Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 64. Sunrise is 6:53 and sunset is 6:34 for 11 hours 41 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning gibbous with 62.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1919, seven days after suffering a “physical collapse” following a speech in Pueblo, Colorado, President Wilson has a catastrophic stroke at the White House, leaving him physically and mentally incapacitated for the remainder of his presidency.
Less than a week ago, on Sunday, this libertarian blogger paid Congressman Derrick Van Orden the one compliment of which he is truly deserving: “Extreme populism isn’t Van Orden’s brand (whatever that overused term might mean), it’s his very nature. The one position that Van Orden gets right is to be true to that nature…”
And so Van Orden has been true to that nature, most recently by using deepfake videos to distort the words of his opponent, Rebecca Cooke:
Attorneys for congressional candidate Rebecca Cooke have sent a cease-and-desist letter to U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R- Prairie du Chien, over Van Orden’s use of deepfake videos.
Cooke, a Democrat, is challenging Van Orden this November in a closely-watched race for Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional district.
Van Orden has repeatedly used artificial intelligence to post videos to his X account, showing Cooke saying things she never said.
See Sarah Lehr, Cooke campaign sends cease-and-desist to Congressman Van Orden over AI deepfakes, Wisconsin Public Radio, October 1, 2026.
It’s not necessary to reach the question of whether Van Orden’s distorted videos are defamatory to settle on the conclusion that these videos, like the rest of his campaign, rest on lies and frauds. In this, Van Orden is, again, true to the man he so obediently follows.
I’ll leave aside the question of why Van Orden or his campaign seems to have a familiarity with deepfakes…
Record diesel prices could raise the cost of almost everything you buy: