Whenever someone has stood for honesty and just change on the basis of fact, inevitably someone will come along to oppose them on the grounds that something is lacking in their innate qualities as a person rather than the rightful cause they stand for.
Rachel Carson, a conservationist who advocated for banning lethal chemicals such as DDT, forced chemical companies to spend more than $250,000 on a smear campaign against her during the 1960s.
Caroline Cook
The current smear campaign against James Talarico, Democratic candidate for Senate from Texas, is costing many times that amount.
The campaign includes quotes taken out of context and creating AI deepfakes.
While Talarico’s Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, and his allies are part of the campaign, others are launching attack ads without endorsing another candidate.
Two of the most prominent ads have been sponsored by Lone Star Liberty PAC and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The aim of these ads is not to promote people to vote, but rather to convince moderates and Republicans not to vote for Talarico.
The ad by Lone Star Liberty PAC begins with a video clip of Donald Trump calling Talarico a “weird” candidate for the Senate. The ad then takes Talarico’s quotes from videos of him campaigning and doing interviews entirely out of context in an attempt to paint him in what Republicans believe will be the most unflattering way possible. The video ends by calling the Democratic senate nominee “low-T Talarico.”
The AI-generated video by the NRSC takes it a step further. In this ad, the fake of Talarico does a “dramatic reading” of several of the real Talarico’s old tweets, commenting on how tweets about radicalized white men, trans acceptance, and Talarico’s Christian beliefs were “so true” or that he “loved this one” in regard to a particular tweet. If not for the writing in the top left corner of the video, it would be very difficult to immediately tell that the video was made with AI.
Screeencap of NRSC ad against James Talarico
The use of AI against Talarico should come as no surprise due to the extensive funding AI companies have sent toward Republican nominees such as Paxton, in the hopes of preventing Talarico’s campaign for regulating AI. Yet it is disconcerting to think that Republicans and their political supporters are willing to distort the real messages Talarico is trying to get across to voters.
The tweets themselves are as real as the video clips from the first ad, but both are taken out of context to cherry-pick and oversimplify what Talarico stands for. By putting the focus on what Republican supporters believe to be his most radical and outlandish beliefs, they paint him as an extremist.
Although there is no specific endorsement for another political opponent in either of these videos, the funding put into these ads comes from organizations that have directed money to Paxton and current U.S. Sen. John Cornyn.
In a fair race, candidates should be evaluated on what they actually believe. Yet this year, we’re left wondering how far Paxton and his supporters are willing to distort the truth to make Talarico appear to be something he is not.
Caroline Cook served this summer as a BNG Clemons Fellow. She is a student at Baylor University.
Related:
Paxton dodges ethics questions while claiming Talarico isn’t Christian
Is James Talarico an Orc? | Analysis by Alan Bean
Why are evangelicals freaking out over James Talarico? | Analysis by Rick Pidcock
Talarico: ‘If you are neutral, you are taking the side of the powerful’
Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Rep. James Talarico | Opinion by Greg Garrett
Fact checking three things James Talarico said | Opinion by Brent Barry