The Algorithmic Reich— MAGA’s War On Reality

The Banality of Disinformation— Trump Seems To Be Using Orwell As A Manual

The real news of the second Trump term is bad news— sometimes clearly enough so that even MAGAts could understand it’s bad. Example: Musk’s DOGE is firing scientists and some have moved to other countries to continue their research. That’s not just about brain drain— it’s about national decline. When a country systematically devalues science, when it replaces expertise with ideology, when it treats world-class researchers as disposable, it loses more than talent. It loses its edge. The best minds don’t wait around to be scapegoated or silenced— they leave. And when they go, they take innovation, future industries, and the keys to global leadership and future prosperity  with them. This is how empires fall— not just with wars or recessions, but with anti-intellectual rot. Countries that once led the world in discovery become dependent on others for the very technologies they used to pioneer. Whether it’s AI, climate science, biomedical research, or space exploration, the cost of purging science in favor of propaganda is civilizational decline. A second Trump term is almost happy to watch that decline… not because he personally hates science— though he clearly does— but because he empowers a movement that sees knowledge as a threat, and experts as enemies. The consequence isn't just political— it’s existential.

On the right of the political spectrum, this is too abstract for many to care. Besides, it’s something that will manifest in a future they’re not really interested in anyway. And expertise? For how many years have they been taught to distrust it?

A collapsing economy, on the other hand, even MAGAts understand when something threatens their pocketbooks Americans, reported CNN, are pessimistic about the economy, more so than at any time since 1952! “Consumer sentiment plunged 11% this month to a preliminary reading of 50.8, the University of Michigan said in its latest survey released today… lower than anything seen during the Great Recession. Trump’s volatile trade war, which threatens higher inflation, has significantly weighed on Americans’ moods these past few months. That malaise worsened leading up to Trump’s announcement last week of sweeping tariffs, according to the survey. ‘This decline was, like the last month’s, pervasive and unanimous across age, income, education, geographic region and political affiliation,’ Joanne Hsu, the survey’s director, said in a release.”

The Federal Reserve and Wall Street are watching closely how souring sentiment translates into consumer spending, which accounts for about 70% of the US economy, and whether Americans lose faith that inflation will return to normal in the coming years.

…If people do lose faith that inflation will ever get back to normal in the coming years, that would make it extremely difficult for the Fed’s monetary policy to fight inflation.

“History teaches that when higher inflation expectations become entrenched, the road back to price stability is longer, the labor market is weaker and the economic scars are deeper,” Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan said Thursday at an event in Dallas.

Inflation expectations these days may be more susceptible than usual to becoming “un-anchored,” since consumers just experienced a period of high inflation, leaving many Americans particularly sensitive to elevated prices.

So what can the Trump regime do to turn this threat around?

Anna Merlan reported this morning that YouTubes “are proliferating, claiming Trump-world figures bested their antagonists during micro-interactions: at restaurants, on the street, in little-known court cases, and on late-night talk shows. These videos often generate thousands of views and a flood of supportive comments— and they’re all completely fake.” Manufactured “good news,” a tool authoritarian states have always used— albeit not with AI tools. It’s called AI slop, “that runs through the internet, made to drive engagement— a torrent of low-quality, artificially-generated content that’s as clumsy as it is omnipresent. AI slop is especially prevalent on TikTok and Facebook, where it is often created by low-wage independent workers in developing countries using AI-generated content as a way to earn money while sitting near the bottom rung of a global economy.”

In the wake of Trump’s second election, essentially-anonymous channels have churned out dozens of videos telling heartwarming stories about players in Trump’s world. The YouTube videos tend to focus on small interactions, presenting invented narratives where a MAGA celebrity— often press secretary Karoline Leavitt or Barron Trump, in a surprising number of cases— face some challenge and come out victorious. The videos are published by accounts with names like Elite Stories and Mr. Robe Stories, the latter of which says it offers “touching stories, stories about understanding, empathy and human rights equality.” Several of the channels have ads in their videos, meaning that the videos are being monetized.

Most of the channels add a disclaimer either in their channel description or in the videos themselves that the stories are fake. Mr. Robe Stories’ videos, for instance, offers a disclaimer in its videos’ first frames that said stories are fake. The disclaimer itself appears to AI-generated, with the clumsy and repetitive wording that’s a hallmark of machine-generated content. It reads, in full, “All stories shared on this channel are purely fictional and created for entertainment purposes, but we want a planet where people have the right to equality before the law, a society that is increasingly fair, developed and civilized. Any similarities to real events, individuals or organizations are fictional or coincidental and unintentional. The stories are not intended to refer to any real-life events, people or entities, especially no political or religious references.” 

I located at least ten accounts specifically producing political AI slop focused on the Trump administration and family. While many of the accounts boast tens or even hundreds of thousands of subscribers, it’s difficult to tell how many of those followers are real humans. (Dozens of dodgy sites offer tools to buy YouTube subscribers, even though the practice violates the company’s terms of service.)

But plenty of these videos seem to be getting interaction from real people who seem to think the videos tell real stories, judging by the large volume of supportive and credulous comments, like “PAM WILL DEFEAT THAT JUDGE, GOD ALWAYS WINS!” And the videos can rack up a huge numbers of views in a very short period of time: the Elite Stories channel was created in October, and produced its first video in late November, but has already garnered more than 31 million views, according to the account’s info page. (Mother Jones contacted Elite Stories and several other accounts for comment, but did not receive any reply.)

Many of the accounts produce multiple videos a day. Similar content is replicated across the accounts— which could indicate the accounts are operated by the same person or people, or simply that what does well on one account is quickly copied. Whatever the explanation, highly specific themes are repeated often. Stories about cross necklaces, for instance, are especially popular: a video about a fictitious judge demanding that Attorney General Pam Bondi remove a cross necklace has generated 2.8 million views so far. (A substantially similar story on another account did less well, with only 109,000 views.) One about Karoline Leavitt being fined by a judge for wearing her cross necklace, before realizing she’s a “legal genius,” has been viewed some 89,000 times. 

Leavitt often wears an eye-catching cross necklace, and anyone searching for news about her jewelry will more than likely stumble across an AI-generated video. (Another common, albeit slightly less successful theme, is Barron Trump seeking to adopt a dog, sometimes accompanied by an AI-generated blonde girlfriend.)

YouTube does have a misinformation policy, which bans “misleading or deceptive content that poses a serious risk of egregious harm.” Under that metric, there’s no “egregious” harm in an unknowable number of people thinking that, say, Barron Trump got a golden retriever.

The content also continues to exist on the site at the same time YouTube is supporting the No Fakes Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation working its way through Congress, which is meant to, as one of the bill’s authors, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) put it in a press release, address the “rampant spread of unauthorized AI-generated deepfakes without stymieing innovation or censoring free speech.” In their own press release backing the bill, YouTube’s vice president for public policy said the company’s support of the legislation “reflects our commitment to shaping a future where AI is used responsibly.” 

In response to a request for comment, a YouTube spokesperson said it had deleted one of the pages, Elite Stories, “for violating our spam policy,” which “applies to all channels, regardless of whether their content is generated using AI tools.” The spokesperson added, “When a channel is terminated, it is against our Terms of Service to use another channel to circumvent that decision.”

Many of the video stories use an AI-generated narrator who speaks in a slow, professional cadence— like an actor reading an audiobook. They’re clearly meant to by turns enrage and soothe audiences, painting a picture of injustices that are, by the end of the video, made right.

These kinds of manipulative micro-narratives—clipped, edited, and re-contextualized to paint Trump and his allies as triumphant truth-tellers— are not just campaign tactics. They’re part of a broader authoritarian toolkit. Disinformation has always been central to regimes that seek to dismantle democratic norms. Hitler's propaganda machine, orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels, didn’t just promote lies— it obliterated the boundary between truth and falsehood, turning loyalty into the only acceptable reality. Stalin’s regime literally airbrushed political enemies out of photographs and rewrote history to render dissent both invisible and unimaginable. Franco imposed a rigid national-Catholic narrative that framed his dictatorship as salvation, using censorship and education to erase alternate histories.

In today’s digital landscape, authoritarianism doesn’t need jackboots and bonfires. It thrives in memes, algorithmic echo chambers, and deepfakes. Trump’s movement has weaponized this new information ecosystem with terrifying efficiency. As Anna Merlan recently reported, YouTube is flooded with AI-generated content that subtly rewrites reality— making Trump look stronger, smarter, and more “real” than his opponents in carefully curated micro-interactions. The result isn’t just disinformation; it’s disorientation.

Orwell warned that the ultimate aim of totalitarianism was to “extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.” In 1984, truth becomes a shifting concept dictated by power: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Hannah Arendt, writing about the rise of totalitarian regimes, emphasized how persistent lying corrodes the very conditions for politics itself: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

That is precisely the danger we face today. Trump’s authoritarian movement doesn’t just lie to the public— it seeks to annihilate our shared reality, to replace civic discourse with tribal spectacle, and to make belief a function of loyalty rather than fact. In doing so, it exploits economic pain and cultural confusion to further entrench its power, turning crisis into opportunity— not for national renewal, but for authoritarian revival. Videos like this— in this case about New Jersey MAGAt trying to present himself as an independent moderate force— can't be fought any other way than by discrediting the media... and by lying.