There is a particular kind of autumn light that falls over western North Carolina in the days leading up to an election. The mountains are still warm with color, the air smells like woodsmoke, and people are getting ready to vote. But this year, something strange and unsettling is moving through the district. A political attack ad, paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee and approved by Republican candidate Jennifer Balkcom, has been appearing on screens, and it does not feel like any ordinary campaign commercial. It is a barn dance, maybe, but not the kind anyone around here has ever thrown. There are drag queens from Asheville. There is a person wearing a pup mask. And in the center of it all is Jamie Ager, the Democratic candidate for the 11th Congressional District, smiling and dancing as though he belongs in this strange, fabricated scene. A closing line drives the message home: “Jamie Ager talks like you and me on TV, but he’s dancing with they/them.” The ad is, quite literally, a lie made of pixels and AI technology. But it is being distributed with real money, real timing, and real intent. For residents across the mountains, it is hard to avoid. They see it on social media, in pre-roll video ads, maybe in sponsored posts. Some people laugh it off. Others feel a knot in their stomachs. For LGBTQ+ residents, the ad is a reminder that their identities can still be used as weapons in the most cynical kind of culture war. For voters who know Jamie Ager, it is just confusing. This is a candidate who talks about family, community, and the future for children. Yet here he is, digitally placed in a cartoonish scene designed to make him seem dangerous. The gap between the real person and the manufactured image is enormous. But in the blur of a political season, with everyone distracted and tired, the lie can sink in. It can make a person wonder if there is any truth behind it. That is the whole point. That is what makes this ad so insidious. It is not just negative. It is not just dishonest. It is a deliberate attempt to replace reality with a hallucination, and the people caught in it are not props. They are human beings.
Jamie Ager saw it, and his response was visceral. In a video statement released Monday, he didn’t adopt the careful, scripted tone of a career politician. He called the ad “100% fake AI-generated” and “bullcrap.” There’s a kind of honesty in that blunt anger. It’s the anger of a man who has spent his life in western North Carolina, who believes in something old-fashioned: that a campaign should be about who you are and what you will do, not about who your opponent can pretend you are. “When you don’t have anything to run on in your campaign, I guess you have to resort to this kind of bullcrap to try to convince people to vote for you,” he said. Then his voice softened, and he talked about why he got into this race. “I’m running a campaign based on the deep values we have here in western North Carolina, around politics that’s good for people, that builds up our community, and it makes a better future for our kids and the people that live here in western North Carolina.” That contrast matters. Ager is not responding with the usual talking points. He is responding as a neighbor who feels insulted, not only on his own behalf but on behalf of the people the ad uses as punchlines. He refuses to distance himself from the LGBTQ+ community. He refuses to say, “I don’t know those drag queens” in a scandalized tone. Instead, he treats them as part of the community he wants to serve. The ad tries to make him appear two-faced: “talks like you and me on TV, but he’s dancing with they/them.” But Ager’s reaction is one of solidarity and defiance. He is saying that dancing with people you care about, regardless of their gender identity, is nothing to hide. It is the kind of quiet moral courage that gets lost in the noise of campaign season. And it may be what saves him from the attack. Because voters understand, perhaps better than consultants in Washington, that a fake ad filled with artificial images is not proof of anything except the emptiness of the other campaign. When you have no record to defend, no vision to offer, no real arguments to make, you can always make up a lie. Ager knows that. The anger in his voice is the sound of a man who has watched politics get uglier and uglier and is refusing to let it turn his hometown into a battleground of fiction.
But the person who may be most hurt by this ad is not Jamie Ager. It is Nova. She is an Asheville-based drag queen, and she appears in the ad—or at least a version of her does. She has never met Ager. She has never attended a barn dance like the one depicted. She has never given permission for her likeness to be used in any political commercial. And yet there she is, inserted into a lie, expected to be a symbol of something she never chose to represent. That experience has to feel like a violation. Imagine waking up to see your face in an ad telling your entire region that you are a threat to their values, that you are the “they/them” that a candidate wants to use to scare people. Imagine knowing that strangers may now form an opinion of you based on an image you never approved. That is not just politics. That is personal destruction. Nova has issued a cease-and-desist letter to Balkcom’s campaign, and a lawyer has pointed out that this could be a case of misappropriation—a legal term for taking someone’s image and using it for your own purposes without consent. It is a way of saying: this is my face, this is my life, and you had no right to steal it. The campaign has not responded, at least publicly. That silence is a strange kind of insult. It treats Nova as if she is not worth a response, as if the artists and LGBTQ+ people of Asheville are disposable props in a political game. But Nova is not a prop. She is a performer with talent and courage. She is part of the fabric of Asheville, a city that has embraced creativity and expression. She has fans and friends and family. She has a right to be seen for who she is, not for the cartoon version of her that the ad depicts. Her decision to fight back is a small but powerful act of resistance. It reminds us that the stakes of a political ad are not just an election. They are someone’s reputation, someone’s safety, someone’s peace of mind. When a campaign steals a person’s likeness, it steals a piece of their autonomy. And when the campaign refuses to answer for it, that theft continues.
This is the new face of political deception: artificial intelligence. The ad against Jamie Ager is exactly the kind of content that experts have warned about for years. At first, deepfakes were strange wonders—videos of Presidents singing, celebrities swapping faces, internet jokes that seemed harmless. But now the technology is being used in actual campaigns to create evidence of things that never happened. This ad looks real enough. The lighting, the faces, the movement—it all has a dangerous plausibility. You can imagine someone scrolling past it and absorbing the message without ever stopping to ask if it was true. The ad’s creators carefully chose the images: drag queens, a pup mask, a barn dance, Ager at the center. It is a pastiche of cultural signifiers meant to trigger anxiety in some voters and outrage in others. The line “dancing with they/them” is not just a joke. It is a deliberate manipulation of language to make nonbinary people sound alien, threatening, other. The ad weaponizes gender identity, much the way old campaign ads weaponized race or religion. It works by creating a tribal instinct: they are not like us; therefore, they cannot be trusted. The tragedy is that it steals attention away from real issues. Instead of debating health care, jobs, infrastructure, education, and the future of the mountains, voters are left to parse a fake barn dance. Instead of asking which candidate will actually represent them, they are being asked to feel fear. This is not democracy. This is a hallucination, paid for by a party committee and used as a tool to win power. The ethical implications are staggering. If a campaign can use AI to place one candidate in a fabricated scene with drag queens, then no one is safe. Any candidate could be placed in any compromising situation. Any person could be inserted into any false narrative. This is what happens when technology outpaces our laws and our norms. We need to find ways to hold people accountable. We need to insist that political ads be honest, that they not deceive voters, that they not steal the faces of real people. But until then, campaigns like this one will continue to blur the line between fact and fiction. And the rest of us are left to live with the aftermath, wondering what is real and what is a machine’s manipulation.
Western North Carolina is a place that does not fit neatly into any box. It is farms and hollers, but it is also Asheville, a small city with a big reputation for art, music, drag, and inclusion. It is conservative churches and progressive neighborhoods, generational families and newcomers searching for a quieter life. It is a place where people take pride in knowing their neighbors, in helping strangers during snowstorms, in showing up when someone is in trouble. That is why this ad feels so wrong. It treats the district like a battlefield and its people like pawns. The campaign behind it looked at the 11th District and decided the fastest way to win was to split it apart. They took the name “Asheville,” made it a weapon, and implied that anyone associated with its arts scene is an outsider. They took a real person like Nova and made her a villain. They took a candidate like Jamie Ager and made him a fool. In doing so, they insulted the intelligence of every voter in the district. They assumed people would be too distracted or too caught up in tribal hate to notice that the ad was fake. But western North Carolinians have a long memory and a stubborn streak. They are not easily told what to think, especially by outside committees that do not understand their lives. Many voters may not agree with Ager on every issue. Many may not have a particular connection to drag culture. But they can smell bullcrap when they see it. They know that a barn dance with drag queens and pup masks is not a real policy debate. They know that a candidate who has to rely on AI-generated fear has already lost the argument. The ad reveals nothing about Jamie Ager except that he is a threat to people who are desperate to hold onto power. It reveals everything about the people who made it. It shows that they would rather divide families, alienate generations, and stoke hatred than talk about the future. There is something deeply sad about that. We are all in this community together. We have shared roads, shared schools, shared natural beauty. The mountains do not care about party affiliation. The rivers do not ask whether you are liberal or conservative. But politics, when it becomes poisoned by lies, can make us forget the things we have in common. This ad is a chance to remember them. It is a chance for voters to say: we are better than this, and we will not be manipulated.
As Election Day approaches, the choice before the people of North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District is larger than party or policy. It is about whether lies should be allowed to decide who represents them. Jamie Ager stands at the center of a fabricated image, but he is not broken by it. Nova stands in the middle of a lie she never agreed to, but she is not silent. The rest of the community has to decide what to do next. The ad is already out there. It has already reached the screen of many people. It has already done its damage. But it does not have to be the final word. Voters can talk to their neighbors. They can listen to what Jamie Ager actually says, not what an AI program made him appear to say. They can look at the person behind the ad and ask why she has not denounced it, why her campaign has not responded to Nova’s cease-and-desist, why the National Republican Congressional Committee spent money on this instead of a positive message. Silence is a choice. Silence in the face of a fake ad is an endorsement. But the voters are not required to endorse it. They can choose to reject it. They can choose to base their vote on real experience and real values. They can remember that a campaign does not become honorable simply by winning, nor does a person become guilty because a machine placed them in a bad scene. The mountains have seen many elections. They have seen politicians come and go, pretending to be one thing, turning into another. The people of western North Carolina have a way of seeing through pretense. They have a way of remembering who fought fair and who did not. This ad, with its AI-generated images and its cruel pronoun punchline, will be remembered. It will be remembered as the moment a campaign lowered itself to a new level, and the moment voters were asked to decide if they hated their neighbors more than they loved their community. Let them choose wisely. Let them choose on the basis of truth, hard as it is to find. Let them not let a fake barn dance drown out the real voices of people who love this place, people like Jamie Ager, people like Nova, people who just want to live in peace and raise their kids with dignity. The ad is fake. The choice is real. And it comes down to each of us, in the quiet of the voting booth, to decide who we want to be.