WHO KNEW SOCIETY’S apparently inexorable descent into fascism would be so wacky?

With only days to go until the US public elects a new president, the race has taken the form of a toss-up suspended in mid-air, with most of the polls from the six or seven states that actually matter producing results that show Donald Trump and Kamala Harris separated only by the margin of error or less.

Relief though it would be, it’s not as if we here in Ireland can ignore the US presidential election. Or, we could, but it wouldn’t do us any good.

The fallout from Donald Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden dominated the week, thanks mostly to comedian Tony Hinchliffe’s speech in which he compared Puerto Rico to a floating island of garbage.

Joe Biden immediately set about blowing whatever momentum Harris’ campaign had seized on the back of Hinchcliffe’s comments by saying that: “The only garbage I see floating out there is [Trump's] supporters.” This, of course, isn’t a patch on what Trump says about his political opponents, their supporters, and various marginalised communities when on his best behaviour, but Biden’s attempt to match the Republicans for rhetoric opened the window for Trump to innovate and take back the narrative.

All of sudden, Trump was behind the wheel of a garbage truck with TRUMP-VANCE 2024 on the side of it, wearing an orange hi-viz vest and reminding the world that he knows what works on TV far better than any other politician who has ever lived.

One actually suspects that Trump would be much happier spending his days doing donuts in a rubbish lorry, hanging out with Hulk Hogan and Dr Phil, but this time next week there’s a solid chance he’ll be president for another four years. Though, in many ways, what’s the difference?

There are few guarantees as we head into that final stretch, but it seems certain that what’s to come will be no less ludicrous than the last week has been. As that happens, it seems more important than ever to fortify ourselves against the toxic influence of US politics and its braindeadening effects on all who get caught in its radiation.

As we prepare for our own election this winter, it would be nice to delude ourselves into thinking that we are altogether more sophisticated than the country that conducts its elections in part by leaving unguarded ballot boxes in the street for their citizens, a famously stable bunch, to interact with as they see fit (hint: it involves fire). But there are signs every now and then that Ireland is apt to import some of America’s unsettling political trends.

This week, for example, Kerry TD Michael Healy-Rae shared a deepfake video of popular Taylor Swift ‘endorsing’ him. Healy-Rae’s own tweet acknowledged that the video was fake, but it still came across as a watershed moment for mainstream Irish politics.

Some going to wake up to the news of an endorsement from Tay Tay herself. I mean haters will say it's fake (and they'd be right) but I'll just shake it off! Like, I'm not looking for a love story and don't want any bad blood.. I just want your number 1 vote when the time comes! pic.twitter.com/FgxUlpTjUo

— Michael Healy-Rae (@MHealyRae) October 28, 2024

Nobody wants to make too much of a meal of it – not least because that’s the kind of tension that Healy-Rae thrives on – but it’s not exactly ideal. We only have a few dozen people in the country who make the laws, and Michael Healy-Rae is two of them. If we need the Swifties to mobilise in order to save our electoral integrity, our position is already more perilous than we might fear.

Healy-Rae has been a TD for 13 years, and say what you will about him, he has more or less demonstrated a respect for the conventions of Irish politics throughout that time. There is, however, a burgeoning political movement in Ireland that is significantly less likely to be bound by the same adherence to “the rules,” as we like to think of them. America used to have rules! And look at them now.

The AI-Taylor Swift story got a little less funny as the week wore on when it became clear that our collective ability to detect fraudulent AI content leaves a gobsmacking deal to be desired. Our mass gullibility on Thursday, when an ad for a fake Halloween parade through Dublin city centre resulted in thousands turning up to gaze forlornly at nothing before realising they’d been duped by an article written by AI and uploaded that to a website whose home page has such human-sounding phrases as: “Halloween is celebrated on the night of October 31st. this tradition dates back centuries and continues to be a favourite holiday for many.” My job remains safe for now.

What has happened to us? Our idea of ourselves cute hoors is under very dire threat if this is the ease with which we can now be outfoxed.

One would think that getting thousands of people to line O’Connell St in expectation of a Halloween parade that isn’t real would take more work than a crappy website populated solely by AI articles, advertising an event about which there has been zero other evidence. As noted in a report by goosed.ie, there were other telltale signs — such as the detail that the parade would wind up in Temple Bar. Why would a parade end up in a tightly packed urban square already jammed with people?

If nothing else, it should have been obvious that Dublin City Council would never introduce such a thing. The last thing those people want is us out on the streets, using the bins and all those other services we pay for. 

And yet, I sympathise with those who were fooled. I sympathise because when I first saw the tweet reporting that thousands of people were stood on O’Connell Street staring flaccidly at a very unparaded road, my first thought was: “Wait, is that real?”

By which I mean to say, I couldn’t immediately tell if the report that people had fallen for a hoax parade was, itself, a hoax. Yes, for some of us, it can seem almost unbelievable just how many people are so easy to trick, and yes, those people do need a long hard look in a reflective surface that is not their phone. But absolutely nobody is immune to misinformation, and we have no excuse not to learn our lesson before it’s too late.

What we have to accept is that people, at large, are extremely easy to manipulate and indeed mobilise under the right conditions. You can get them out of their house with the promise of some skeletons waddling past Clery’s or whatever the hell else the AI promised those people. It bears worrying about what could happen if a more intentional, more advanced and more vicious scam comes along.

The two big stories of the week therefore dovetail to form a sort of cautionary double-helix, one of those helter-skelter slides that wrap around one another.

A deepfake Taylor Swift “endorsement” of Michael Healy-Rae is easy to brush off because the belief is that nobody would ever be stupid enough to believe such a thing. That belief is about to be stress tested like never before.