat for a friend, which explains the new dog pictures you’ll find below all of the political/dystopian stuff today.

Happy Tuesday. There are 41 days until Election Day.

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Trump’s imaginary world

In case you missed it, check out Ashley Parker’s baller piece in the Wapo:

In Donald Trump’s imaginary world, Americans can’t venture out to buy a loaf of bread without getting shot, mugged or raped. Immigrants in a small Ohio town eat their neighbors’ cats and dogs. World War III and economic collapse are just around the corner. And kids head off to school only to return at day’s end having undergone gender reassignment surgery…

The former president’s imaginary world is a dark, dystopian place, described by Trump in his rallies, interviews, social media posts and debate appearances…

It is a distorted, warped and, at times, absurdist portrait of a nation where the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to deadly effect were merely peaceful protesters, and where unlucky boaters are faced with the unappealing choice between electrocution or a shark attack. His extreme caricatures also serve as another way for Trump to traffic in lies and misinformation, using an alternate reality of his own making to create an often terrifying — and, he seems to hope — politically devastating landscape for his political opponents.

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As Parker notes, the Trump strategy — which has been eagerly embraced by Trump’s Parseltongued running mate — is increasingly divorced from reality, and shamelessly so. The Guardian’s David Smith describes the Trump-Vance strategy as “say anything, make up anything’’. The racist lie about cat-eating immigrants was merely the latest example. I talked with him about that.

Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “What JD Vance is saying is that the facts don’t matter and that I am completely unashamed to have peddled a false story.

“It underlines the degree to which Trump and Vance and the Maga movement are addicted to these fake online internet memes and unshakeable in their attachment to them. Even when they are refuted, they stick with them, which is a dangerous thing because it means that no matter how much evidence you can provide, no matter how dangerous the lies turn out to be, they’re not going to back off.”

Sykes warned: “They’re going to keep pushing. Extrapolate this to what’s going to happen in November and the election results. Extrapolate it to anything.”…

And then there is Trump’s ongoing penchant for the batshit crazy bigots, like Laura Loomer.

Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, regards Loomer as a symptom rather than a cause. “Run through a list of all the conspiracy theories that Donald Trump has embraced or pushed and it’s lengthy,” he said. “It’s not as if Laura Loomer is making Donald Trump into a conspiracist. Donald Trump has been one for years. He’s now finding people who will stroke and validate his darker impulses.”

The Paradox of AI

Mark Robinson is blaming Artificial Intelligence for the lurid revelations about his adventures in pornography.

Robinson says that the reports that he called himself a “Black Nazi”, who enjoyed watching kinky sex (with his wife’s sister) and reading Mein Kampf, were all a malicious deep fake.

For the moment, let’s aside our tumescent schadenfreude and think about the implications of all of this.

In Monday’s Atlantic Daily, I wrote about the Catch-22 of Artificial Intelligence: It can make fake stories believable; but its existence can make even true stories seem unbelievable — because why should we believe the evidence of our eyes, when we can’t tell whether something is real or fake?

If the last eight years introduced us to a post-fact/post truth world, 2024 may be showing us what the obliteration of facts looks like.

If facts matter at all.

As Robinson’s sordid tale reminds us that much of the Trumpified GOP electorate (1) either doesn’t believe the allegations because they no longer believe anything the media reports, or (2) doesn’t care whether they are true because nothing matters.

From yesterday’s newsletter:

“Look, I’m not going to get into the minutiae about how somebody manufactured these salacious tabloid lies,” Robinson told CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, who broke the original story. “But I can tell you this: There’s been over $1 million spent on me through AI by a billionaire’s son who’s bound and determined to destroy me. The things that people can do with the internet now is incredible,” Robinson insisted. “But what I can tell you is this: Again, these are not my words.”

Robinson’s claims of fakery—AI or otherwise—are extremely unlikely. As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes, the CNN report linking Robinson to the porn site known as “Nude Africa” was “robust,” exposing “a digital trail that would be all but impossible to create artificially.” And not everyone in the GOP is buying Robinson’s excuse. Much of his senior staff has resigned, and the Trump campaign is reportedly distancing itself from Robinson, although Donald Trump’s endorsement of Robinson still stands.

But the existence of AI aids Robinson in his shoddy defense: Not only can the technology make fake stories believable, but its existence helps those who want to make true stories seem unbelievable.

In this election, invoking AI is yet another tool for some Americans to alter facts so that they align with their desired reality.

Trump, for example, falsely accused Kamala Harris of using AI to generate an image showing a large crowd at a rally. (Meanwhile, he himself has spread illusions online: He recently reposted a doctored photo of Harris with the accused sex offender Sean “Diddy” Combs—whose face is actually superimposed on the body of Montel Williams; Trump also shared a fake endorsement from Taylor Swift last month.) To be sure, many fake images of politicians—including Donald Trump—proliferate online, some of which use AI, but because this technology sows doubt about reality, it can also provide a convenient dodge for politicians confronted by uncomfortable facts….

But obviously, the problems are not merely in our technology. Many Trumpified voters simply don’t care whether or not the reports of Robinson’s bigotry and depravity are true or not:

At a Trump rally in North Carolina over the weekend, The New York Times found that while few in attendance believed the story—many blamed the untrustworthiness of the media, according to the Times—some would support Robinson even if the reports of his racist, anti-Semitic, transphobic, and obscene posts were real. “Bryan Faulcon, 39, of Wilmington, said he didn’t believe the allegations,” the Times reported, “but even if they were true, Mr. Robinson still had his vote. The calculation was simple, Mr. Faulcon said: policy over character.”

Indeed, if these allegations mattered to voters, they would not have nominated Robinson in the first place, would they? This is, after all, someone who called the Holocaust “a bunch of hogwash,” referred to transgenderism and homosexuality as “filth,” and suggested this summer that “some folks need killing.” North Carolina’s GOP voters had ample evidence of who he was, and they chose him anyway.

And now Republicans are stuck with him — with all of his weirdness, perversity, antisemitism, and lies. In 2024, it speaks volumes that so many don’t seem to care.

You can read the whole thing here.

Dog Buddies

Fern’s a rescue dog who is cautious around strangers. But she warmed up this weekend and let me feed her treats.

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Leo on his perch.

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Fern and Leo. Fashion plates.

All the Worst People: Update

Funny, he doesn’t look Haitian.

Via the Guardian:” Project 2025 mastermind allegedly told colleagues he killed a dog with a shovel.”

The man behind Project 2025, the rightwing policy manifesto that includes calls for a sharp increase in immigrant deportations if Donald Trump is elected, told university colleagues about two decades ago that he had killed a neighborhood dog with a shovel because it was barking and disturbing his family, according to former colleagues who spoke to the Guardian.

Nota Bene

Charlie Warzel: You Should Read Trump’s Wild Truth Social Posts - The Atlantic.

Last Friday, I received an email with a link to a website created by a Washington, D.C.–based web developer named Chris Herbert. The site, Trump’s Truth, is a searchable database collecting all of Trump’s Truth Social posts, even those that have been deleted. Herbert has also helpfully transcribed every speech and video Trump has posted on the platform, in part so that they can be indexed more easily by search engines such as Google. Thus, Trump’s ravings are more visible.

Read: The MAGA aesthetic is AI slop

Like many reporters, I’d been aware that the former president’s social-media posts had, like his rally speeches, grown progressively angrier, more erratic, and more bizarre in recent years. Having consumed enough Trump rhetoric over the past decade to melt my frontal cortex, I’ve grown accustomed to his addled style of communication. And yet, I still wasn’t adequately prepared for the immersive experience of scrolling through hundreds of his Truths and ReTruths.

Even for Trump, this feed manages to shock. In the span of just a few days, you can witness the former president sharing flagrantly racist memes about Middle Easterners invading America, falsely edited videos showing Harris urging migrants to cross the border, an all-caps screed about how much better off women would be under his presidency, a diatribe about Oprah’s recent interview with Harris. It’s a lot to take in at once: Trump calling an MSNBC anchor a “bimbo,” a declaration of hatred for Taylor Swift, a claim that he “saved Flavored Vaping in 2019.”

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Dan Pfeiffer, in his newsletter, Message Box:

Riding the pollercoaster is an exercise in insanity. A few things to keep in mind (I like to reiterate these reminders every month or so): first, polling is an inexact science. There is a margin for error. A poll that shows Harris up two and one that shows her down two are essentially the same.

Second — and I can’t emphasize this enough — polling is not supposed to predict the future. It tells us our present. Let’s say the NYT poll is right. Harris is down two in North Carolina now, but has more than a month to make up that gap. Finally, it is totally okay to ignore all of the polls, but if you must look,  focus on the averages. They smooth out the statistical variance inherent in individual polls.

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Joe Perticone: Top Nebraska Republican: Trump-Led Push To Change Electoral College Vote Is Dead

NEBRASKA’S SENIOR SENATOR said on Monday that efforts led by Donald Trump to change the state’s Electoral College vote allocation system to benefit his presidential campaign were dead. 

Sen. Deb Fischer told The Bulwark and one other reporter that the votes were not there in the statehouse to make Nebraska a winner-take-all state this cycle. 

“It’s over,” said Fischer.

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Rick Wilson:

I may have a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of American politics, but with 7000+ elected officials in the country, no one knows them all by name.  Until a few days ago, I had never heard of state Senator Mike McDonnell of Nebraska.

There aren’t many elected Republican heroes left still inside the party. Yesterday,  we saw one in action when McDonnell stood in front of the MAGA freight train of corrupt politics and their ongoing attempt to steal the 2024 election and said, “Stop.”

Evil as usual would have been easy. McDonnell could’ve simply agreed to allowing the special session of Nebraska’s legislature to help Trump’s Electoral College prospects and he likely would’ve never entered anyone’s radar.

Finally

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