In 1964, the Johnson campaign aired what would become one of America’s most infamous attack ads. Now, it’s being repurposed against James Talarico and trans kidsLibrary of Congress
In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign ran a terrifying 60-second advertisement. It opens with a three-year-old girl in a field, pulling petals off a daisy while counting to ten. Then, a man’s voice begins a countdown, and a nuclear explosion fills the screen.
The advertisement only aired once, but roughly 100 million people saw it. The message was clear: Johnson’s opponent, Barry Goldwater, was a warmonger who would put American children in danger and bring nuclear armageddon. Johnson won in a landslide, and the daisy video became America’s most infamous attack ad.
Now, a Super PAC acting on behalf of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Senatorial campaign is using an AI-generated, Frankensteined version of Johnson’s video to push a different message.
In this version, instead of being wiped out by a nuclear bomb, the daisy girl—resurrected via generative AI—lies on an operating table in front of an AI-generated version of Texas Representative James Talarico.
“She dreams of growing up, falling in love, becoming a mother,” a narrator intones. “The trans industry preys on confused children. Irreversible puberty blockers. Cross-sex hormones. Sex-change surgeries.” The Talarico campaign has stated that “James does not support gender reassignment surgery for minors,” and that “this AI deep fake ad is flat out lying.”
It’s not the only AI advertisement Paxton’s allies have produced this cycle, nor is it the first designed to attack Talarico’s support for transgender youth. Another advertisement, which ran in June, shows an AI-generated James Talarico dancing in a dress, singing a parody version of “My Favorite Things” from “The Sound of Music” reworked to be about giving girls hormones “til they grow mustaches.” Paxton has built his brand on ridiculing trans youth and making it as difficult as possible for them to access medical care. In May, he even took time during his runoff victory speech to call Talarico’s defense of trans youth “weird.”
This $10 million ad buy, though, might be the Paxton campaign’s most egregious attack yet. The ad was developed by the American Principles Project, one of the earliest groups to push anti-trans laws. Their ultimate goal, as my colleague Madison Pauly has reported, is to go beyond banning gender-affirming care for children and outlaw medical care for trans people of all ages. As the group’s president, Terry Schilling, admitted last year, he and his allies are starting with children because that’s “where the consensus is.”
The original “daisy girl” ad was effective because it was able to make people afraid. The campaign spot, which aired in the middle of a family television program, pushed parents to vote in the way they believed would protect their children from an unthinkable fate. Schilling and his allies hope to leverage parents’ fears of a supposed predatory medical establishment to push Paxton to victory.
But if previous attempts to remix the daisy video are anything to go by, the American Principles Project may not succeed. Bob Dole, in 1996, aired a version of the daisy video that concerned itself with teenage drug use. Audiences didn’t find that particularly compelling, and Dole lost. The Hillary Clinton campaign, in 2016, tracked down the actress who starred in the original video to shoot an ad for her presidential bid. Clinton lost, too. An atom bomb is terrifying because it is real, but an AI-generated three-year-old on an operating table is a manufactured threat.
This article has been updated to reflect a comment from James Talarico’s campaign.
