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Out of Ideas, Into the Deepfake: Republicans’ Desperate Recycling of Anti-Trans Panic
A towering, hyper-muscular swimmer stands atop a national championship podium in a women’s swimsuit, holding a trophy and smirking down at a terrified, diminutive cisgender girl competitor. In the background, a young girl asks her mother, “Will I have to race someone like that one day?”
Moments later, the scene shifts from the pool to the locker room. A hand pulls open a shower curtain, and the camera closes in on a young woman sitting in the corner, wrapping her arms around herself in fear. The voiceover lands its punchline: “ [David] Jolly [the Floridian Democratic gubernatorial candidate] says we should be supportive to let them play, or our daughters pay the price.”
Sponsored by the Republican Party of Florida against Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Jolly, this 30-second campaign ad does not document reality. It uses generative AI to manufacture a grotesque caricature of transgender girlhood.
To make its case, the spot takes a single sentence Jolly gave on a podcast—“I think it can be supportive of them to allow them to play”—and cuts away everything else. In the actual interview, Jolly was talking about kids trying to find a team and make friends while working through personal struggles with their families and doctors. The ad, however, manufactured a muscular adult villain as a sexual predator to turn youth inclusion into an existential threat.
A few thousand miles away in California, Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton launched a similar ad in Spanish targeting Hispanic voters. His ad depicts an oversized, mustached player bowling over teenage girls at soccer practice. When an anxious father asks who authorized this, a deepfake of Democratic opponent Xavier Becerra smiles and declares: “That was me. I fought for boys to play in girls’ sports, and I will continue to do so as governor.”
The Anatomy of a Recycled Panic
Manufacturing spectacle around trans girls in sports is not a new invention. The blueprint dates back to the 2022 midterms, when the dark-money group Citizens for Sanity launched its "Game Over" campaign, staging an exaggerated track meet where a male actor portraying a trans girl easily blew past female runners.
That playbook reached its peak during the 2024 presidential race, where Donald Trump saturated the airwaves with attacks painting Kamala Harris as outside the cultural mainstream. Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project celebrated those spots as a decisive factor in Trump's victory. Now in the 2026 midterms, the party is recycling the same script: Republican National Committee spokesperson Hunter Lovell told PolitiFact that Democrats are “allowing boys to infiltrate girls' locker rooms and sports.”
Yet the sudden jump to AI-generated media gives the game away. Real high school fields do not feature predatory “males” dominating girls' leagues, so campaigns have to invent them using AI. Even in Florida and Georgia, where state laws banned trans girls from school sports years ago, candidates continue to run ads about imaginary invasions.
Voters are seeing through the illusion. Across social media, comment sections mock these commercials as lazy “AI slop,” asking: If this issue is such an urgent crisis, why do you have to invent fake videos to prove it? In Florida, where neighborhood groups are already fighting massive new data centers that strain power grids and spike electric bills, people are asking why millions of dollars and vast computational energy are going toward anti-trans ads instead of fixing local infrastructure.
Misreading Communities and Burning Out the Base
Hilton’s ad relies on an old assumption that Latino families will reflexively turn out over social panic. Citizens for Sanity ran the same play in 2022, buying airtime in battleground districts to argue trans inclusion violated "Latino values" while attacking school integration initiatives in Asian and white communities.
That pitch ignores what parents actually worry about. Pew Research Center surveys show Hispanic parents are focused on tangible, daily safety: neighborhood violence, bullying, teen mental health, and keeping food on the table. Foreign-born parents report even greater concern over basic stability and physical safety.
You cannot feed a family on synthetic outrage. By reducing working-class communities to single-issue culture warriors, these campaigns fundamentally misread their own base. Even across traditionally red states, voters are voicing sharp frustration over skyrocketing gas, grocery, and healthcare costs, placing the blame for inflation on corporate greed and rising expenses rather than manufactured social panics.
Exposing the Obsession and Turning the Tide
Instead of dodging the trans concern, progressive coalitions are finally calling out this political fixation. A recent seven-figure buy from the Progress Action Fund titled “Republicans In Your Bathroom” turns the surveillance logic back on its authors: a girl walks into a public restroom to find a middle-aged Republican congressman standing in her stall, insisting he needs to inspect her. The ad captures the absurdity many families have felt: it is strange for politicians to obsess over children's lockers while ignoring gas prices and rent.
The cracks in the strategy are showing from within. As former Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan admitted to Texas Monthly, anti-trans advertising is "not resonating" with voters who care about property insurance, hospital bills, and inflation. Behind closed doors, Republican operatives are panicking because their old cultural wedge is failing to distract from their lack of economic solutions.
Manufactured panics only work when people stay home. This November, we have the power to cut through the digital noise, reject synthetic fear, and demand leadership grounded in real, everyday progress.
October 20, 2026