In a display of blatant hypocrisy, the Democratic National Committee’s rapid response account, FactPostNews, which was slapped together back in January to “combat misinformation,” was busted on Wednesday promoting a fake audio clip that allegedly showed Donald Trump Jr. giving support to the idea of turning on Ukraine and arming Russia.
You know, if you’re going to fight against misinformation, you probably shouldn’t be creating your own. Kind of makes it difficult to take you seriously, know what I mean?
“The audio in question, which was amplified by the official X account of the DNC, along with countless other major anti-Trump accounts, is 100% fake,” a spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. went on to tell ABC News. “It appears to be an AI-generated deepfake.”
“Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-founder of GetReal Labs who is an expert on digital forensics and synthetic media, appeared to agree, suggesting that the audio viewed millions of times and shared at least 6,600 times on X was most likely generated by artificial intelligence,” Blaze Media reported.
If you listen to the fake clip shared by FactPostNews along with thousands of other accounts on social media, a voice created to sound like Trump Jr. says, “I honestly can’t imagine anyone in their right mind picking Ukraine as an ally when Russia is the other option.”
“I mean, just think about it: Massive nuclear power loaded with natural resources everyone needs, literally the biggest country on the planet. And ha ha, there’s Ukraine, which has Chernobyl and some radiation-proof dogs,” the voice says. “Meanwhile, the Biden administration is like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is definitely the ally we need. Let’s dump all our money into them.’ Honestly, if anything, the U.S. should have been sending weapons to Russia.”
Mediaite reported that there were immediately suspicions about the authenticity of the audio, especially since the clip was presented as an excerpt from the Feb. 25 episode of Don Jr.’s podcast, “Triggered with Donald Trump Jr.,” on Spotify, even though the episode still had not been uploaded to the platform as of Thursday morning. In the full Feb. 25 episode that aired on Rumble, the remarks were nowhere to be found.
Andrew Surabian, a Republican strategist and spokesman for Donald Trump Jr., tweeted, “This is 100% fake AI generated audio, but I’m sure that won’t stop anti-Trump resistance accounts from continuing to dishonestly spread it.” Citing a policy against “misinformation,” a spokesman for the DNC told ABC News that the post was removed as soon as it was learned that the audio spread online was fake.
When Democrats launched FactPostNews, DNC chief mobilization officer Shelby Cole said in a statement, “The Republican disinformation machine is powerful, but we believe a stronger weapon is giving people the facts about how Trump and his administration are screwing over the American people.”
Now the adult thing to do in a situation like this would be to issue an apology to someone you just slandered — or is it libel since it was part of a post on X? — but as we all know, leftists are perpetual bratty children, so no such thing occurred.
Imagine the kind of reaction the left would have had if a Republican account with massive reach published a deep fake audio of former President Joe Biden. Hypocrisy through and through.