This is Slopaganda
July 4, 2025 Fascism Propaganda Generative AI OpenAI Donald Trump Authoritarianism Annika Brockschmidt Hayao Miyazaki Mitch Theireau Jason Stanley Naples Unreality
Every movement has its visual style. Today’s autocrats are generating it with AI.
In February, Donald Trump reposted a now infamous video that imagines a future for the Gaza Strip. Set to an AI-generated song, the video shows the Strip full of gleaming skyscrapers and golden Trump statues, the streets filled with Teslas, and dollars raining from the sky.
In the clip, the Speedo-clad Trump and Netanyahu tan on sunbeds, a youthful Elon Musk snacks on some hummus, children frolic through the streets.
Viewed before the backdrop of an ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the clip is certainly tasteless. But it also isn’t real: This video is an AI-generated fever-dream, a vision (a nightmare!) set in the unreal cinematic universe of Trump 2.0, replete with all its main characters. “Trump Gaza”, as the background song goes, is nothing but a cruel fantasy where Trump is king and reality bends to his will.
A few weeks after the clip came out, OpenAI released an update to their AI image generator, empowering it to create more credible images in the style of existing artworks.
For a day or two, the internet became awash with pictures of everyday situations or famous images in the style of the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli1; all anime eyes, pastel colors, and surreal scenes.
The image shared by the US government
People would “Ghiblify” their images with ChatGPT, and the new American government was all too happy to participate, sharing a Ghiblified image of a crying deportee in handcuffs.
“We will find you and we will deport you”, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had declared just a few days earlier, speaking as she stood before the half-naked inmates in a Salvadoran supermax prison2 where her government deports people (sometimes by mistake).
Noem’s press stunt was cruel, a hyper-realistic and ultra-violent statement of intent.
Pair it with the Ghiblified picture of a deportation, and it all looks even more sinister: Someone fed a photo into an AI and applied a trendy prompt, as though the administration wanted to remind people that it wasn’t just ruthless but also embraced meme culture.
This “naked cruelty”, as Mitch Theireau on Drift Mag has called it3, this “lust for violence” as Annika Brockschmidt describes it is one of the hallmarks of fascist regimes. And shockingly, more and more researchers have come out and said it: We’re witnessing the United States slide into fascism.
Annika Brockschmidt has written and talked at length about this issue, including the ill-fated notion that “it can only be fascism if it’s the 1930s in Germany”. Of course fascism emerged in Italy before the nazis, in Spain it survived the fall of the nazis, and it never quite disappeared.
In the most recent iteration, today’s digitally-tinged fascism, we’re seeing a wide embrace of AI imagery by the new right. They are becoming the dominant style of the global fascist ascent.
Aside from Trump, Argentina’s Milei has posted AI-images, the German AfD had AI-generated images on their election posters—and we’re seeing more examples every day.
The first time I saw all this tied together was in The New Socialist magazine, which called AI “The New Aesthetics of Fascism”:
The right loves AI-generated imagery. In a short time, a full half of the political spectrum has collectively fallen for the glossy, disturbing visuals created by generative AI.
Though I find talking about AI in terms of the working and capitalist classes surprisingly retrograde, there are some important points in the article—particularly about the cruelty on display:
No matter how deeply avant-garde art has engaged in shock and putative nihilism, no artist, to my knowledge, has ever made art with the sole aim of harming the already vulnerable. (…) Andy Warhol’s mass-produced art did not create enjoyment by enabling its viewers to imagine their class enemies being made unemployed. Those are the goals of AI art, and that is why it resonates with the right.
Trump’s AI aesthetic also sets out to provoke his opponents, argues Matthew Gault on 404 Media:
All political movements are accompanied by artists who translate the politics into pictures, writing, and music. Adolf Ziegler captured the Nazi ideal in paintings. Stalin’s Soviet Union churned out mass produced and striking propaganda posters that wanted citizens about how to live. The MAGA movement’s artistic aesthetic is AI slop and Donald Trump is its king. It is not concerned with convincing anyone or using art to inform people about its movement. It seeks only to upset people who aren’t on board and excite the faithful because it upsets people.
As I’ve written before, regimes of all stripes love to replace whatever aesthetic exists in a quest to appear progressive4. They love forging their own visual style to differentiate themselves from whatever came before.
Looking at the past, an artistic style like socialist realism seems inevitable, or even inextricably linked to the political movement, yet it was anything but.
Hitler’s new reich chancellory, with a horse statue by Josef Thorak: Giving shape to fascism.
Each look was specifically chosen to break with the past and to appear new: The Soviets had Tatlin’s Tower, the Italian Fascists had Futurism, and the nazis their faux neo-classical look. The nazis also employed propaganda artists like Josef Thorak to give shape and a visual style to their regime.
In Germany, most Nazi art and architecture is rightfully gone. I haven’t been able to experience its desired effect.
But then, visiting Naples a few years ago, I stepped out of a restaurant one night and into a street lined by the Palazzo delle Poste. The building had been commissioned by the fascists and has remained standing until the present day. There was something undeniably notable about it, about how the post office clashed with the rest of the built environment.
Looking it up now, I see that it is because of an architectural style that Wikipedia describes as “severe and monumental”—both austerely modern and strangely reminiscent of the Roman Empire.
Here’s me standing in front of Naples’ post office.
“Severe” is a fitting term, as it squares with the AI images we’re now seeing everywhere: The AI propaganda is indeed severe, it’s a kind of merciless and unforgiving “art” that provokes, agitates, and desensitizes. It’s an “aesthetic justification of the right of the strongest”5—and it calls into question reality itself.
How Fascism Works
In How Fascism Works, the researcher Jason Stanley describes “Unreality” as one of the core tenets of fascism. Stanley refers mainly to conspiracy theories and how the powers that be leverage them to call into question a society‘s shared sense of reality to divide it.
But when he wrote his book in 2018, there was no AI to reckon with, no “large-scale degradation of the information environment”, as Elizabeth Lopatto has called it. Stanley couldn’t have known that future fascists would be able to leverage the same unreality as socialist realist art, the same severity of Futurism. And that they could do so without hiring propaganda artists, all at a fraction of the cost, enhanced by the sharing power of global social networks.
The unreality is only set to become greater.
Miyazaki had famously said that he considered AI art “an insult to life itself”↩︎
That image, actually, had all the hallmarks of being fake—starting with the context collapse of the Secretary in front of the prisoners—but the stark disconnect was surely engineered to shock. When so much is becoming fake, realizing that something is real can cut deeply.↩︎
Theireau writes: “The message is twofold: to the believers and the concerned, There is a threat and we will deal with it; to the outraged and the terrorized, Deal with it. These images say all this not through the functionary slog of a PowerPoint, as with the nonexistent WMDs, but with a battery of filters, edits, and references. You might call it agit-slop.”↩︎
Resulting in such ironies as the nazis abolishing the deeply progressive Bauhaus, something Germany’s AfD has copied.↩︎
I translated this term from a German article quoting Wolfgang Ullrich. Here’s the passage if you read German: Als „ästhetische Rechtfertigung des Rechts des Stärkeren“ hat der Kulturwissenschaftler Wolfgang Ullrich kürzlich die neuen autoritären Bildwelten charakterisiert. Die Formel bringt auf den Punkt, was die reaktionären Visionen der Network-States mit den hypermaskulinen Antikenphantasien von Musk und Zuckerberg, Altmans kulleräugigem Profilbild und der „ghiblifizierten“ Meme-Propaganda des Weißen Hauses verbindet: Es sind Bildwelten der Rücksichtslosigkeit, in denen neokoloniale Expansionsträume, pseudohistorisch bemäntelte Machtphantasien, ein entfesselter Datenextraktivismus und die zynische Glorifizierung staatlicher Gewalt ihren gemeinsamen Ausdruck finden.↩︎