GOP Keeps Getting Caught Using Russian Footage In Its Ads
A 2020 Trump Ad Featured Russian Fighter Jets & Soldiers: "Support Our Troops"
The GOP unveiled their "Commitment to America" agenda for 2023 ― with beautiful imagery of heartland America that was quickly exposed as generic footage from Russia and Ukraine, according to Huff Post.
“We celebrate the rich heritage of the American story and the vibrancy of the American Dream,” the voiceover states, as we see footage of an oil rig at sunrise. But that clip was actually shot by Serg Grbanoff, a Russian filmmaker, in his country’s Volgograd region.
It is one of four instances in the video of Russia/Ukraine footage being passed off as quintessentially American. A young boy plays with a toy airplane, a farmer works in a corn field, and a woman shops in a grocery store — footage that also reinforces “traditonal” gender stereotypes.
The farmer footage come from DedovStock, a Shutterstock contributor, and the actor playing the farmer works for DedovStock. His webpage has shots of him in Ukraine and the Carpathian Mountains.
In the grocery store, the word “AKCIA” can be seen on one of the items on the shelf. That’s a Slovak word meaning “action” and it is used informally to designate sales in Slovakian stores.
This is far from an isolated incident.
In 2020, Donald Trump’s re-election campaign was outed for using Russian footage four times in a three-month span. The final infraction was an ad by America First Action called “Pandemic Tax” includes Shutterstock footage from the Russian city of Novosibirsk in Siberia and iStockphoto footage from Viachaslau Rutkouski, a photographer in Belarus.
Another Trump ad “called on people to ‘support our troops’ but used a stock photo of Russian-made fighter jets and Russian models dressed as soldiers”.
Another Trump campaign ad also used footage of a conveyor belt with cardboard boxes saying “MADE IN THE USA” that was created by a Russian photographer and illustrator, and a pre-recorded video at the Republican National Convention used stock footage of a factory in Moscow.
This is all in addition to the effusive praise many Republicans have showered on Putin this year, taking their cue from Trump, who seems congenitally unable to utter a bad word bad about Putin, even as more of his critics keep dying in unusual ways and the world learns of his army’s war crimes, including sexual violence against victims “ranging in age from 4 to 82 years old”.
Fox has been a steady supporter of Putin and Russia, urging the world to show deference to the Russian dictator, repeating Putin’s propaganda so often that the Kremlin ordered Russian media to feature Tucker Carlson’s segments in their entirety. Carlson agrees that Putin “is on our side”.
In addition to its inability to curb its embrace of Putin, the GOP also face-planted with a fake Abraham Lincolm quote.
Connelly’s thread, with screenshots, exposes a potentially terrifying future — a future about which Republicans are being quite vague (password-protecting the party’s platform?), because they know it will shock, terrify, and anger so many voters. That’s a big reason why so many far-right candidates have, after seeing numerous polls condemning the Dobbs decision and outrage at their insistence that 10-year-old rape victims be forced to give birth, removed their unpopular positions on abortion from their websites as the midterm elections get closer.