When Real Videos Get Called Deepfakes: The New War on Truth

In an era where 47% of Americans don't trust online news, even authentic videos are now under suspicion.

Last week, when footage emerged of Alex Pretti kicking an ICE vehicle's taillight, left-wing social media immediately cried "deepfake." Pretti, a 37-year-old anti-ICE protester, would be shot dead by Border Patrol agents 11 days later. The video was real.

What the Video Shows—and What It Doesn't

Let's establish the facts. Pretti did damage the vehicle. But this doesn't justify his killing. In America, the penalty for kicking a government SUV isn't summary execution.

Donald Trump called Pretti an "agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist." Right-wing influencers like Megyn Kelly claimed the footage proved Pretti had been "victimizing" Border Patrol. But the crucial evidence was different: cellphone videos showing Pretti trying to help a fallen protester before being shot 10 times by federal officers.

The Department of Homeland Security initially claimed Pretti "approached officers with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun" to "kill law enforcement"—a narrative anyone with eyes could see was false.

The New Denial Playbook

Here's where it gets interesting. The right responded with false interpretation; the left responded by denying the video's existence entirely.

The "deepfake" claims spreading across X, Bluesky, and TikTok made little sense. If conservatives wanted to fabricate evidence against Pretti, why show him merely damaging property rather than assaulting officers? Yet logic didn't matter—the narrative went viral anyway.

This rush to denialism was dangerous on two levels. First, publishing strong assertions without evidence is always unwise. Second, and more critically, it undermines one of democracy's last remaining safeguards.

Trump's War on Reality

Trump has waged an unprecedented assault on objective truth, making over 30,000 false or misleading statements during his first term alone. From inauguration crowd sizes to election legitimacy, his lies assert that his word supersedes reality.

Video evidence has been one of the few remaining checks on this mendacity. The Pretti case proved this. Despite the administration's false narrative, clear footage sparked bipartisan outrage. The Border Patrol commander was demoted, the DHS secretary admitted error, and the FBI took over the investigation.

This demonstrated that while Trump might deceive half the country about invisible matters—election integrity, vaccine efficacy—visual evidence can still ground Americans in shared reality.

Don't Cry "Deepfake"

This makes liberal conspiracy theorizing particularly reckless. Yes, AI can generate photorealistic videos. Yes, we must verify footage authenticity. But falsely crying "deepfake" corrodes the very constraints that keep authoritarianism in check.

We're at risk of losing video evidence as a democratic safeguard. Every baseless "deepfake" claim hastens a world where recordings of state violence carry no weight.

The Global Stakes

This phenomenon extends beyond America. From Myanmar's military denying massacre footage to Russia dismissing war crime evidence as "Western propaganda," authoritarian regimes worldwide exploit deepfake anxieties to discredit inconvenient truths.

Even in established democracies, politicians increasingly dismiss unflattering footage as "manipulated" or "out of context." The UK's handling of protest videos, France's response to police brutality footage, and Germany's debates over surveillance recordings all show similar patterns.

Tech platforms face an impossible task: How do you moderate content when any video can be labeled "fake" for political convenience? Meta, Google, and TikTok are developing detection tools, but they can't solve the underlying problem—our willingness to believe what's convenient rather than what's true.

The Democracy Advantage

Liberal democracies have one crucial advantage in this information war: They don't need to manufacture reality. The facts are usually on democracy's side. Police misconduct, government corruption, corporate malfeasance—these stories emerge because democratic institutions, however imperfect, create space for truth-telling.

But this advantage disappears when democracy's defenders abandon intellectual honesty. Authoritarian movements can spread self-flattering fictions with abandon because they have no investment in reality-based politics. Democrats don't have that luxury.