Biden’s Ex-Comms Chief Admits Dems Are Lying about Recent Trump Comments

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Biden’s Ex-Comms Chief Admits Dems Are Lying about Recent Trump Comments

(Headline USA) Kate Bedingfield, the former White House communications director for President Joe Biden, admitted this weekend that Democrats were misrepresenting recent comments by former President Donald Trump about the upcoming election.

Trump spoke at the Turning Point USA-sponsored Believers Summit in Florida on Friday, where he encouraged his supporters to “get out and vote, just this time.”

After November, “You won’t have to do it anymore … In four years, you don’t have to vote again,” he added. “We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

Democrats immediately pounced on Trump’s comments to claim the former president would “end democracy,” with Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., calling Trump an “authoritarian” who would make sure Americans “never have the chance to vote again.”

However, even Bedingfield argued this was an uncharitable interpretation.

“I realize this will earn me the ire of many Dems, but … I don’t think that here he’s saying there will be no more elections,” Bedingfield wrote on X.

“I think he is saying I won’t be on the ticket either way, so who cares,” she added. “Which is hideously damning in its own right, cause this is what the Republican Party has turned itself inside out and shredded its credibility for — to become a stan account for this one awful, narcissistic guy.”

In a follow up post, Bedingfield insisted that she was “in no way minimizing” the “threats that Trump poses” to democracy. 

“I’m just saying that right here what he is telling us is WHY he doesn’t care about this country—cause he only cares about him,” she claimed.

After continuing to receive backlash from the Left, though, Bedingfield tried to walk back her earlier statement.

“I’m neither defending him nor giving him the benefit of the doubt—I called him an awful, narcissistic man who is a threat to democracy in my tweets,” she wrote.

“But we win this thing in part by persuading people who aren’t yet persuaded,” she added. “And telling them why he’s a threat—bc he only cares about himself—is more persuasive than just saying he’s a threat,” she said.

The former Biden staffer came under fire earlier this month for stoking inflammatory rhetoric about Trump just days after the former president narrowly avoided an assassination attempt.

Trump Promises to Establish Federal Cryptocurrency Reserve

Dmytro "Henry" Aleksandrov
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Trump Promises to Establish Federal Cryptocurrency Reserve

(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) On July 27, 2024, Donald Trump said at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville that the United States must dominate the cryptocurrency sector, promising to make the country the world’s cryptocurrency leader.

Trending Politics reported that he also said he would embrace friendlier regulations, which Kamala Harris would never support.

“If we don’t embrace crypto and bitcoin technology, China will. Other countries will. They’ll dominate, and we cannot let China dominate. They are making too much progress as it is,” he said.

The news source added that Trump vowed to create an established presidential advisory council and create a national “stockpile” of bitcoin, which would be done using cryptocurrency already held by the American government after being seized through various law enforcement operations.

“Never sell your bitcoin. If I am elected, it will be the policy of my administration, the United States of America, to keep 100% of all the bitcoin the U.S. government currently holds or acquires into the future,” he said.

Trump also called for increased involvement in Bitcoin mining by U.S. firms.

“This afternoon, I’m laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world, and we’ll get it done,” he said.

Throughout his speech, Trump also constantly highlighted the contrast between his own policies and those of the Biden administration.

“The Biden-Harris administration’s repression of crypto and bitcoin is wrong, and it’s very bad for our country. Let me tell you, if they win this election, every one of you will be gone. They will be vicious. They will be ruthless. They will do things that you wouldn’t believe,” he said.

Additionally, Trump said that he is committed to commuting the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, who is serving a life sentence for creating the black market site Silk Road, saying that his time served was “enough.”

Radical Islamic Cleric Plans to Buy Scottish Island, Practice Sharia Law

Dmytro "Henry" Aleksandrov
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Radical Islamic Cleric Plans to Buy Scottish Island, Practice Sharia Law

(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) A Muslim cleric who has been accused of spreading hate and potential Islamic dominance has raised more than £3 million to buy a small island in the United Kingdom and turn it into his own Islamic country.

The Daily Mail reported that a 45-year-old Sheikh Yasser al-Habib, who claimed asylum in the United Kingdom 20 years ago after fleeing his native Kuwait, and his followers are in advanced talks to buy the remote isle of Torsa, off the west coast of Scotland.

The Islamic extremist, who already runs military-style training camps, said that he hopes that his organization would build its own school, hospital and mosque on the island to practice only Sharia law and abandon the laws of the United Kingdom.

In a video obtained by the Mail, he encouraged his supporters to donate towards their £3.5 million target so that the complacent government would give away the territory to the terrorists who currently live inside the country and allow the new terrorists to come “from all over the world” to be given a visa to “their new homeland.”

As expected, the residents of the neighboring island of Luing didn’t like this idea.

Al-Habib said the “new homeland” would be called the Mahdi [Messiah] Servants Union (MSU), adding that the island is an “irreplaceable opportunity.”

“If you want to live free under the banner of the imam [Shia leader], in a special homeland where you feel everything in it reminds you of the awaited Mahdi, everything is the Shia homeland… support this project,” he said.

Sarah Zaaimi, a deputy director for communications at the American think tank Atlantic Council, also expressed her concerns regarding the recent news.

“They will have their own army, their own justice system, they will manage their own schools and hospitals and people from around the world will be able to migrate to this homeland. It does challenge the notion of sovereignty. It’s puzzling to me how the U.K. authorities are allowing such a discourse. You are fundraising for the creation of a sovereign country on the margins of another country,” she said.

Google, Facebook Pulling Laptop-Style Cover-Up on Trump Assassination Attempt

Elias Irizarry
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Google, Facebook Pulling Laptop-Style Cover-Up on Trump Assassination Attempt

(Elias Irizarry, Headline USA) In the latest Big Tech election scheme, Google and Meta were accused of censoring information about the July 13 assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump—and possibly even implementing a total search ban on Trump’s name.

Users on X sounded the alarm over the weekend after they noticed that search results on Google for the assassination attempt failed to automatically appear when typed in, instead suggesting a search for an assassination attempt on former President Harry Truman.

Several Republican lawmakers—including Sens. Roger Marshall of Kansas and Mike Lee of Utah—called for investigations into the matter.

“Has there been a dramatic increase in Truman biographers in the last two weeks?” asked Marshall before announcing a formal inquiry.

In a statement, Google denied taking any manual action to censor the search result, claiming, “Our systems have protections against Autocomplete predictions associated with political violence, which were working as intended before this horrific event occurring.”

However, Google was not the only company to be accused of censoring Trump’s assassination attempt.

Meta’s artificial intelligence software and the Microsoft-linked ChatGPT both refused to admit that the assassination attempt ever happened, labeling it as fictional.

Moreover, an iconic photograph by Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci of Trump raising his fist amid the chaos was reportedly being labeled as “misinformation” by Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram.

The AP claimed that the photo being censored was not the original photo but a modified version that showed the Secret Service agents smiling.

A photo posted to Facebook by Headline USA on Monday evening did not appear to be censored, nor did the original photos on Vucci’s Instagram account.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Evan Vucci (@evanvucci)

Nonetheless, the reports of the censorship attempts follow a recent Axios story revealing that media editors had openly discussed efforts to suppress the photos because of the benefit they would likely have serving as “photogranda” for Trump’s campaign.

The stunning censorship campaign by Big Tech emerged only a week after Democrats staged a coup to replace President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris on their 2024 presidential ticket, while otherwise facing certain electoral defeat.

It hearkened back for many conservatives to the companies’ election-meddling in 2020 to suppress legitimate information on stories such as the Hunter Biden laptop.

Yet, the woke tech companies are likely to be emboldened following last month’s Supreme Court decision in Murthy vs. Missouri, which upheld their right to censor viewpoints at their discretion—or in partnership with government entities who may coerce them to limit unapproved speech.

Follow Elias Irizarry at twitter.com/eliasforsc.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.

Kamala Harris Haunted By ‘Defund the Police’ Support

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Kamala Harris Haunted By ‘Defund the Police’ Support

(Casey Harper, The Center Square) Vice President Kamala Harris’ kickstart to her presidential campaign last week immediately faced a flurry of references to her most controversial stances and statements, not the least of which was her support of the “defund the police” movement in 2020.

“Defund the police” took off as a movement in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter riots in cities around the country.

In June 2020, Harris praised the movement, repeatedly saying we need to “reimagine” how we get safety in our cities and rework budgets instead of spending so much on police.

“Defund the police, the issue behind it is that we need to reimagine how we are creating safety,” Harris told the radio show “Ebro in the Morning” in a clip now resurfaced by CNN. “When you have cities with one third of their entire city budget focused on policing, we know that is not the smart way or the best way or the right way to achieve safety.”

“This whole movement is about rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out if it reflects the right priorities,” she continued. “For too long the status quo thinking has been, you get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that’s wrong.”

When Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti diverted $150 million from the police budget, Harris praised the decision.

“I applaud Eric Garcetti for what he’s done,” Harris said on “Good Morning America” at the time.

Many American cities saw a spike in violent crime in the months following the BLM riots.

In 2022, Garcetti pushed for adding about $150 million to the city’s police budget, an apparent about-face turn on the policy.

Again in June of 2020, Harris echoed her support for the “defund the police” movement during an appearance on ABC’s “The View.”

Harris proposed diverting funding from police to social services.

“We have confused the idea that to achieve safety you put more cops on the street instead of understanding to achieve safe and healthy communities you put more resources into the public education system of those communities, into affordable housing, into home ownership, into access for capital for small businesses, access for healthcare regardless of how much money people have,” Harris said. “That’s how you achieve safe and healthy communities.”

President Joe Biden came out and distanced himself from the “defund the police” movement during its peak. Later in 2020, when the issue was less popular and Harris was grappling with being Biden’s pick for vice president, Harris’ press team reportedly claimed Harris did not support defunding police.

Former President Donald Trump and other Republicans have hit Harris for her stance on the issue. Trump pushed out a clip of Harris’ comments praising defunding police to his followers over the weekend.

“She’s a radical left lunatic, defund the police, all of the different things,” Trump said of Harris during remarks in Nashville over the weekend.

Defunding police never had majority support, and after 2020, what support it did have dropped significantly, according to polling from Pew Research.

“Support for reducing spending on police has fallen significantly: 15% of adults now say spending should be decreased, down from 25% in 2020,” Pew said in an October of 2021 release. “And only 6% now advocate decreasing spending a lot, down from 12% who said this last year. At the same time, 37% of adults now say spending on police should stay about the same, down from 42% in 2020.”

Local Sniper Who Lost Thomas Crooks Shot Himself 7 Months Ago

Ken Silva
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Local Sniper Who Lost Thomas Crooks Shot Himself 7 Months Ago

(Ken Silva, Headline USA) ABC News published an interview Monday with the Beaver County SWAT team involved in providing security for Donald Trump on the day he was nearly assassinated, reporting the identity of the sniper who first flagged the shooter’s suspicious behavior at the July 13 campaign rally.

The identity of that sniper, Greg Nicol, was first reported on July 15 by the local news site BeaverCountian, which cited unnamed law enforcement sources. The BeaverCountian previously revealed that Nicol shot himself last December—more on that below.

ABC News is seemingly the first outlet to interview Nicol about the event.

According to ABC, Nicol was stationed on the second-floor post inside the AGR complex. That’s the location from where Butler County ESU counter snipers left their post to search for alleged shooter Thomas Crooks—leaving the rooftop wide open for him to take his shots. It’s still unclear why that massive security failure happened, but ABC at least told Nicol’s side of the story.

According to ABC, Nicol noticed an unattended bike and backpack believed to have belonged to Crooks. He also reportedly saw Crooks looking up and around, then pulling a rangefinder from his pocket.

The activity spotted by Nicol likely happened around 5:38 p.m., according to law enforcement text messages. Before that, another counter sniper who was working with Nicols spotted Crooks around 4:26 p.m. That other sniper hasn’t been publicly identified. The shooting occurred at 6:11 p.m.

“The first thing I did, I sent those pictures out, we had a text group between the local snipers that were on the scene. I sent those pictures out to that group and advised them of what I noticed and what I’d seen,” Nicol told ABC.

“There was a text back that said, ‘Call it into command.’ I then called into our to the command via radio. And they acknowledged,” he said.

“I assumed that there would be somebody coming out to—you know, to speak with this individual or, you know, find out what’s going on,” he added.

According to ABC, Nicol moved through the building trying to shadow Crooks, who was outside, and keep eyes on him. But Nicol reportedly lost sight of Crooks as the counter sniper made his way down to the building’s first level.

“Then, as the former president began speaking, Nicol noticed rallygoers looking away from the podium, up toward the roof of the AGR building. Some were shouting that there was someone up there,” ABC reported.

“That’s when I heard the gunshots,” Nicol told ABC.

ABC News also revealed that the Beaver County SWAT medic who found Crooks’s lifeless body on the rooftop was the counter sniper Nicol’s wife, Michel Vasiladiotis-Nicol.

Vasiladiotis-Nicol told ABC she put her gloved fingers to the shooter’s neck, and found that “he had absolutely no pulse.”

The July 13 Trump rally wasn’t the only shooting Nicol has been involved with over the last year. In fact, Nicol shot himself last December, according to the BeaverCountian.

“Police Sergeant Gregory Nicol was in his office at the Monaca Police Station on December 15 when he unholstered his duty weapon to show it to another officer. His firearm accidentally discharged in the process, in what is being described as a ‘freak accident,’” the BeaverCountian reported in January, citing two unnamed law enforcement sources.

“The round when through-and-through the officer’s leg, which was subsequently placed in a tourniquet. Nicol was transported to Heritage Valley Beaver where he was treated for soft tissue injuries and released. The officer missed a week-and-a-half of work before returning to full duty.”

Headline USA also found that Nicol was sued in December 2005 for causing the wrong suspect to be arrested in a robbery investigation. In that case, Nicol admitted to confusing the identity of a woman, saying he made an honest mistake.

“Nicol received information that the female suspect involved in the armed robbery was Victoria Schaper. Ofc. Nicol received further information that Victor Schaper was an alias used by Victoria Reagan,” Nicol said in an affirmative defense he filed in March 2006.

“Believing that he had probable cause, Ofc. Nicol completed a Criminal Complaint Affidavit of Probable Cause which was approved by a judge and a warrant was issued. Upon learning that Victoria Reagan was not involved in the armed robbery, Ofc. Nicol immediately advised the District Attorney’s office and the criminal charges were withdrawn,” he said.

“At all time relevant, Ofc. Nicol acting with and pursuant to a bonafide good faith belief that his actions were lawful, privileged, justified and in keeping with his proper duties as a police officer.”

The lawsuit was dismissed the next month in April 2006.

Court records also suggest Nicol filed for bankruptcy in 2000, but those records aren’t available online.

According to his LinkedIn, Nicol’s interests include the Justice Department, Black Rifle Coffee and the non-profit organization FBI-LEEDA, which is an acronym for Law Enforcement Executive Development Association.

Nicol did not respond to a LinkedIn message from this reporter.

Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.

Kamala’s Lead Campaign Designer Promoted Domestic Terrorism in 2020

Jacob Bruns
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Kamala’s Lead Campaign Designer Promoted Domestic Terrorism in 2020

(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) The lead graphic designer for Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign promoted violent political tactics and domestic terrorism in social-media posts, the New York Post reported.

Ana Cherée Rice, 32, penned several damning Twitter posts during the 2020 race riots linked to George Floyd’s death.

Conservative investigative journalist Andy Ngo, known for infiltrating Antifa and later becoming a victim of brutal assaults while trying to cover the 2020 riots in Portland, Ore., dug into Rice’s social-media history and uncovered several of the damning messages.

Rice, who recently designed the new “Harris for President” graphic, wrote posts backing BLM riots and Antifa arson, encouraging her friends to “burn all that s**t down” in a May 28, 2020 post—three days after Floyd’s death.

The next day, Rice was detained by the New York Police Department while she rioted in New York City.

The following month, she would encourage BLM rioters in Georgia to continue the violent raids.

“[B]urn that s**t down, atlanta,” she wrote on June 14, 2020.

Later that summer, she wrote a post suggesting that she needed to acquire a firearm.

“[I] need a gun. because i’m not playing with ya’ll,” Rice tweeted on Aug. 23, 2020, three days later calling for more burnings: “[A]gain. and again. and again,” she wrote.

Eventually, she would back looting as well, suggesting that “rioting works,” as well as “looting.”

Rice complained about America, writing, “[I] hate capitalism,” while making money from her graphic design work at Apple, Lululemon and JPMorgan Chase.

However, it should come as no surprise that Rice supports Harris.

In a June 2020 interview with Stephen Colbert, Harris backed the rioters and suggested that “they’re not gonna let up–and they should not.”

The VP-to-be also organized a fundraiser to gather bail cash for violent Minnesota rioters who had been arrested.

“If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota,” Harris tweeted at the time.

United States National Debt Reaches $35 Trillion

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United States National Debt Reaches $35 Trillion

(Casey Harper, The Center Square) The U.S. national debt as of Monday officially topped $35 trillion, a grim milestone for the U.S. government and the economy as the national debt continues to soar each year.

The national debt has nearly tripled in the last 20 years.

“If this sounds familiar, we only just reached $34 trillion at the very end of 2023,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said in a statement after the milestone. “We passed $33 trillion three months before that and $32 trillion three months before that. The borrowing just keeps marching along, reckless and unyielding.”

MacGuineas said the U.S. annual deficit is on track to hit almost $2 trillion this year and nearly $3 trillion in ten years.

Before COVID-19, deficits remained under $1 trillion, but since the pandemic, they have been well above the previously unbroken $1 trillion-dollar mark.

Medicare and Social Security are on the path to insolvency because of the worsening fiscal situation, according to budget groups. Meanwhile, the cost of interest on the national debt has doubled since President Joe Biden took office and is on track to be the single largest expense for the federal government, more than entitlements or national defense.

“CBO projects that interest costs in 2024 will total $892 billion — a jump of 36 percent from the previous year and following increases of 35 and 38 percent in each of the two years before that,” the Peterson Foundation said in a report earlier this month. “This year’s high interest bill isn’t a one-year phenomenon, it’s part of a trend that stretches out into the future, as debt continues to climb and relatively high interest rates push up the cost of federal borrowing.”

“Election years cannot be an exception for trying to prevent completely foreseeable dangers – and the debt is one of the major dangers we are facing,” MacGuineas said. “True fiscal responsibility cannot exist in a vacuum – if we want any hope of putting America back on course toward a sustainable and prosperous future, our leaders need to bridge rhetoric with action. Pay for your new spending; pay for your new or extended tax cuts; make deals, shake hands, pass budgets. In a word: govern.”

Trump Agrees to FBI Interview about Assassination Attempt

Headline USA Editor
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Trump Agrees to FBI Interview about Assassination Attempt

(Headline USA) Former President Donald Trump has agreed to be interviewed by the FBI as part of an investigation into his attempted assassination in Pennsylvania earlier this month, a special agent said on Monday in disclosing how the gunman prior to the shooting had researched mass attacks and explosive devices.

The expected interview with the 2024 Republican presidential nominee is part of the FBI’s standard protocol to speak with victims during the course of its criminal investigations. The FBI said on Friday that Trump was struck by a bullet or a fragment of one during the July 13 assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“We want to get his perspective on what he observed,” said Kevin Rojek, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office. “It is a standard victim interview like we would do for any other victim of crime, under any other circumstances.”

Through roughly 450 interviews, the FBI has fleshed out a portrait of the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, that reveals him to be a “highly intelligent” but reclusive 20-year-old whose primary social circle was his family and who maintained few friends and acquaintances throughout his life, Rojek said.

His parents have been “extremely cooperative,” with the investigation, Rojek said. They have said they had no advance knowledge of the shooting, a statement the FBI considers credible since Crooks had not been doing anything public in the weeks prior to the attack that would have aroused their suspicions.

The FBI has not uncovered a motive as to why he chose to target Trump, but investigators believe the shooting was the result of extensive planning, including the purchase in recent months of chemical precursors that investigators believe were used to create the explosive devices found in his car and his home and the use of a drone about 200 yards (180 meters) from the rally site in the hours before the event.

In addition, Rojek said, Crooks looked online for information about mass shootings, improvised explosive devices, power plants and the attempted assassination in May of Slovakia’s populist Prime Minister Robert Fico.

FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress last week that on July 6, the day Crooks registered to attend the Trump rally, he googled: “How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?” That’s a reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, the shooter who killed President John F. Kennedy from a sniper’s perch in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

New details, meanwhile, were emerging about law enforcement security lapses that preceded the shooting, with Sen. Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, releasing text messages from members of the Beaver County Emergency Services Unit that showed how local officers had spotted a suspicious-looking man who turned out to be Crooks lurking around in the hour before the shooting.

“Kid learning around building we are in. AGR I believe it is,” one officer wrote to other counter-snipers, including a photograph of Crooks. “I did see him with a range finder looking towards stage. FYI. If you wanna notify SS snipers to look out. I lost sight of him.”

AGR is a reference to a complex of buildings that form AGR International Inc. Crooks scaled the roof of one of the buildings of the compound and fired eight shots at the rally stage with an AR-style rifle. Trump said he was “shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear,” and he appeared in the days later with a bandage on the ear. One rallygoer, Corey Comperatore, was killed, and two others were injured. Crooks was shot dead by a Secret Service counter-sniper.

In an interview with ABC News, a Beaver County officer who sounded the alarm said that after sending the text, “I assumed that there would be somebody coming out to speak with this individual or find out what’s going on.”

Another officer told ABC News that the group was supposed to get a face-to-face briefing with the Secret Service counter-snipers but that never happened. An email to the Secret Service was not immediately returned Monday.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

Humorless Leftists Come Unhinged Over Spoof Kamala Video Shared by Musk

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Humorless Leftists Come Unhinged Over Spoof Kamala Video Shared by Musk

(Headline USA) A video that uses an artificial intelligence voice-cloning tool to mimic the voice of Vice President Kamala Harris to talk about her failed policies and personality flaws outraged leftists, who, per usual, decried it as a “threat to democracy” ahead of the 2024 election.

The video gained attention after tech billionaire Elon Musk shared the video on his social media platform X on Friday.

By late Sunday, Musk had clarified that the video was a satirical post, known as a meme, pinning the original creator’s post to his profile, and making the point that parody is not a crime.

The video uses many of the same visuals as a real ad that Harris, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, released launching her campaign. But the meme swaps out Harris’ voice-over audio with an AI-generated voice that convincingly impersonates Harris.

“I, Kamala Harris, am your Democrat candidate for president because Joe Biden finally exposed his senility at the debate,” the AI voice says in the video. It claims Harris is a “diversity hire”, and it says she doesn’t know “the first thing about running the country.” The video retains “Harris for President” branding. It also adds in some authentic past clips of Harris.

Mia Ehrenberg, a Harris campaign spokesperson, said in an email to The Associated Press: “We believe the American people want the real freedom, opportunity and security Vice President Harris is offering; not the fake, manipulated lies of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.”

The widely shared video is an example of how lifelike AI-generated images, videos, or audio clips have been utilized both to poke fun and to mislead about politics as the United States draws closer to the presidential election. It exposes how, as high-quality AI tools have become far more accessible, there remains a lack of significant federal action to regulate their use, leaving rules guiding AI in politics largely to states and social media platforms.

The video also raises questions about how to best handle content that blurs the lines of what is considered an appropriate use of AI, particularly if it falls into the category of satire.

The original user who posted the video, a YouTuber known as Mr Reagan, disclosed from the beginning both on YouTube and on X that the manipulated video is a parody.

Over the weekend, before Musk clarified on his profile that the video was a joke, some participants in X’s “community note” feature suggested labeling his post as manipulated. No such label has been added to it, even as Musk has separately posted about the parody video.

Some users online have questioned whether his initial post might violate X’s policies, which say users “may not share synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.”

The policy has an exception for memes and satire as long as they do not cause “significant confusion about the authenticity of the media.”

Chris Kohls, the man behind the Mr Reagan online persona, pointed an AP reporter to a YouTube video he posted early Monday responding to the ordeal. In the YouTube video, he confirmed he used AI to make the fake ad and argued that it was obviously parody, with or without a label.

Musk endorsed Trump, the Republican former president and current nominee, earlier this month.

Two experts who specialize in AI-generated media reviewed the fake ad’s audio and confirmed that much of it was generated using AI technology.

One of them, University of California, Berkeley, digital forensics expert Hany Farid, said the video shows the power of generative AI and deepfakes.

“The AI-generated voice is very good,” he said in an email. “Even though most people won’t believe it is VP Harris’ voice, the video is that much more powerful when the words are in her voice.”

He said generative AI companies that make voice-cloning tools and other AI tools available to the public should do better to ensure their services are not used in ways that could harm people or democracy.

Rob Weissman, co-president of the advocacy group Public Citizen, disagreed with Farid, saying he thought many people would be fooled by the video.

“I’m certain that most people looking at it don’t assume it’s a joke,” Weissman said in an interview. “The quality isn’t great, but it’s good enough. And precisely because it feeds into preexisting themes that have circulated around her, most people will believe it to be real.”

Weissman, whose organization has advocated for Congress, federal agencies and states to regulate generative AI, said the video is “the kind of thing that we’ve been warning about.”

Other generative AI deepfakes in the U.S. and elsewhere have tried to influence voters with misinformation, humor or both. In Slovakia in 2023, fake audio clips impersonated a candidate discussing plans to rig an election and raise the price of beer days before the vote. In Louisiana in 2022, a political action committee’s satirical ad superimposed a Louisiana mayoral candidate’s face onto an actor portraying him as an underachieving high school student.

Even more recently, a Huffington Post op-ed called for Democrats to utilize artificial intelligence to intentionally gaslight the American public by making him speak clearer, appear healthier and seem more youthful.

Congress has yet to pass legislation on AI in politics, and federal agencies have only taken limited steps, leaving most existing U.S. regulation to the states. More than one-third of states have created their own laws regulating the use of AI in campaigns and elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Beyond X, other social media companies also have created policies regarding synthetic and manipulated media shared on their platforms. Users on the video platform YouTube, for example, must reveal whether they have used generative artificial intelligence to create videos or face suspension.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

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