From Viral Vandalism To Fake Ads: What We Missed And Why It Matters

Your feed looks glossy for a reason—AI is dressing up ordinary products to feel irresistible, and plenty of those “deals” just landed in thrift stores days after the holidays. We dig into the surge of “AI slop” gifts, why even savvy shoppers get fooled, and the simple checks that can save your wallet from cardboard-thin shoes and misprinted mugs. Alongside the shopping deep dive, we wade through fast-moving headlines: an alleged vandalism incident at JD Vance’s home, a disturbing Planet Fitness bathroom claim, and a hotel dispute involving ICE bookings. The common thread is speed—slick visuals, viral outrage, and narratives that outpace verification.

We share practical tactics to fight back against deceptive ads: leave the platform and search the brand directly, verify domains and return policies, reverse-image search suspicious photos, and scan recent reviews with user images. We also talk about setting personal cooling-off rules and using payment methods that protect you when sellers ghost or ship junk. Then we zoom out: how do we keep our balance when stories go viral before facts are clear? We walk through signals to watch for—hedging language like “allegedly,” reliance on secondary sources, and missing primary evidence—so you can stay curious without getting swept away.

If you’ve ever unboxed something that looked nothing like the ad, you’re not alone. We close with a question to you: what’s the worst product you bought from a social ad, and how do you spot red flags now? Tap follow, share this with a friend who impulse-buys from their feed, and leave a quick review to help more people find the show.

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Liberty Line each week on Sunday, look for topics on my X file @americanistblog and submit your 1-3 audio opinions to anamericanistblog@gmail.com and you'll be featured on the podcast. 

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Chapters

• 0:00 Morning Setup & Countdown
• 0:50 X-File Stories Overview
• 1:02 JD Vance Home Vandal Allegations
• 5:56 AI Slop Gifts After The Holidays
• 9:10 Personal Ad-Scam Lessons
• 9:44 Planet Fitness Bathroom Controversy
• 11:33 Hilton vs ICE Booking Dispute
• 12:13 Question Of The Day & Sign-Off

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:15

Well, hello and good morning. It's Tuesday. 28 more days, 27 more days. One of those two. I think I have calculated it. Not including the weekends, not including holidays and travel coming up, but I think I'm going to be able to end this near Valentine's Day in February. Yay! Okay, let's see. Over to the X-File. I have four stories for you. One of them we're not really gonna get into, I think. We'll see. But I just wanted to tell you about it so you can go over and read about it on my X-File. All right, the first one up, though, is alleged JD Vance Home Vandal is son of a wealthy doctor, Democrat donor, of course, who recently changed his name to Julia. Yes, it's a transgender trying to break into JD Vance's home. And he's the son of a wealthy Democratic donor. Alright, the deranged hammer wielding alleged vandal accused of busting several windows at Vice President J.D. Vance's home. VP JD Vance home in Cincinnati is allegedly, is allegedly the son. We don't know if he's the son, but these people, and using the word allegedly, is he the son of him or not? Allegedly the son of a prominent millionaire family family. And appears to have been going by Julia in recent weeks. They have pictures of the parents, and yes, they definitely look democratic, liberal. You know the look. Old and white. Okay, so um let's see. William DeFor, not William Defoe, he was 26 years old, was arrested early Monday after allegedly shattering four windows at Vance's home. Police said that DeFor was attempting to break into the home around midnight. The Vance's who moved into the vice president's official residence in Washington, D.C. after the inauguration were not in Ohio at the time. It's unclear whether DeFor identifies as transgender or non-binary, but he recently appeared to be posting under the name Julia DeFor. Cops listed the suspect's name as William and his gender as male. In a mugshot, DeFor has an unkempt matted mullet and a dead-eyed stare. DeFor's father, also named William, is a successful Harvard University graduate. He boasts a decades-long history as a pediatric urologist in Cincinnati and works as a professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. You know some abuse was going on in that family. The family lives in a$1.3 million house in the city's Wealth Hyde Park neighborhood. The elder DeFor donated thousands to Kamala Harris's failed presidential campaign in 2024 after years of small contributions to a PAC that lobbied for urologists according to federal records. Oh, goodness gracious. He also is a longtime Democratic supporter according to his public contributions. He donated upwards of$5,000 to former President Joe Biden, blah, blah, blah. He also previously backed a federal assault weapons ban in the wake of the Uvalde elementary school shooting. The younger DeFor appear to have a fall from grace from gra after graduating from the Summit County Day School in 2018. What is that? Summit Country Day School, where he was hailed as a candidate for the U.S. Presidential Scholars Program. He had a brief two-year stint at the University of Cincinnati's College Conservatory of Music, but he appeared to drop out in 2020, according to his Facebook. He said earlier this year he was attending Cincinnati State Technical and Community College. The uh alleged vandal has a tricky mental health history, including a 2024 sentence for two counts of vandalism at a local interior design company. Instead of a standard conviction, DeFor was sentenced to two years of mandatory mental health treatment, which is still ongoing according to a court. Well, they're setting this up, aren't they? In April of 2023, DeFor was charged with trespassing at the UC Health Psychiatric and Emergency Services. He was originally held on a 10,000. This boy has been in trouble a lot with all this mental break mental health and breaking into people places. Good heavens. But a judge determined he was not mentally competent to stand trial. Well, there you go. And the counts were dismissed. So what? So what are you gonna do? He's not competent to stand trial. That's bullshit for one thing. Um you gotta have a lot going wrong with you to not be mentally competent to stand trial. And what? They just dismiss the charges and let him go? That's dangerous. DeFor is charged with obstructing official business. Okay, I'm not even gonna finish reading that. You can go finish reading that. Hopefully we'll hear more about this. I don't know. We'll see. Alright, moving on. Everyone is donating their AI slop gifts after Christmas shoppers were duped by deceptive ads. So this will be my question of the day for you. Let's go through this real quick. Shop till you slop. So-called A, and this is in quotes, AI slop gifts. I don't know why they're dubbed that, but they are, are already turning up at thrift shops to be resold after duping holiday shoppers with misleading ads. Slop, Miriam Webster's 2025 Word of the Year, refers to low-quality digital content produced by artificial intelligence delivered to consumers via social media. AI slop gifts are trinkets from companies that used AI to make them look better online than they do in reality. Think Timu. Sometimes barely looking anything like what was shown in the AI-generated advertisements. Companies online used AI to make gifts such as shirts, mugs, advent calendars, and so on, look like they were higher quality than they were, if the recipient even got it delivered in the first place. These gifts fooled many this year, especially older generations, yes. And just after Christmas, videos started popping up on social media with people showing off the items that deceived their parents. I would like to see these. Five days after Christmas and the AI slop mugs are already in the thrift stores, one person wrote in an on-screen text of a cheap-looking mug made to resemble a stack of books. What's sad is I've seen much worse than this one, the user added in the caption. Many people in the comments shared that they received similar AI slop gifts for the holidays, and the one shown wasn't even the worst they've seen. They actually, okay, so this goes on and on and on. So even actress Melissa Joan Hart fell for the AI slot gifts this year, buying herself a dress based on an AI generated ad. She said, What I ordered and what I received, she wrote on Instagram. So there you go. Um so have you ever been duped by a social media ad where you bought something and it came in and it's like, what in the world? This is not what I'm gonna fess up on Instagram. I've done this several times. Now, most of the times when I order something online, if I see it on social media, uh, I will leave that social media platform and I will go over to Google and Google the company and go directly to their website to see if they're legit. Well, I ordered before I started doing that though, I ordered a pair of shoes from Insta from an Instagram ad. Oh my god, the shoes that came, I'm like, I can't wear these, they're like paper, they're made out of paper or cardboard or something, it was ridiculous. Luckily, I didn't spend that much money on it, and I should have known better. But you know, I don't fall for that anymore. So I'll if I see something that I like on an ad on a so either if it's Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, mainly Facebook, I will leave that platform. Like I said, go over and search for the company, scroll down, make sure you guys have to scroll down because you're gonna go through sponsored advertisements first, but you have to scroll down and find the actual, let's say bobble bar. I see a lot of ads for that on Facebook. I will leave it, Facebook, and I will go over and to bobblebar.com and find it. And I think they're pretty legit. But anyway, moving on. Let's see. This next one is the one I want you to go look at. I saw this yesterday on X, and that had the video on X, and I almost reposted it, and I thought, no, that's almost porn, and I'm not gonna do it. Let me read the thing to you, and I don't know why this is not all over the news. Trans gym goer caught, you know what, in women's bathroom at California Planet Fitness. I don't even want to say the word, but it starts with an M. He was caught doing the M word in her bathroom's bathroom. Disturbing viral video shows a moment a transgender gym going appears to be, you know whating, in a stall inside the women's bathroom at a Planet Fitness in California. Of course it's Planet Fitness. Patron Grace Hudson claims she encountered the ordeal while she was using the female restroom at the gym's Concord location, just outside San Francisco last May, but the footage only exploded online over the weekend. The clip, and they have a picture of it. They have a picture, so you don't actually see the guy, you see underneath of the stall and the shadows. So you see his feet underneath, and then you see the shadow of the movement of you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I think you do. It's disgusting. That's all I'm gonna say about it. I wish this was all over the news. Maybe it's a hoax, maybe it's not. I don't know. If it's not a hoax, it needs to be investigated and exposed and put out there all over the news. This is what women are having to put up with, apparently, in the gyms. All right. Moving on to the last one, real quick. This, I heard this yesterday too. I'm not gonna get into this because I'm running out of time. DHS accuses Minnesota Hilton of maliciously denying services to ICE agents as massive federal operations kick off. You know, these ICE agents are traveling all over the place. They're trying to stay in those hotels. And I guess in um what did I say, Minnesota, they uh yesterday talked about having showing these emails that said, look, you're part of ICE. We're not, we are not, we're canceling your reservations because you're not gonna stay with us. Now, Hilton, the corporation, said that particular Hilton is individually owned and operated. So they're trying to distance themselves from it. So who knows? But you can go read about that over there, too. All right, I need to. I guess I already gave you the question of the day. Have you ever been duped by an advertisement online? Okay, that's it. I gotta go. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.