Within the age of rampant AI slop, seeing isn’t all the time believing. There’s a couple of approach, although, to make folks doubt their very own eyes.
Many have lengthy predicted and warned that AI deepfakes might profoundly distort public opinion. For instance, though swiftly debunked, a fake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urging his troops to give up in early 2022 gave the impression to be a harbinger of horrors to come back—when AI would develop into indistinguishable from actuality.
However as occasions this week in Minneapolis and the White Home reveal, no visible manipulation is critical for forging actuality from complete fabric. All it takes is a federal authorities united round its chief’s most well-liked narrative.
On Tuesday afternoon, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shot a woman driving an SUV in a Minneapolis suburb. Amid a crowd protesting the company’s current incursion into the Twin Cities, authorized observer Renee Nicole Good was stopped in the midst of the road when federal autos zoomed towards her, sirens wailing.
Brokers then hopped out of the autos and aggressively approached Good’s automotive on foot. As captured on video from multiple angles, she tried to evade the brokers, prompting one among them to fireplace a number of pictures by way of Good’s windshield, one among which hit her face. She died of her accidents on the scene.
Even earlier than lots of the above particulars had been recognized or confirmed, the official authorities narrative had already begun to coalesce.
At the moment, ICE officers in Minneapolis had been conducting focused operations when rioters started blocking ICE officers and one among these violent rioters weaponized her automobile, making an attempt to run over our legislation enforcement officers in an try and kill them—an act of home terrorism.…
— Homeland Safety (@DHSgov) January 7, 2026
Who’re you going to consider?
Journalism could be the first tough draft of historical past, however the Trump administration, famously hostile toward journalists, prefers to jot down the primary tough draft of actuality themselves, in actual time—occasionally with a Sharpie pen.
As movies of the incident in Minneapolis proliferated on-line, a tweet from the Division of Homeland Safety (DHS) declared {that a} anonymous “violent rioter” had dedicated “an act of home terrorism” by “making an attempt to run over our legislation enforcement officers in an try and kill them.”
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem quickly held a press conference, reiterating this model of occasions. She claimed that the still-nameless girl had been “stalking” officers and instructed that she’d used her automobile as a weapon. Each accounts claimed that officers concerned had been “harm” however “anticipated to make a full restoration.”
After all, no narrative from the Trump administration is full till the president himself weighs in, which he did quickly sufficient on Fact Social. Apparently, it wasn’t sufficient for Trump to only reiterate the skewed DHS model of occasions; as an alternative, he added some thrives of his personal.
In Trump’s telling, the motive force hadn’t merely tried to run over an ICE agent; she’d “viciously ran over” him—to the purpose the place “it’s arduous to consider he’s nonetheless alive.”
Earlier than Good’s title had even been confirmed by The Minnesota Star Tribune and launched to the general public, the administration had turned her into an tried assassin (the uncommon sort of tried assassin, no much less, who drives round with a glove box full of stuffed animals for her younger little one).
Stranger than fiction
A lot stays unknown concerning the occasions that led to Good’s killing, since video has but to emerge displaying what occurred earlier than her automobile stopped in the midst of the highway.
Whether or not her try and flee the scene was unlawful or ill-advised could also be up for debate. What is totally sure, although, is that this was the ninth ICE shooting since simply final September, which means that Good had extra motive to be petrified of the brokers than they had been of her.
Both approach, to explain what’s depicted within the movies as a ramming assault is so staggeringly indifferent from actuality, it’s an assault on the very concept that one ought to consider their very own eyes.
Sadly, on this administration, such brazen fabrications are par for the course.
At some point earlier than Good’s taking pictures loss of life, the White Home crystallized Trump’s paradoxical reframing of the Capitol riots with an official new government internet web page. On the fifth anniversary of the assault, the administration touted a timeline that grossly misrepresented what occurred on January 6, 2021, regardless of countless freely available video clips taken by the rioters themselves.
On this fanciful retelling, the pro-Trump marchers had been “orderly and spirited,” whereas the Capitol police escalated tensions by firing tear gasoline and flash-bangs for no motive. And someway it’s all then-Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s fault.
Maybe extra egregious, the positioning presents this revisionist historical past as a corrective to the purportedly revisionist historical past spun by the Biden administration. It’s not that Trump and his defenders are being dishonest; they’re simply the one ones brave sufficient to inform the reality!
“The Democrats masterfully reversed actuality after January 6,” the positioning reads, “branding peaceable patriotic protesters as ‘insurrectionists’ and framing the occasion as a violent coup try orchestrated by Trump—regardless of no proof of armed rise up or intent to overthrow the federal government.”
In fact, roughly 174 of the 608 defendants charged with assaulting, resisting, or interfering with legislation enforcement that day were charged for utilizing a lethal or harmful weapon or in any other case inflicting critical damage to an officer.
Footage that exhibits it taking place is out there for all to see. However for the second Trump administration, it doesn’t matter if arduous video proof disproves their narrative. What issues is their unwavering insistence that their narrative is the best way it’s.
Seeing remains to be believing
Though Trump’s reelection in 2024 has basically rendered moot the reality about January 6, the story of what occurred in Minneapolis on Wednesday remains to be growing. Native politicians will not be mincing phrases as they try and wrest management of the narrative out of Trump’s palms—and again into the realm of evidential actuality.
“They’re already making an attempt to spin this as an motion of self-defense,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said throughout a press convention on Wednesday. “Having seen the video myself, I wish to inform everyone immediately: that’s bullshit.”
Shortly afterward, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz tweeted that he’d additionally seen the video and urged folks to not “consider this propaganda machine.” (Walz was on the enterprise finish of Trump’s “propaganda machine” final Saturday, when the president reposted a video falsely suggesting that Walz was behind the homicide of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman final summer time—a video Hortman’s youngsters have asked Trump to take down, thus far to no avail.)
Walz’s and Frey’s statements reiterate that seeing is believing, an concept that Trump himself apparently shares.
Requested by visiting New York Occasions reporters on Wednesday about his version of occasions—by which Renee Nicole Good viciously ran over an ICE agent—the president ordered an assistant to play video footage that he appeared to suppose proved him appropriate.
Whereas watching the video, the reporters declare they instructed Trump that the angle didn’t seem to point out an ICE officer had been run over.
“Effectively,” Trump responds, “I—the best way I take a look at it . . .” He then apparently trails off, with out ever admitting that the footage exhibits one thing totally different than what he beforehand claimed it does.
The report describes this exceptional trade as “a glimpse into Mr. Trump’s reflexive protection of what has develop into a generally violent federal crackdown on immigration.”
However this characterization doesn’t inform the total story. It’s extra of a glimpse into how the president routinely invents no matter model of actuality finest serves him, no matter whether or not it clashes with actuality’s model of actuality.
On Thursday morning, the Occasions launched a forensic evaluation of Good’s killing from three different angles, which definitively contradicts Trump’s account.
And but even conclusive video proof is certain to have little impression—so long as the president’s supporters out and in of Congress insist on solely viewing the world the best way Trump seems to be at it.
