Total Fraud: Adam Schiff Demands AI Political Parodies Be Banned, Forgets He Lied About Trump and Called It Parody in 2019
A politician who’s built his career on lies is suddenly worried about truth in advertising?
California Sen. Adam Schiff, a man with a documented record of deception, has introduced two bills aimed at regulating political speech in election campaigns — including one that would add prohibitions on content generated by artificial intelligence to a law that already prohibits campaigns from impersonating their opponents.
Maybe Schiff has forgotten his own past when it comes to impersonations — and the lies behind his attacks on President Donald Trump.
In a career of lowlights that would make a masochist blush, Schiff achieved one of his most notorious moments during the 2019 hearings that led up to Trump’s first impeachment, when the then-California congressman fabricated quotes from a phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodomyr Zelenskyy.
Schiff then defended playing fast and loose with the truth by claiming he was engaging in “parody.”
Well, reasonable people can disagree about whether Schiff was engaging in political “parody” or sinking to the belly-crawling tactics of a lying coward to further the cause of assassinating Trump’s character. (The vote here is “belly crawling,” just for the record. Schiff’s record is so crooked even his mortgage reeks of fraud.)
But there’s no question that Schiff’s motivation for filing the bill comes from the campaigns that led up to California’s primary elections in June.
As the San Francisco Chronicle noted in its coverage of Schiff’s bills, Spencer Pratt, the insurgent candidate challenging Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, made effective use of “brazen AI videos to disparage his opponent in his bid to become mayor of Los Angeles.”
“Pratt, a former reality TV star, relied on AI videos made by his supporters in his run for office,” the Chronicle reported. “One depicted Mayor Karen Bass as the Joker and Pratt as Batman, fighting crime. Another used AI-generated women discussing why they would vote for Pratt after a Pilates class.”
Schiff’s other bill, a campaign regulation bill, would force campaigns to disclose payments made to social media influencers for positive portrayals. Current federal law requires influencers to disclose the payments, but does not require the campaigns to make any public declaration themselves.
According to the Chronicle, that was driven by billionaire Tom Steyer’s use of social media influencers in his unsuccessful campaign for California governor.
The irony of the loathsome Schiff manufacturing a stand for honesty in politics would be laughable if it wasn’t so infuriating.