Inaction on GOP’s Biden ‘cheapfakes’ will cost us our democracy

Talk about playing with fire and getting burned.

The Republican National Committee is defiantly sending out misleading videos to add credibility to the idea that an aging President Biden is mentally incompetent. RNC officials say they do not care that their fraud is being called out by fact-checkers at big news organizations. Although not manipulated by AI, they do not stand up to scrutiny “when the moments are viewed in context or from wider camera angles.”

They do not care that the Biden White House’s press secretary is labeling the manipulated videos as “cheapfakes” and saying the treachery tells “you everything that we need to know about how desperate Republicans are.”

Republicans don’t care, because these cheapfake videos are a money-making hit, click-bait supreme in the conservative media’s echo chamber. 

They are even being picked up for local news broadcasts by Sinclair. Conservative websites and radio shows have joined in mocking and bullying Biden.

But while they are laughing, the Republicans have not noticed that they’ve set their pants on fire.

Congressional Republicans, led by former President Donald Trump, for years have argued that right-wing media content would be unfairly constrained by establishment liberals in the big social media companies and government. 

They posed as defenders of conservative free speech to oppose rules to constrain the flood of bullying, personal hate, disinformation and conspiracy theories flooding the internet.

They said federal laws against online abuse amount to government censorship.

But with their fraudulent, cheaply distorted Biden videos, it is now clear that the right-wing’s real goal is to protect their right to stir up online rage to maintain political power based on lies, deception and propaganda.

Their years of talk about protecting free speech was just a three-card-monte trick to distract from their work behind the curtain to twist the truth to raise money and get votes.

This is a sad realization for me. I wrote an entire book about the need for honest political dialogue more than a decade ago. (“Muzzled: the Assault on Honest Debate”)

But times change and technology changes. To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, when the fact changed, I changed my opinions.

As comedian Bill Maher aptly put it, we can no longer afford to excuse bad behavior online because it is now everywhere. Big tech companies refuse to do anything about it on the grounds that they are benevolent creators of a utopian digital world. In fact, they are, in Maher’s words, tobacco companies “selling an addictive product to children” with little regard for the consequences.

“Phillip Morris just wanted your lungs,” Maher intoned. “The App Store wants your soul.”

We’ve seen something very similar to this fake video episode before. In case you forgot, Russia filled the internet with lies, racial division and conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton to boost Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

This conspiracy was meticulously documented in the report issued by a Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee Report, released in 2020.

And who can forget Trump’s request to Russia to hack Hillary Clinton?

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said while demonizing his political rival for the presidency for deleting emails from a personal account.

Despite the furor raised by Trump, Clinton was never found to have done anything wrong. But Russia got the message.

“As it turns out, that same day the Russians…made their first effort to break into the servers used by Mrs. Clinton’s personal office, according to a sweeping 29-page indictment…that charged 12 Russians with election hacking,” The New York Times reported in 2018.

In fact, the indictment found that Russian factories of disinformation and hacking began targeting 76 email accounts used by the Clinton campaign.

Some of the hacked emails made their way to journalists, who put naively made it front page news, becoming pawns used by Republicans to sully Clinton’s reputation.

What every American needs to know now is that, like the GOP, Russia is back at it for the 2024 campaign.

Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, said last month at a senate hearing: “Specifically, Russia remains the most active foreign threat to our elections.” 

Also last month, Ben Nimmo, the leader of OpenAi’s investigations unit, told reporters that his company has shut down some artificial intelligence accounts tied to Russia as well as China and Iran. They are “generating text at a high volume and with fewer errors than these operations have traditionally managed,” he said. 

Also this month, U.S. intelligence officials told the Associated Press that they have issued more warnings than ever before because “presidential elections draw more attention from our adversaries.”

Earlier this year, an FBI informant with ties to Russia was arrested and charged with spreading lies to help Trump during the 2020 campaign.

Russia has added incentive this time. Trump is Russia’s dream candidate because he opposes U.S. support for Ukraine’s struggle to survive an unprovoked Russian invasion. Trump has also belittled NATO, the alliance of European countries standing against Russia’s land grab.

The fire is burning. The heat is in our face. It is time for Congress and big tech to shut down political fraudsters on the internet. The price of inaction is that we lose our democracy.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.