Chris Cuomo is doing the digital version of eating crow on Wednesday, after he was duped by a deepfake video of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling Sydney Sweeney’s jeans ad “blatant Nazi propaganda” on the floor of Congress.
The AI-generated video also shows the Democratic congresswoman saying that beauty “is defined by the number of victim groups of which you are a member” and that “skinny, attractive, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, cisgender women descend from the slave-daddy oppressors of this nation.”
The NewsNation host fell for the video hook, line, and sinker—even though the facial movements on the deepfake AOC can’t even keep up with the audio.
“Nothing about Hamas or people burning jews cars...but Sweeney jeans ad?” Cuomo lamented in an X post recirculating the video. “Deserved time on floor of congress? What happened to this party? Fight for small business...not for small culture wars.”
But he didn’t delete the post until after Ocasio-Cortez caught it and commented, “This is a deepfake dude. Please use your critical thinking skills. At this point you’re just reposting Facebook memes and calling it journalism.”
After realizing his mistake, Cuomo posted, “You are correct...that was a deepfake (but it really does sound like you). Thank you for correcting. But now to the central claim: show me you calling on hamas to surrender or addressing the bombing of a car in st louis belonging to the idf american soldier?...dude?”
Republican officials have glommed onto the internet conversation around Sweeney’s “great jeans” tagline in spectacularly cringeworthy fashion. President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, Fox News, and more on the right have all decided that defending Sweeney from the “woke mob” was worth national attention after online commenters speculated that the campaign’s play on the word “genes” in reference to the white, blue-eyed actress smacked of eugenics and neo-Nazism.
Not one Democratic official or lawmaker has commented on the American Eagle advertisements, which feature Sweeney ruminating about her blue jeans (or genes) being “passed down from parent to offspring.”
But the ads have been MAGA’s central distraction from Jeffrey Epstein since they debuted. Last week, Fox News mentioned Sweeney’s name a whopping 100 times more than Epstein’s, according to reports from CNN and Media Matters. Trump declared on Truth Social, “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the ‘HOTTEST’ ad out there. It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are ‘flying of the shelves.’ Go get ‘em Sydney!”
JD Vance told the Ruthless podcast last week, “My political advice to the Democrats is continue to tell everybody who thinks Sydney Sweeney is attractive is a Nazi.” He added, “You have a normal all-American beautiful girl doing a normal jeans ad. They’re trying to sell jeans to kids in America and they have managed to so unhinge themselves over this thing. And it’s like, you guys, did you learn nothing from the November 2024 election?”
But since no prominent Democrats have attacked the ad, someone evidently decided to use artificial intelligence to put those words into Ocasio-Cortez’s mouth. Unfortunately for Cuomo, he missed the clearly displayed “ChatGPT + AI Art” description on the video’s link when he recirculated the fake video on X Wednesday.
As for Sweeney, the internet backlash has only served to make her more famous—and increase shareholder value at American Eagle. American Eagle towed the line with both ends of the political spectrum when the company declared the campaign is only “about the jeans” and “great jeans look great on everyone.”
