The Deepfakes Are Coming From Inside Your Head
It’s getting real. And it’s getting real stupid
Donald Trump was shot at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday. One heroic attendee, Corey Comperatore, a firefighter and father of two daughters, was killed by a stray bullet while shielding his family. Two other attendees were critically wounded. A bit too late, the shooter was taken out by a Secret Service sniper. Those are the facts—if you still believe in “facts.”
The reality is that millions act as if there is no objective reality. Sure, in a media environment saturated by lies and obfuscation, there are plenty of critical questions to ask. For instance, many people want to know how the shooter was able to get into position at all. Good question! Everyone’s heads should spin on that one—and some heads should roll.
But a rapidly growing swarm of internet-brained skeptics are primed for the James Shelby Downward spiral. Indeed, less than 33 hours after the incident, the rabbit holes had already devolved into a whack-a-doodle maze of stage magic, splattered ketchup, crisis actors, and AI deepfakes.
Before we fall into that downward spiral, though, let’s return to plain ol’ consensus reality for a moment.
Typical of an America where ships smash into bridges and plane windows blow out midair, Trump’s “elite” Secret Service failed to secure a glass factory on the outskirts of the event. Apparently, there were no surveillance drones available that day—but there was no shortage of SS diversity hires. While a small crowd pointed and screamed, a big-chinned, congenitally deformed 20 year-old gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, climbed onto the factory’s roof with a rifle.
For whatever reason, the Secret Service and local police failed to respond in time. Considering that a few months ago, House Democrats introduced a bill to strip Trump of SS protection entirely, it’s a wonder they were there at all.
As Trump pointed to a graph showing our country inundated by illegal immigrants, the bungling would-be assassin popped off multiple shots. One bullet nicked Trump’s ear. Others struck innocent bystanders. After a moment of confusion, the bloodied President emerged with a triumphant fist in the air, yelling, “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!” To the chagrin of spiteful liberals and establishment Republicans alike, one thrilling photo stoked public admiration for a leader with balls of steel. That single image may win him the presidency again.
But for those who took the generic “red pill,” one important question remains—what if this historic assassination attempt was fake? Maybe the named shooter wasn’t the actual shooter. Maybe there were multiple gunmen. Maybe Trump staged it himself. Maybe it’s all AI-generated.
Maybe the computer has melted your brain.
Some cynics were fairly subtle. Just after the shooting, the psy op-obsessed Whitney Webb tweeted (or eXcreted): “Sometimes the people who think they are the most ‘awake’ are the most psyopable.” This is true, of course. But that principle cuts both ways. In a violent world, the most dangerous psy op is to suggest everything is fake—bullets and all.
The subversive cartoonist Bob Moran, who brilliantly lampooned the Covid regime, never got over Trump’s persistent endorsement of Operation Warp Speed and the vaxx it created. “‘The shots are safe,’” Bob eXcreted that night, mocking Trump. “‘I received several, and all I got was a sore ear.’”
Okay, fair enough. As I browsed the comments, though, a strange picture emerged. “Make ketchup great again,” one guy said, in an apparent reference to fake blood. “BB gun,” another stated flatly. One commenter insisted, “It was a staged shooting, Bob.”
By this morning, Bob was all in. “I’m surprised there was such a tiny amount of blood, and that it stopped flowing almost instantly,” he considered. “Unlike a lot of people who spent the last four years repeating the mantra, ‘Question Everything,’ I’m not suddenly stopping now.”
If you’re going to “Question Everything,” don’t forget to question your own sanity.
To be fair, the media has lied consistently my entire life—creating a yawning vacuum where precise analysis should be—so I try to sympathize with those who fill that vacuum with paranoid fantasies. But it’s hard not to be annoyed by them. Especially when their childish ideas go viral.
Out in Leftyville, there’s an emerging “false flag” narrative. For example, a former Marine turned obnoxious turbo-lib—who calls himself Roger ZenAF—has jumped on that bandwagon. Thinking himself clever, he compared Saturday’s assassination attempt to the 1933 Reichstag fire. “The Nazis blamed it on the Communists and used it to enable Adolf Hitler to seize power,” Roger eXcreted. “It was a political setup to demonize the opponent.”
Such ideas spread so quickly, even the perennially masked lizard woman, Taylor Lorenz, was forced to call out her fellow liberals who began “flooding social media platforms with conspiracy theories.” These people are sure the blood on Trump’s ear was a “theatrical gel pack” and that the entire spectacle was “#staged.”
“The shooting threw into overdrive a phenomenon dubbed ‘Blue Anon,’” Lorenz wrote at WaPo, “a play on the right-wing conspiracy theory QAnon.”
Further down the rabbit hole, we find former Trump-adviser and rabid Bannon-hater Roger Stone attesting, “Credible sources insist that the shooter in the Trump attempted assassination is in fact Maxwell Yearick”—a violent Antifa activist. Across this delusional sphere, you’ll find Yearick’s photo posted side-by-side with pics of the deceased shooter and old photos of Thomas Matthew Crooks, whose ear is conveniently blurred out. That’s probably because a cursory glance at Crooks’s weird, knotted earlobe reveals an exact match with the shooter’s corpse.
And on it goes, down the spiral, with bizarre memes tailored to drag people farther and farther from objectivity. This guy “exposes” the shooting as stage magic. That guy claims it’s all a deepfake—and he uses a cheap AI detector to prove it.
These notions overlap with the laughable, yet increasingly widespread belief that Joe Biden’s public appearances are just masked decoys or AI-generated deepfakes. Internet sleuths point to Biden’s newly elongated earlobes and scrotal chin as evidence of a decoy—ignoring the fact that facelifts stretch your earlobes and chin fillers collapse, as do natural chins with age. They reference videos of a wide-eyed Biden as proof of deepfakes, apparently unaware that a common symptom of Parkinson’s disease and other neuro-degenerative conditions is a lack of blinking.
And on down the spiral we go.
X marks the spot.
The amazing thing about social media is how vast troves of valuable information get collapsed into the dumbest takes imaginable. One of these guys should write a book: From Alchemy to Idiocy, or How I Exposed the Master Plan Using Only My Smartphone.
Digital delusions are a luxury of our internet age. For now, the legitimate threat of deepfakes leaves many with the nagging suspicion that everything they see onscreen is AI-generated, or at least, that everything they’d rather not believe is phony. Once actual photorealistic deepfakes begin to proliferate—and due to recent advances in AI, there’s every reason to think they will—this mental collapse will only accelerate.
Instead of focusing on why our Secret Service didn’t secure that nearby glass factory, or asking how the shooter knew it would be unguarded, many Trump-hating skeptics are questioning the reality of the shooting itself. They never seem to wonder if the psy ops are coming from inside the house. This is a symptom of a worsening mass psychological disorder. For now, it mostly afflicts the paranoid fringe. But their numbers grow by the day.
When everything is fake, any hyper-“awake” dolt has the freedom to imagine reality as he or she desires—even when real bullets are flying. If you say it is, then it’s true. Until the bullets start flying at you.
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"the psy op-obsessed Whitney Webb tweeted (or eXcreted)" and "the perennially masked lizard woman, Taylor Lorenz," Hilarious Mr. Allen.
Excellent perspective piece and so timely. Glad you're on it, Joe!