[Essay]
The Slopaganda Midterms
This election cycle is rife with “slopaganda” — that is, AI-generated “slop” used for political propaganda. In a fascinating recent piece in the Washington Post, TPM alum Matt Shuham noted that roughly 164 of these ads have appeared on TV or online, mostly in service of Republican candidates. As Matt points out, the ads are bizarre: “Political spinmeisters have used AI to dress candidates in superhero costumes, show a rifle-wielding Donald Trump in a foxhole, depict entire societies as Lego figurines, and also to put words in opponents’ mouths.”
I encountered one of these ads in the wild last month featuring a familiar face: Marshall Rawson, the subject of my first big investigation as a reporter here at TPM. Rawson is the GOP nominee for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives and, our investigation found, a pretty extreme guy — perhaps the most extreme candidate on the ballot this November. A quick refresher:
- Rawson was actively involved with a white supremacist group called League of the South that advocates for the southern states to secede from the U.S.
- He appeared at the infamous Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia back in 2017, and could be seen in a photo standing near James Alex Fields Jr., a neo-Nazi who drove his car into counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer
- He has condoned slavery and called for the execution of queer people
- A lot of his campaign donors were white supremacists.
He’s running for the state House seat in a deeply conservative part of north central Florida and is widely expected to win in the general election. Rawson hasn’t denied any of my reporting, or distanced himself from his white supremacist activism. I tried my best to find a Republican who would denounce him, but came up empty.
What I’ve seen instead over the past couple weeks is Rawson receiving public messages of support, including from his likely future colleagues in the Florida state House. Perhaps the most excitable support he’s received, however, has come from the University of Florida College Republicans. The group was only reinstated by the university last month, having been disbanded back in March following a photograph showing two of its members giving Nazi salutes.
One of its first orders of business after being reinstated? Producing this deeply bizarre piece of slopaganda: a video featuring an AI-generated Rawson walking through an adoring crowd of Red Hats in sunglasses and a trench coat; coasting along a Florida waterway in a fanboat; and standing in a field, clad in all white, his arms outstretched, Christ-like.
The video is set to the rap song “Already” by Kodak Black — a musical selection that upset at least one of Rawson’s biggest fans. Chandler Langevin is a city councilman in Palm Bay, Florida and the executive director of the American Restoration Coalition, which a Raw Story investigation earlier this week revealed as a “Republican group with white power ties openly plots infiltration of Florida government.” Langevin and his ARC cohorts knocked on doors for Rawson during his primary campaign.
“Video is great, music is awful. Play our music to it,” Langevin replied on X (emphasis mine), seeming to state that he didn’t like the use of a Black musician’s song. “An edit to Dixieland would go hard… Freebird goes hard in right wing edits too.”
“You right,” the UF College Republicans account replied.
Back in 2017, one week after I covered the “Unite The Right” rally, writer Alex Pareene penned a prescient blog in Jezebel titled “Charlottesville Was a Preview of the Future of the Republican Party.” His thesis — that the extremism of the “alt-right” would go mainstream, taking over the GOP — would become my own over the next nine years. Still, I feel like my head is spinning, staring at this little interaction on X, reflecting on just how radical the party has become. To attempt a summary:
The GOP nominated Rawson, an unrepentant white supremacist who marched in Charlottesville, for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives. A recently re-instated college Republican group, disbanded after its members gave Nazi salutes, posted an AI slop video on X — rebranded from Twitter by a trillionaire and GOP megadonor who gave two Nazi salutes during Trump’s inauguration — in support of Rawson. The video used a song by a Black man, which upset a local Republican activist, himself part of a GOP group with white nationalist ties that is trying to put more Rawson-like extremists into Florida government positions. Despite all of this, Rawson is all but assured to be a state legislator in Tallahassee next year.
I really did expect our politics to become this extreme. I’m just not sure I anticipated how bizarre it would be too.
