Call it the slop election.

This year’s midterms have dovetailed with the moment experts have been warning about for years: when generative artificial intelligence makes content that looks real enough to fool people, is accessible to almost everyone and can be deployed at massive scale.

Political action committees and campaigns spent well over $100 million on fake ads to influence federal, state and local elections this year. Fake pollsters used AI to make up shops and reports overnight. And political-attack websites disguised as nonprofit think tanks swayed local elections. I wrote in September about the Local Government Accountability Institute, a fake research organization that used AI to spin up fake studies and papers as well as attack videos and ads targeting two Sarasota County commissioners in Florida.

This kind of “slopaganda” — which researchers define as unwanted AI-generated content spread in order to manipulate beliefs to achieve political ends — is everywhere.

A Russian disinformation campaign doctored celebrity videos to mock Democrats and urge social media users to vote Republican. A Republican running for a county judge seat in Texas shared an AI-generated video depicting Black voters expressing support for his campaign. In Wisconsin a Republican U.S. representative running for re-election prompted Grok for a video of his opponent ordering “peasants” to vote for her. President Donald Trump has depicted himself as Jesus, the pope and the Green Lantern.

Slop was used by campaigns big and small this year, almost exclusively in support of right-wing candidates. Slopaganda is affordable and so easy to produce that anyone with a basic understanding of the internet can deploy it with minimal effort.

So I did.

With an afternoon to spare, a few prompts to ChatGPT and Claude and Grok, and a $14 charge to the company card, I created a website for the Generative Research Institute for Truth (or GRIFT). I wanted to show how easy it would be to launch a fake political organization like LGAI, and convince the algorithms — and, if I wanted to take it further, the voters — that my slopaganda was legit.

The site features a mission statement, an advisory council, research papers full of statistics and even an award section, all created by AI. I announced the organization on Substack and Facebook pages I set up, and had Grok create videos using my likeness to advertise. The GRIFT was on, and my slopaganda campaign was more successful than it had any business being.

Watch “SLOPAGANDA!” the second episode of “The Deep End with Brandy Zadrozny” on YouTube and at MS NOW.

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After a stunning election victory for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, American right-wing officials and commentators fell back on their usual response to a loss for one of their own: baseless claims that the contest was rigged.

“Is Brazil turning into a Banana Republic?” Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser turned election denier, wrote on X, appending a chart of a rolling vote count that showed Lula overtaking his right-wing opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro. “What does this remind you of?”

“Where have we seen this same pattern?” far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones asked. “Ahh yes, 2020 …”

Lula won 51.8% of Sunday’s second round of voting to Bolsonaro’s 48.2 percent, a margin of almost 4.4 million votes. It was a remarkable reversal from the first round, in which Lula lost to Bolsonaro by 2 percentage points. Never before had a Brazilian candidate come back from a first-round loss to win the second, and Bolsonaro refused to concede the upset, asking election officials to annul the results and calling the extension of voting hours (which both campaigns had requested, after weather and transportation problems) a “dirty trick.”

The result is a blow to President Donald Trump, a friend to authoritarian strongmen and longtime ally of Bolsonaro and his family, including his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently imprisoned for attempting a coup. Trump has yet to respond to Bolsonaro’s loss, but the reaction from the American right was swift, with some of its loudest voices calling for U.S. intervention in Brazil.

“If a conservative government in Brazil did this, everyone in the mainstream press in America would lose their minds,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote on X, referring to the extended voting hours. “But I guess they’re just choosing to be silent because it’s all for the cause.”

Mike Benz, a former vlogger who praised Hitler and now enjoys special access to the State Department, suggested that the extended voting hours had “just stacked the 2026 vote for Lula,” and that they were the work of a Brazilian court installed by USAID — the humanitarian and development agency at the center of Benz’s many conspiracy theories, and which he helped dismantle.

“Don’t be cucks,” pickup artist turned conservative commentator Mike Cernovich urged the State Department on X. “The election was rigged and it must be done again, the legal way.”

“It’s time for President Trump to send in a team for Lula,” one far-right influencer said on X, referring to Trump’s invasion of Venezuela and capture of its president, echoing Jones’ call for “Lula to get the Nicolás Maduro Treatment.”

Trump did not explicitly endorse Bolsonaro in this election, but the defeated right-wing family seems to be asking for more direct U.S. help now.

“This is a message to you: Do not recognize this election because even more other facts are coming up right now,” said Eduardo Bolsonaro, Flávio’s brother, who lives in Texas and was sentenced in Brazil to more than four years’ jail time for lobbying the Trump administration to interfere in his father’s trial. “We need to cancel this election. It was clearly fraudulent, but we need international pressure. We need you to share this video, make sure that everybody’s on the same page.”

Strangely, in a video, posted to X, Eduardo Bolsonaro offered early Polymarket predictions as evidence of the alleged fraud.

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