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.
Schiff is the politician whose duplicity became a byword on Capitol Hill during the first Trump presidency.
He’s the man who swore to Americans that proof of the Democratic hysteria of “Russian collusion” was in “plain sight” — before years of investigation and tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money were wasted on finding out that there was no there there.
He’s a man, in short, who has played the dirtiest kinds of political games in the dirtiest ways there are to play it in his time in Congress.
It’s the kind of behavior that got him kicked off the House Intelligence Committee he once chaired. (Fellow Democratic reprobate Eric Swalwell got the boot from the committee, too.) But it’s exactly the kind of behavior that convinced California Democrats to promote him to the Senate.
But give former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi credit as a talent spotter — she knew an amoral, conniving low-life like Schiff was exactly the kind of person she needed on the committee that “investigated” the Capitol incursion of Jan. 6, 2021, and wove a tapestry of half-truths and lies about that date thick enough to cover up her own considerable role in the events.
(She also hand-picked former Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for the same committee. The devil looks after his own, as the saying goes.)
And this selfsame Adam Schiff is suddenly aflame with the ardor of honesty — consumed with agony at the prospect that American voters could be subjected to artificial intelligence ads doing exactly what Adam Schiff himself did in the flesh before the House of Representatives — lying about a political opponent by putting words into his mouth that he never once said.
Whatever it is that Schiff is really afraid of when it comes to AI in ads, it’s a rock-solid bet that it isn’t because he’s afraid they’re going to be dishonest.
Few men in American politics have ever been bigger strangers to the truth.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
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