Sabrina Carpenter defeated the White House
The White House isn’t leaving Sabrina Carpenter alone, as they posted yet another video featuring her this week from the official White House accounts. As more of the United States cabinet positions and departments pivot to trolling on Social media, the beloved pop star is the latest target of their ire.
Previously, the White House account used one of her songs in a video promoting ICE raids targeting immigrants in different locations. When Carpenter realized that her songs are being used as the background checks for these ice videos, she called out the agency and the white house communication staff on social media.
Sabrina Carpenter’s ongoing ordeal with the United States Government
Numerous Twitter users are celebrating the pop star effectively ratioing the actual white house account. (Commenters point out that it could be the biggest ratio in the history of Twitter, but we haven’t confirmed that fact yet.)
At this moment, as ICE remains unpopular on social media outside of conservative circles, that fact has not stopped the administration from continuing its all out media blitz assault. Their posts feature AI generated videos and clips that play as recruitment adds for individuals wanting to join their cause.
The White House issued a statement to Entertainment Weekly. (A real sentence in 2025!) They doubled down on their use of her arresting gimmick in their videos. “Here’s a Short n’ Sweet message for Sabrina Carpenter: We won’t apologize for deporting dangerous criminal illegal murderers, rapists, and pedophiles from our country… Anyone who would defend these sick monsters must be stupid, or is it slow?”
ICE, Sabrina Carpenter, AI, and all of us
Seeing the images of real people interspersed with AI hallucinations of people under assault by ice is largely the point. Blurring the lines between vulnerable among us and “hardened criminals” (because that’s a thing that’s not slippery to define at all) is a crucial part of the exercise. In effect, it’s a lot harder to be neighbors with people when you can easily craft an “other” to despise.
The Guardian’s piece on AI art as the aesthetics of fascism is illustrative at this juncture. Eric Reinhart lays out how dehumanizing people has always been a part of fascist projects, and AI supercharges that effort.
“Machines are things that make other things,” he observes. “Under their expanding influence, we too risk becoming nothing more than another thing – a process of thingification by which we forget what it feels like to be human and to connect not just as employees, workers, consumers or citizens but as beings capable of feeling and being felt in return.”
(featured image: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)
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