Fox News Falls For Racist AI Videos Of Fake SNAP Recipients

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The Republican Party, right-wing media, and the rest of the MAGA world would have us believe America is not and never was a racist country. But it is. The very people trying to convince us it isn’t prove every day that it is, either by trying to suppress or outright erase the history that proves unequivocally that America was founded on racial oppression, or by demonstrating American racism in the present.

And there’s no better illustration of that clear and present racism than the way the controversy behind SNAP benefits being jeopardized by the ongoing government shutdown has inspired racists across social media to create and post AI-generated videos depicting Black women complaining about losing their SNAP benefits and/or selling them for cash. What’s worse is that these videos have fooled conservative “news” networks like Fox News into thinking they’re real.

That’s right, y’all — so-called journalists at MAGA America’s most trusted news site saw videos of Black women talking about selling their benefits and wondering how they’re going to feed their “seven children” from “seven baby daddies, and they opted not to do the 10 seconds of Googling it would have taken to know that these videos were not real.

“SNAP Beneficiaries Threaten to Ransack Stores Over Government Shutdown,” read the headline of one of Fox’s original stories on the matter, according to the Internet Wayback Machine. The headline was eventually rewritten, “AI Videos of SNAP Beneficiaries Complaining About Cuts Go Viral,” after someone at the network realized its media professionals have the media literacy of 80-year-old MAGA rubes who would believe any piece of disinformation presented to them from the bowels of TrustMeBro.com.

That would include the sitting president of the United States, by the way.

“SNAP beneficiaries have expressed outrage on social media over the government shutdown that could affect their grocery benefits starting next month, and some are even threatening to ransack stores if food stamp payments don’t go through starting Nov. 1,” Fox’s original article read, citing multiple AI-generated TikTok videos, including one in which a mother says: “It is the taxpayer’s responsibility to take care of my kids. It is the taxpayer’s job to pay for my kids to eat and for my kids to be taken care of.”

So, basically, people whose job it is to research and present news didn’t question for a second quotes that couldn’t possibly be more on the nose in regards to right-wing rhetoric against welfare recipients.

Fox News did include an editor’s note at the end of the amended article, saying, “This article previously reported on some videos that appear to have been generated by AI without noting that. This has been corrected.” A more honest editor’s note would have read, “Our network is run by white supremacists who don’t really care about factual reporting, so they accidentally attacked Black women, who they perceive to be the face of SNAP, by airing videos of fake Black women on welfare. Sorry about that. We’ll make sure our raging misogynoir isn’t expressed through easily-debunked racist nonsense next time. (BTW, we absolutely won’t make sure of that next time.)”

Fox News isn’t the core problem here, of course. The real issue is that these deep fakes were created in the first place. Without a doubt, we know what kind of people created them and why. They’re of the same ilk as the Newsmax host who recently claimed without evidence — and in direct contradiction to what actual, data-based research on welfare recipients shows — that the SNAP system is overrun with scammers who are using their benefits “to get their nails done” and “to get their weaves.”

The clip of host Rob Schmitt being a full-blown anti-Black bigot came after he aired a montage of videos that exclusively featured Black women on SNAP, despite the fact that Black people, in general, represent less than 26% of people on SNAP.

The racist welfare queen myth has been around since the Reagan administration, and no matter how many times it has been exposed as a bigoted lie over the decades, white conservatives continue to perpetuate it through white supremacist fiction. It’s an unchanging narrative because America being a racist country is an unchanging condition. And, again, it’s the people who are most in denial of this demonstrable fact that do the most work to keep white supremacy alive.

It’s really that simple.

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