Comrade Kamala and the Disinformation Campaign

How the Republican Party Is Cooking Up the Next Red Scare.

Aug 23, 2024

Recently, former president and current felon Donald Trump shared this scintillating AI image of his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, looking over an arena with stands full of people in military uniforms. A large red-lettered sign spells out “Chicago”, and a hammer and sickle garrison flag flies over Harris’s head. He posted the image twice, once on TruthSocial and once on X, adding his latest nickname to the second: Comrade Kamala.

Trump’s propaganda campaigns against his rivals aren’t a new strategy in his arsenal. He’s been a champion of the smear campaign since he officially entered the political sphere in 2015 (not including his failure through the Reform Party in the year 2000). For instance, here is a chart depicting how many times he tweeted disparaging things about Hillary Clinton in 2016 alone:

But the image he posted over the weekend is something quite different than the tactics we’ve seen before. AI-generated images have finally become almost undetectable, something the tech crowd’s been working on for years, and the Republican Party has wasted no time in using it to their advantage. From accusing Kamala Harris’s team of boosting her crowds with artificial imagery to using it themselves to demonize the opponent, they’ve become immediate fans of the new technology. However, this photo isn’t the only example of politically charged AI imagery we’ve seen during this elective cycle.

AI Imagery: the Next Wave of Propaganda

In July, the RNC unveiled a new ad imagining the country over the next four years if Biden won. Images of scared citizens, military presence, and uncontrolled borders pervaded the majority of the thirty-second video. Every one of those images was made with artificial intelligence. The video itself contains a small, partially-transparent disclaimer in the top left-hand corner that reads “Built entirely with AI-generated imagery”. However, according to a CNN poll on the topic, some viewers did not notice the disclaimer on their first watch.

The AI disclaimer in the Republican 2024 election ad is partially obscured by YouTube’s disclaimer (which does not specify how many images are false).

The actions of the GOP seem to have filtered down to its supporters, as people across social media have begun to post false photos of targeted demographics rubbing shoulders with the former president. The most popular of these instances would be the photos shared by conservative radio show host Mark Kaye, which featured a group of black women smiling with Trump.

Something is interesting about the way the Republican party is debuting its introduction to the AI-generated ad space. While it can’t be denied that they’re using it to manipulate voters, they maintain a level of plausible deniability when they add negligible disclaimers and post AI content with no context. They aren’t truly lying to potential voters if they aren’t outright lying to potential voters. Although this is also a well-worn political tactic, its combination with artificially generated media has created new ways to mislead the American people. For example, Trump’s Comrade Kamala image.

Tracking Interest: Kamala’s Ideology

The Republican nominee and his party lackeys have been making implications against the Vice President since shortly after her campaign announcement, but they’ve ramped up during the last week. He’s claimed her father was a Marxist, and that she’s going “full communist” on her economic policy. He claimed she would enact “Soviet-style” price controls, and authored nicknames like Commie-la and Comrade Kamala. His false image showing her as the undisputed leader of a (literally) red-flagged army is only the latest of his assertions that she possesses an ideology that the United States has a deeply negative view of. But the image he shared had the too-pristine characteristics of AI, and a trained eye could spot it easily.

However, google search statistics suggest that his other comments have definitively had an impact on the public perception. “Kamala Harris economic policy” was a trending search query during the last week, with a major jump immediately following his claims about her Soviet inspiration and his string of attacks against her on TruthSocial.

Screenshot captured from Google Trends analytics. Spikes in activity align with Trump’s comments on VP Harris.

“Kamala Harris communism” also experienced waves of searches, leading to a peak on the 20th.

This shows that the narrative he’s creating is misleading the American people. And with the track record he’s created, it’s not a jump to believe that he’s doing this intentionally. Someone had to ask an AI generator to create an image of a Communist Kamala, and if it wasn’t Trump, it was likely one of his staffers.

Harris’s policies are far from communism. Her most controversial new policy is one addressing price gouging laws, something that isn’t new to US legislature in any form. Different states have enacted similar laws many times after natural disasters led to shortages in certain industries, and the federal government has indeed intervened in the private markets before, largely due to wartime economies. And while capitalist, socialist, and communist ideologies are largely considered to be opposites, there doesn’t seem to be any society on Earth with can claim to be purely any one of these. Every government is a mix of ideologies that create the policies that govern the people, and those policies structure the economic style of any given country. For instance, if the US was a purely capitalist society, we wouldn’t have:

Minimum wage
Worker safety protections
Centralized welfare or retirement
The highway system (as we know it)
Public, highly-available schooling
Anti-monopoly laws

Similarly, if China was purely communist, it wouldn’t have a private sector or any of the private equities that came with it, and it wouldn’t be the only major economy that requires no special approval for foreign direct investments.

Trump’s choice to make these specific insults is not an accident. The American population has had a distaste for anything they perceive to be communist since the turn of the 20th century and the First World War, and anti-communist propaganda has proven incredibly useful for past presidents like Harry S. Truman and Woodrow Wilson.

Existing In the Context of History

Anti-communist propaganda in the McCarthy Era

In the McCarthyism era, Truman started conversations on national trust when he signed an executive order effectively creating the first loyalty test; Which was intended to guard the American government against communist infiltration by investigating any federal or state employees known to be associated with “subversive activity”. However, participation in labor unions and strikes were often among the list of activities interpreted as subversive by the overreaching administration. The establishment at the time used a mix of propaganda and misinformation to weaponize citizen’s fear of communism against counterculture movements.

Then, in 1950, McCarthy’s claim to have a list of 205 names working in the federal government on behalf of the Communist Party gave rise to the kind of mistrust that allowed Hoover and private corporations to question anyone involved the right to protest, without any evidence of wrongdoing. The outing of a few key spies in the federal space and general fear in the population spurred the creation of COINTELPRO, which is the shady government organization responsible for the deaths of figures like MLK Junior. COINTELPRO’s original intention was to monitor communist activity in the states, but by the time it was disbanded in 1972 it had been used to undermine or effectively freeze in place many aspects and organizations associated with the Civil Rights movement, including the massacre of Fred Hampton and fellow Black Panthers during a nighttime raid in December 1969. The events of this decade led to countless innocent left-leaning citizens at the time being questioned, investigated, and imprisoned for their involvement in protests and demonstrations. Although McCarthyism is widely believed to have ended with the arrival of the 60s, government surveillance of US citizens associated with labor and civil rights organizations continued and is still used today.

Conclusions: The RNC Has Learned From History, But the American People Haven’t

The GOP and its ideological ancestors have long since understood the need for controlling your opponent. From gerrymandering to government hits, they’ve been involved in the manipulation of voter blocs and their access to election information since the founding of the parties. But in an urbanized, post-segregation world that is letting go of the no-nuance beliefs of its past, this attack on democracy has to take more creative forms. Instead of keeping people from voting for their opponents by restricting their access to the ballot, they have to change the voter’s mind before the vote is cast. They could do this by adopting widely popular policies to their platform that would bring prosperity to their constituents, but they would lose the corporate profits they enjoy when they ignore economic need. So instead, they use misinformation and distrust to discredit their rivals, making themselves appear more palatable by comparison. But the influence doesn’t end there, as we see in history. In a time when Americans fear their economy falling to China’s rising GDP, Russia’s aggression in Europe, and the rampant spread of government corruption, Trump’s narrative paints a dangerous picture. If the American people allow themselves to be convinced of shadows where there are none, we risk opening ourselves up to unjustified persecution.

Trump and the GOP’s use of both AI-related claims and the actual software itself is an organized effort to disenfranchise the American people and concentrate power in their own party. The use of AI imagery in political campaigns is inherently dishonest and it must be nipped in the bud before it revolutionizes our election information cycle. Email your representatives or make your voice known at local political meetings. In the age of information, we will not go back to a time when the American people are so easily convinced.