The Slopaganda Midterms
This election cycle is rife with “slopaganda” — that is, AI-generated “slop” used for political propaganda. In a fascinating recent piece in the Washington Post, TPM alum Matt Shuham noted that roughly 164 of these ads have appeared on TV or online, mostly in service of Republican candidates. As Matt points out, the ads are bizarre: “Political spinmeisters have used AI to dress candidates in superhero costumes, show a rifle-wielding Donald Trump in a foxhole, depict entire societies as Lego figurines, and also to put words in opponents’ mouths.”
I encountered one of these ads in the wild last month featuring a familiar face: Marshall Rawson, the subject of my first big investigation as a reporter here at TPM. Rawson is the GOP nominee for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives and, our investigation found, a pretty extreme guy — perhaps the most extreme candidate on the ballot this November. A quick refresher:
- Rawson was actively involved with a white supremacist group called League of the South that advocates for the southern states to secede from the U.S.
- He appeared at the infamous Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia back in 2017, and could be seen in a photo standing near James Alex Fields Jr., a neo-Nazi who drove his car into counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer
- He has condoned slavery and called for the execution of queer people
- A lot of his campaign donors were white supremacists.
He’s running for the state House seat in a deeply conservative part of north central Florida and is widely expected to win in the general election. Rawson hasn’t denied any of my reporting, or distanced himself from his white supremacist activism. I tried my best to find a Republican who would denounce him, but came up empty.
What I’ve seen instead over the past couple weeks is Rawson receiving public messages of support, including from his likely future colleagues in the Florida state House. Perhaps the most excitable support he’s received, however, has come from the University of Florida College Republicans. The group was only reinstated by the university last month, having been disbanded back in March following a photograph showing two of its members giving Nazi salutes.
One of its first orders of business after being reinstated? Producing this deeply bizarre piece of slopaganda: a video featuring an AI-generated Rawson walking through an adoring crowd of Red Hats in sunglasses and a trench coat; coasting along a Florida waterway in a fanboat; and standing in a field, clad in all white, his arms outstretched, Christ-like.
The video is set to the rap song “Already” by Kodak Black — a musical selection that upset at least one of Rawson’s biggest fans. Chandler Langevin is a city councilman in Palm Bay, Florida and the executive director of the American Restoration Coalition, which a Raw Story investigation earlier this week revealed as a “Republican group with white power ties openly plots infiltration of Florida government.” Langevin and his ARC cohorts knocked on doors for Rawson during his primary campaign.
“Video is great, music is awful. Play our music to it,” Langevin replied on X (emphasis mine), seeming to state that he didn’t like the use of a Black musician’s song. “An edit to Dixieland would go hard… Freebird goes hard in right wing edits too.”
“You right,” the UF College Republicans account replied.
Back in 2017, one week after I covered the “Unite The Right” rally, writer Alex Pareene penned a prescient blog in Jezebel titled “Charlottesville Was a Preview of the Future of the Republican Party.” His thesis — that the extremism of the “alt-right” would go mainstream, taking over the GOP — would become my own over the next nine years. Still, I feel like my head is spinning, staring at this little interaction on X, reflecting on just how radical the party has become. To attempt a summary:
The GOP nominated Rawson, an unrepentant white supremacist who marched in Charlottesville, for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives. A recently re-instated college Republican group, disbanded after its members gave Nazi salutes, posted an AI slop video on X — rebranded from Twitter by a trillionaire and GOP megadonor who gave two Nazi salutes during Trump’s inauguration — in support of Rawson. The video used a song by a Black man, which upset a local Republican activist, himself part of a GOP group with white nationalist ties that is trying to put more Rawson-like extremists into Florida government positions. Despite all of this, Rawson is all but assured to be a state legislator in Tallahassee next year.
I really did expect our politics to become this extreme. I’m just not sure I anticipated how bizarre it would be too.
Ignore Women’s Basketball at Your Own Peril!
With every new detail, Sen. Eric Schmitt’s (R-MO) mortifying attempt to make former Special Counsel Jack Smith perjure himself seems more and more bumbling.
As everyone with an internet connection knows by now, the junior senator from Missouri had whipped up a grand plan to prove that Smith was in Atlanta the day after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) admitted to having a relationship with one of her prosecutors amid the investigation into President Donald Trump’s election interference in Georgia. That’s it. That’s the big smoking gun he was looking for: that Smith and Willis were in the same giant city for one night as proof (?) that the two were colluding in trying to take Trump down.
But he couldn’t even muster that. When he revealed the explosive texts supposedly revealing that Smith had attended an Atlanta Hawks game (in Atlanta!! Where Willis is!!), Smith was befuddled. Eventually, he offered that he’d attended an Iowa Hawkeyes game against the hosting Maryland Terrapins (a game, notably, much closer to Washington D.C.) around that same date to see now-Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark in action.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, suggested that Schmitt had mixed up “Hawks” with “Hawkeyes,” explaining the error. That turned out to be too generous a guess.
The efforts of Schmitt and his staff to vet the texts — which reportedly did not include the names of the teams, but did include coordination over seat number and location — went only as far as googling which NBA games started at the time mentioned in the messages.
“Well, we had text messages from [Smith’s] team that he was at a basketball game, and the only game at 7:30 tip-off in the NBA was in Atlanta,” Schmitt told Politico, adding, “I didn’t know he was a Caitlin Clark fan. Now we know.”
Schmitt simply forgot that women’s sports exist. It didn’t occur to him that Smith might be more interested in watching Clark rain down 38 points on the Terps’ heads amid her team’s run to the title game than to witness the dazzling spectacle of the 36-46, playoff-missing, 2024 Atlanta Hawks.
Let this be a reminder to Republicans: Everyone watches women’s sports.
That’s the Stuff
How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?
- Name two states where the Senate seats look increasingly out of reach for Republicans, causing the party to pull back on funding and ad buys.
- This vulnerable Republican announced he’d break with Donald Trump on key issues, criticizing the admin’s withholding of infrastructure funds for blue states like his.
- Which two basketball teams did Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt (MO) confuse while spectacularly failing to frame former special counsel Jack Smith with perjury?
Answers below
Tell Us How You Really Feel
“If you’re evil you are at least competent. If you’re evil, you’re not bad. You’re actually maybe kind of good. You’re at least getting something done.” – Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel
Ken Paxton Got Ridiculed for Nothing
The blows just keep coming for Texas Senate nominee Ken Paxton. In new audio leaked to the New York Times, the state’s Republican attorney general admitted that President Trump’s weird September midterms convention in Dallas actually hurt his campaign. “When we did that convention — it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped,” Paxton said at a private event with conservative lobbyists and donors. It is perhaps a bit rich for Paxton to be pointing fingers at Trump, since he’s done a great job at making voters dislike him all on his own. The guy was already unpopular in Texas, where state lawmakers from his own party voted to impeach him over allegations of bribery and unfitness for office. While he survived that effort, the stink of corruption didn’t go away; a focus group of Texas swing voters recently used the words “crook,” “crooked,” “amoral” and “disgusting” to describe him to the New York Times. Paxton only won the primary because of a last-minute endorsement from Trump, and has been languishing in the polls against Democrat James Talarico. The president has lately taken to kicking the AG while he’s down, mocking him at the Dallas convention as not “the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen” and following up with these recent remarks at the White House: “Ken Paxton, you might not like the way he dresses. And I say this — it’s so insulting to him, but I might as well say it — you might not like the way he looks. You might not love his look. You might not love his television interviews, but he was the best attorney general in the country.” Hope it’s all been worth it, Ken!
Sure, Sounds Chill
The Trump administration has spent months trying to put its thumb on the scale in the midterms, from igniting a nationwide redistricting war to trying to seize detailed voter records from the states. Admin officials have also repeatedly threatened to post federal troops at polling places just, you know, in case. All of this flies in the face of plain constitutional language mandating that the states have primary oversight over election administration.
Mike Collins, the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia, totally gets that. He is, he said this week, “a firm believer in local elections are state and local level.” He’s such a believer in local elections, in fact, that he thinks it would be “fine” to have federal troops at polling places in order to ensure that people “have confidence in their elections.” Got it!
The Influencer Grifters Working Hand in Glove With Trump + Co.
Josh Kovensky joined the excellent Posting Through It podcast to talk through some of the “content creators for the authoritarian state.” We’re talking Nick Shirley, Tyler Oliveira, Savanah Hernandez, Nick Sortor and some of the other online influencers who push out propaganda for the Trump administration, particularly on immigration. (Some have even embedded with ICE on ride-alongs and toured detention facilities).
“You can see them giving and taking. You can see the symbiosis, right?” Josh says. “[They’re] with administration officials telling them what they think is happening and the officials are responding in real time, responding with what they’re going to do in terms of federal policy.”
Department of False Equivalencies
This summer’s wave of progressive primary victories was met with a flood of articles fretting over whether Democrats were seeing the rise of a “Tea Party of the left.” University of Pittsburgh associate professor Paul Elliott Johnson explained why those comparisons don’t hold up to scrutiny.
Tea Partiers were motivated by an anti-systemic energy that had deeper roots than the current ire of Democratic voters, and the demographics of the GOP meant the party ultimately embraced a “burn it down” approach to governance. The insurgent left within the Democratic coalition remains focused on conventional liberal issues like human rights, affordability, and taxing the wealthy.
Trivia answers: 1) North Carolina, Georgia 2) Rep. Tom Kean (R-NJ) 3) The Atlanta Hawks and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes
Morning!
The Hawks/Hawkeyes conflation is yet still stupider than even that. Hawks start time was 7:30. The Maryland tipoff was at 8:00.
My best guess is that the whole thing was the text messages getting fed into Grok and then prompted with something like “What is the evidence that Jack Smith did the collusion with Fanni Willis to frame trump?”
So, our next major cult will obviously be started by an AI.
And, I presume it will feature “liquid death” because it supposedly tastes good.
But its all good, drugs fail to kill woman. (I know so much of the news by only skimming only the headlines!)
No so out there. It was reported last week (Time interview) that Trump consults GROK on policy.
Or may be not: