America's Manufactured Reality

It would be nice to spend billions on schools and roads, but right now that money is desperately needed for political ads. - Andy Borowitz, funny human

I spent several years of my working life trying to get inside Karl Rove’s head, which I knew was probably not a very pleasant place to be. The first time I interviewed him in 1979, I told my cameraman, as we loaded our gear back into the car, we all ought to be worried if Rove ever got real power. Two books came out of my reporting on him. My co-author and friend, the late Wayne Slater and I, read the filings, sat with the operatives, and chased the sources who would only talk in parking lots and off the record. We both came away understanding something about American politics that has never stopped being disturbing.

In October of 2004, Ron Suskind published a piece in the New York Times Magazine describing a conversation with a senior adviser to George W. Bush. The adviser told Suskind that reporters like him lived in what he called the “reality-based community,” people who believed that solutions emerge from the judicious study of discernible reality. That was no longer how the world worked, the man said. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

Suskind has never named his source. Everyone in political journalism assumed it was Rove, who, predictably, has long denied it and claims the quote is fictitious. Suskind has stood behind both the quote and his refusal to identify the speaker for twenty-two years now.

I think the attribution matters less than the doctrine, which has consistently manifested itself in our politics over the past two decades. Somebody at the center of American power said out loud that facts were a constraint for other people. Whoever said it was describing a method that was already in the field, and had been for four years.

I go back to February of 2000. I was traveling on occasion on John McCain’s bus, “The Straight Talk Express,” and jumping over to the campaign of Texas Governor George W. Bush. McCain had just humiliated the Texan in New Hampshire. South Carolina was the firewall to protect W, and what happened there has laid the predicate for every electoral lie and head fake that have since muddied up the truth for Americans looking for reliable information to make their ballot choices.

Voters got phone calls from people posing as pollsters. Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate Black child? It didn’t matter that he had not. The McCains had adopted a daughter, Bridget, from a Mother Teresa orphanage in Bangladesh. She was nine years old and she was traveling with her father. Leaflets turned up on windshields making the same claim. A professor at Bob Jones University pushed it out by email. Other rumors said McCain had committed treason as a prisoner of war, that the years in Hanoi had left him mentally unfit, that Cindy McCain was an addict.

None of it was ever traced to the Bush campaign. Bush said he would fire anyone on his staff who was involved. Rove has denied any role. McCain’s own strategists described being pelted from an underground campaign of unknown origin that they could not keep pace with. But nothing happens by accident in politics. Those third-party attacks, then and now, operate with the silent consent of the candidates who might benefit. Neither Bush nor Rove ever called upon the practitioners to stop. I will also add that I, and a few other reporters, were standing close enough to Bush to hear his response when he was first confronted by McCain on the dirty dealings. “It’s just politics, Senator,” W said. “It’s not personal.”

Not exactly plausible deniability.

It’s important to understand, though, that the innovation I am talking about was not the lie. Politics has always had liars. The evolutionary mutation was that nobody could be made to own it. The smear arrived from everywhere and nowhere, and did its work in four days. By the time the journalists had confirmed it was false, the primary was over, and the nomination was gone. Bridget McCain learned years later what had been done to her by Googling her own name as a teenager.

Lying stopped being a liability that could end a campaign and turned into a deliverable, just another tactic.

The electoral system faltered even further in 2010 when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling on Citizens United. The last practical limit on campaign behavior came off. If a falsehood benefits an interest, that interest can now spend without ceiling to put it in front of voters, through entities that need not answer to the candidate and often do not answer to anyone. Deniability was the 2000 innovation. Unlimited capital behind the deniability was the 2010 innovation.

And now our broken system has created a broken land, and the truth is being further sundered by AI.

As usual, Texas is the petri dish where the infection culture thrives. James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, has raised roughly $72 million to Republican Ken Paxton’s $16.8 million. Paxton, impeached by his own party’s House and carrying a securities fraud case, among other allegations, like becoming a multi-millionaire on a state salary, is, nonetheless, not going to be outspent, because he does not have to raise the money himself. Trump’s MAGA Inc. opened its midterm account a few days ago on September 5 with $10 million for Paxton, drawn from a war chest north of $400 million. Elon Musk’s America PAC put its first candidate money of the year into Texas, about $250,000 of an initial $840,000 national tranche, then roughly half of another $2.9 million the following night. Ted Cruz’s aligned super PAC has put in more than $2 million. Republican outside groups spent a combined $11 million on Texas advertising in a single week against roughly $4 million from Talarico’s own campaign.

But that’s not democracy’s biggest worry in Texas just now.

That moment arrived on Tuesday, September 8, with the thirty seconds of video Ken Paxton’s campaign released, which shows James Talarico, but is not James Talarico. An AI-generated version of the man sits with a crayon and writes his own scripture into something the ad calls “The King James Talarico Bible,” reciting it aloud in his own synthesized voice. “And God said, let there be six genders, and there were.” Paxton’s caption says Talarico is weaponizing faith to sell a radical agenda and brags about hating Christianity.

The easy criticism of this ad is probably wrong and Paxton’s people are counting on the easy criticism because the quotes are real. Nearly every line traces to something Talarico truly said, in public, on a date, in a place. The ad even puts citations on screen. If the pundits write that Paxton fabricated the words, they will be corrected, and the correction will become the story.

Which is what the Paxton campaign wants because it obfuscates the false construct of the ad.

Think about the six genders quote. Talarico never said it. In an April 2021 committee hearing, he was questioning the author of a bill that assigned schoolchildren to sports teams by birth certificate, and he asked how intersex kids fit into that equation. He said modern science recognizes “there are many more than two biological sexes. In fact, there are six,” and he then listed chromosomal variations and argued that sex is a spectrum. Sexes, not genders. Intersex chromosomal conditions, not gender identity.

His own number was shaky, though, since clinicians document thirty to forty such variations and there is no fixed count. Talarico has since walked it back entirely. He told CBS News in May, “I know there are two sexes, men and women,” and added that the small number of people with chromosomal abnormalities deserve dignity. Paxton himself said “six biological sexes” in his primary victory speech. The ad uses the degraded version because the degraded version is the one that cuts the deepest.

Talarico also said God is non-binary on the Texas House floor on October 14, 2021, opposing a bill restricting transgender kids in school sports. He was arguing from Genesis, where the opening lines use a masculine Hebrew noun for divinity and a feminine one for spirit. “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is non-binary.” That is a seminarian making a theological argument against a sports bill. He has since called it intentionally provocative and said he meant God cannot be confined to human categories, which is roughly what Presbyterians have been saying for four hundred years. To Trumpublicans, though, God has a man gland.

Talarico also said, “I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity.” That’s verbatim, on a podcast from March of 2021, in response to a question about how a person escapes systems into which he was born. The clip that has circulated since June is six seconds long, cut from an hour, and clipped immediately before the next sentence, in which he says he keeps getting drawn back to Christianity because no philosophy or economic theory he has found is as radical as the teachings of that barefoot rabbi. Snopes verified the quote and flagged the editorial amputation.

The unavoidable conclusion regarding the Paxton attack ad is that it takes six statements made across four years in four settings- a committee hearing, a floor speech, two sermons, and two podcasts- deletes the argument attached to each one of them, and stages the quotes as a single confession delivered by a synthetic man in a synthetic room performing a synthetic act he has never performed. The lie is not in any sentence. The lie is in the AI architecture.

That is the one that should frighten everyone in this country. South Carolina required operatives, phone banks and four days. Citizens United supplied unlimited money. Generative video supplies unlimited production. A staffer can now manufacture a candidate saying anything, doing anything, anywhere, for the cost of a subscription, and iterate it forty times before lunch.

Texas, oh irony of ironies, wrote the first deepfake election law in America in 2019. It reaches only video, only within thirty days of an election, and one section of it was struck down as unconstitutionally over broad by a state appellate court in 2023. Election Day is November 3. The thirty-day window opens around October 4. This ad landed September 8. Somebody counted, not that violating the law will have any consequences if they go beyond the open window of time.

Dade Phelan, the House Speaker at the time, tried to fix the flawed language in the legislation. His HB 366 would have required conspicuous disclosure on any political ad using altered media. The measure passed the House 102 to 40 in 2025 and died in the Senate, where all reasonable legislation goes to die in Texas. What Paxton ran instead was small print on screen for about four seconds, saying that certain video content in the advertisement was generated by artificial intelligence. Certain content? Hilarious, it was every second of it.

The race remains a coin flip, which is also a commentary on how little character matters now in American electoral politics. Polls have Talarico ahead by two or three, with twelve to fourteen percent undecided and those undecideds leaning Republican. No Democrat has won a Texas Senate seat since 1988. This ad is aimed with precision at getting soft Republicans to remember they are Republicans, and to not think too much about Ken Paxton’s utter lack of morality.

Which may work. That’s not the part that keeps me up, though. The fact that keeps me constantly fretting over the fate of my country is that twenty-six years after South Carolina, we have industrialized the thing that disseminates lies, financed it without limit, automated its manufacture, and left the statute that was supposed to govern it dead in a Senate committee.

Whoever said it to Ron Suskind was right, though. They create their own reality now. They just do not need operatives anymore. They have a video render queue.