In addition to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem reposting AI-doctored footage that falsely portrayed black teens threatening ICE, her agency has been justifying its escalating attacks on Democratic cities by posting a flood of false and misleading videos, systematically lying to the American people.
Some of this has already been reported by the Daily Beast and by AFP, but the most comprehensive analysis is from The Washington Post:
Some videos that purported to show the fiery chaos of Trump-targeted cities included footage from completely different states. One that claimed to show dramatic examples of past administrations’ failures instead featured border crossings and smuggling boats recorded during Trump’s first term. …
The administration’s intense digital strategy has helped grab Americans’ attention and shape discussion around current events, with some of its videos now capturing bigger audiences on social media than mainstream news reports. A White House video claiming Chicago was “in chaos,” which used footage from other states, has been viewed more than 1.4 million times across Instagram, TikTok and X. …
The freelance journalist Ford Fischer was scrolling through X earlier this month when he saw a DHS video overlaid with a message saying “antifa terrorists” had stormed federal facilities in Portland, Oregon. But he recognized the footage because he’d captured it himself days earlier, outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois.
The video, which The Post verified, had been cropped to remove Fischer’s watermark. And it seemed to bolster Trump’s claim that the Oregon city was overwhelmed by violent leftists who were “burning [it] to the ground.”
But Fischer had recorded the footage 1,700 miles away, at a prominent protest zone outside Chicago, where federal agents routinely scuffle with protesters seeking to block an ICE facility’s gate.
Politicians have always lied. What is different about this is the use of the official organs of government to flood the country with false claims and propaganda, deliberately undermining the public’s ability to make informed decisions.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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