‘Delete This’: MLK Jr’s Daughter Blasts ‘Vile’ and ‘Irresponsible’ Deepfake Viral Video of Her Father Endorsing Trump
AP Photo/John Bazemore
Bernice King, the youngest child of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., strongly denounced a deepfake video of her father that went viral after it was shared by supporters of former President Donald Trump in the final days before the election.
The video appears to have been originally shared back in February by an account on The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter that describes itself as part of the “Dilley Meme Team: Trump’s Online War Machine.”
“If Martin Luther King, Jr. was alive today, he’d support President Trump,” the @ramble_rants account tweeted, along with the nearly-three minute video that shows MLK appearing to criticize Democrats and urge the audience to support Trump.
“We’ve been told again and again that we cannot vote for the man that did more for the Black community than any other president,” says the fake-King in mimicry of the slain civil rights leader’s speaking voice to start the video. “If a Black man dares speak out in support of Donald Trump, a Democrat is always there to call that man an Uncle Tom, a house Negro, or even worse.”
The video was shared again on Sunday by another pro-Trump account called @MAGAResource, along with a similar caption claiming it represented what MLK would say “if he could speak today.”
The original post of the video got about 70,000 views, according to the data shown on the @ramble_rants tweet, but the one posted by @MAGAResource went far more viral, racking up over 10.2 million views at the time of publication.
Unsurprisingly, the video received many highly critical replies, denouncing both the use of deepfake videos in general, but especially the use of the technology to falsify support from MLK specifically.
Bernice King, who was only 5 years old when her father was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, had sharp words for the video in her own post Monday.
“Delete this,” she wrote. “It’s vile, fake, irresponsible, and not at all reflective of what my father would say. And you gave no thought to our family.”
More than five hours after Bernice King’s post, the video remains up, although a Community Note has been attached to @MAGAResource’s tweet stating that the video “is a deepfake/digitally altered and could be misleading,” and that King had asked for it to be taken down.
Screenshot via X.
Meanwhile, the @ramble_rants account posted another tweet about the video, linking to the viral @MAGAResource post and urging followers to “please vote down this bullshit community note as missing the point and not needed.” Brenden Dilley, who tweets under the username @WarlordDilley as another member of this “Dilley Meme Team,” was similarly unrepentant, bragging about the millions of views the video had received and mocking King for criticizing the appropriation of her murdered father’s image.
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