superbowl jesus ad, part 4: a lie so blatant it must be true
Welcome to the fourth post of a series analysing the imagery from the billion-dollar “He Gets Us” propaganda campaign to recruit people into fundamentalist evangelism, focusing specifically on the ad run during the 2024 Superbowl.
I strongly urge you to read the first section of Part 1 before continuing, if you have not already done so. That first section explains the overall theological structure of the ad. Without understanding that structure, the terms “Sinner” and “Saviour” as used in this series will not make sense, but I don’t want to have to paste that explanation back in to each of these posts.
Caught up? Nice.
One of the more curious parts of this event has been the maker’s disclaimer stating that they absolutely did not use AI, that they hired a photographer – they even named someone – and that these images are photographs.
I suggest you revisit Part 3 of this series if you still give that any credence.
Personally, I’m willing to accept that a photographer played some role. I’m convinced that the images actually used were at very least heavily reworked with AI tools, if not re-created from whole cloth using the photographs as training material, but I admit that it’s possible that in some way a photographer was involved. Maybe in the rough drafts.
But why lie about it?
AI art is, obviously, huge right now. A lot of tech is super into it; several months ago, it would’ve got them a lot of attention if they’d made interesting images and said upfront that’s how they did it. Maybe they decided to hide it because the mood on AI has shifted so much. I don’t know.
But that’s not the important part. The important part – the important question – remains…
…why lie about it?
Particularly given how obvious it is that it’s a lie?
Even though they absolutely couldn’t get images that weren’t obviously at very least heavily AI altered, if not entirely AI rendered, they decided to lie about it. Why?
The answer is very simple: they can’t not lie. They actively can’t. They can’t avoid it.
I mean, sure, they could’ve told the truth here, but the more they feel that being honest about it would hurt them in some way – even just making them look bad – the less likely that becomes.
I wish it were because of PR. I really do. But it’s not. It’s because they have adopted a very different definition of truth.
For most of us, truth is weighed against observable, measurable reality – at least, where that’s possible. The truth of science, or more generally, the truth of empiricism.
Empiricism is the idea that you can observe the world, measure it, test against it, and accept that what happens reveals things about the world (and the universe). It means you can use those tests – that data – to make decisions about your life. To improve it, even. It’s core of the scientific method, amongst other things.
Babies are, in many ways, empiricists.
But that’s not how the fundamentalist evangelical movement defines truth.
Their truth is defined by God Said. If observable reality differs, then it’s reality that’s wrong, and it’s wrong because God Said.
Yes, really. That’s the key. Right there. God Said, so It Is. It’s that simple.
This is an example of a group using inherited wisdom as its metric of truth. It’s pretty common, historically, and before empiricism took off, it was absolutely the standard in Western thought. It’s core to both western conservatism and their flavour of authoritarianism, and built upon the idea that we are all living lesser, degenerate forms of an ideal way of living that we must constantly strive to recover. In their case it’s extremely literal, in that it’s the Fall of Man in the greater sense from the Garden of Eden, and the absolute, perfect, and utterly unchanging Word of God as represented in the Bible.
And believe me, they harp a lot on that perfect and unchanging part.
In practice, is any of this actually preserved across generations? Oh hell no. It’s basically two to three generations back, as modified to suit nostalgia, simplified re-renderings of memories from childhood and parental stories, and – of course – to serve white Christian cishet male dominance over others.
Don’t believe me? In the 90s, they didn’t really care about trans people. I’d see more hate-forward people try to tease those in authority forward on it and they’d be “That sounds very, uh, medical. Is it homosexual? Then whatever, we care about stopping the homosexuals.” Before the late 1960s, they didn’t even care all that much about abortion or birth control, because caring about those things was Papist, and they were way more concerned about race mixing.
However, they’ve decided hating trans people is eternal, so now, for them, it is. It’s always been true and therefore it’s always perfect and unchanging and God Said.
This next part’s really important to understanding what’s happening around us. I’m begging you, understand this. I’ve been trying to get people to understand it for twenty years.
If truth is measured against inherited wisdom, then the truth of a statement depends upon conformity to that inherited wisdom.
That stays true even if that inherited wisdom is in the form of a Perfect and Unchanging Word Of God that changes a lot every generation and a half. How much something supports your worldview – again, God’s Word – becomes the only measure of truth, regardless of anything reality might have to say about it.
This literally is how you get most flat earthers. This is how. Right here. This. They’ve decided that’s what God Said, so God Said, and that makes it real. I have seen this happen, someone already deep in that community going over the edge to flat-eartherism, because someone proved to him that the Bible says the earth is flat, and so, he said, “You’re right. The BIble does say the earth is flat. So it is.”
This definition of “truth” – this definition that has zero direct reliance upon observable reality – is also how they can so guilelessly set up lie factories to manufacture new types blood libel against their enemies.
It’s how they could say for decades that “homosexuals” were violent vicious evil mentally-ill psychopathic paedophiles who want to rape your children, give them AIDS, and turn them gay because it’s the only way we can reproduce. It’s how they can say the same sorts of things – often exactly the same things – about trans people now, along with all the other insanity they make up.
They are aware, of course, that whose who “haven’t found Jesus” have different definitions of truth. Their leadership in particular has always been highly aware of this.
The way they’ve gone about handling that hasn’t changed much in decades. First, get a couple of fundamentalist or socially-allied “sciencey” people to either cherry-pick or just straight-up fabricate data (the “make shit up” method) and publish papers that look like science, that look real to people who don’t know how their whole system works. Paul Cameron was a particularly famous foot soldier in this part of the war; look him up, if you want. He was a professional liar generating blood libel to get people killed.
Then set up some “sciencey” or “policy-ish” sounding sockpuppet groups, and have them generate a bunch of bullshit that sounds like research or analysis. The important part is that whatever they do has to be towards the goal of ‘proving’ the desired result, as opposed to studying the actual data and seeing where that leads them.
Footnote each other back and forth for a while, then generate some another layer of new sockpuppet organisations, referencing the first two. Then the first layer can start referencing the third, and your bullshit generator is up and running.
Eventually, you get enough noise that the credulous media starts hearing and parroting it and treating your bad-faith horseshit as legitimate, both-sidings it against reality for the horse race and the views.
That’s what they did against against lesbians and gay men people for decades. That’s what they’re doing to trans people now, with the absolute intent of going back to doing it against LGB people if they manage, in the end, to “ditch the T.”
If there was one thing in the world I wish I could do with this knowledge, it’s get it into the heads of journalists and in that way convince them to stop playing along. To stop meeting bad faith with good, to stop parroting bullshit because it’s “both sides.” Just fucking stop. I don’t care that they can lie to you with sincerity, they can lie with sincerity because they’ve decided God Said This Shit We Made Up, and because of that, actual reality doesn’t matter.
It’s not even that they don’t know. They know their methods are bullshit. They know their data is bad. And they don’t care, because their own data doesn’t matter, not even to them. The lie serves God – in that they’ve decided it serves their goals that they’ve ascribed to God – and that makes it true.
Even though it’s in every way a lie, a knowing lie, made in the most complete possible bad faith, that’s what they’ve decided.
So when it comes to lying about something as obvious as this AI art bullshit…
…they can no longer even tell they’re lying.
It’s better for them and their movement, they’ve apparently decided, for then to declare that this isn’t AI art. That it’s photography, as nonsensical as that is. So despite all the obvious bullshit of that statement – despite everything your own lying eyes tell you – that’s what they’ve decided is true.
So that’s what they rationalise, and that’s what they say.
If that sounds like everything you know and hate about MAGA, and everything you know about how Donald Trump works…
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