A Sitting Congressman Is Faking His Opponent's Words With AI — and Wisconsin's Deepfake Law Can't Touch Him

On September 30, Cooke's attorneys at Elias Law Group sent Van Orden a cease-and-desist letter stating flatly: "Ms. Cooke never made the statements attributed to her. She does not support, and has never supported, the positions ascribed to her in this deepfake" ^[2][4]. The letter went further, accusing Van Orden of "indisputably posting videos falsely conveying that Ms. Cooke has made particular statements... for the patently obvious purpose of harming Ms. Cooke's reputation" ^[4]. Cooke herself said the videos were "putting words in my mouth" because Van Orden "can't run on his record" ^[4]. The letter also exposes a regulatory gap: Wisconsin law requires AI-generated political content to be labeled, but that statute applies only to paid advertising and does not apply to federal candidates — meaning Van Orden's organic X posts fall outside it entirely ^[1][3][4]. Rather than take the videos down, Van Orden responded with a new AI-generated clip of Cooke depicted as a red duck in a Democratic Socialists of America T-shirt shouting "Cease and desist!" ^[1][3].

The videos originate with Van Orden himself, posted directly from his own X account and campaign, not an anonymous troll farm ^[1][2][3]. His campaign dismissed Cooke's letter as a "full blow tantrum," calling her "an untrustworthy political hack who is willing to say or do anything for power," and pointed to what it called her own misleading ads about his record ^[2][5]. This is not an isolated tactic: fact-checkers and legal observers tracking the 2026 midterms have documented multiple candidates, overwhelmingly on the Republican side, using AI-generated "slopaganda" — a blend of "AI slop" and "propaganda" — to depict opponents saying things they never said, a trend expected to accelerate as the technology gets cheaper and faster ^[3]. Cooke has tied the videos to Van Orden's own policy record, noting the same AI infrastructure used to generate them is "facilitated by the same data centers Derrick Van Orden gave special tax breaks" ^[5].

This is FALSE. Rebecca Cooke did not say any of the things Van Orden's AI videos attribute to her — not the comments about "illegal alien" healthcare, not the Communist remark, not the primary-stealing accusation ^[2][3][4]. The videos are synthetic media, built and published by a sitting member of Congress against his general-election opponent, and they remain up as of this writing despite a formal legal demand to remove them ^[1][5]. Wisconsin's deepfake disclosure law was written with exactly this scenario in mind, but a drafting gap means it simply does not reach federal candidates like Van Orden — leaving Cooke's only recourse a defamation threat under common law, not the AI-specific statute ^[1][3][4]. Absent a platform takedown or a court order, voters in Wisconsin's 3rd District are left to sort fabricated AI quotes from real ones on their own.