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No, It’s Not Crazy To Ask If This Video Is Fake — Here’s Why

I am here to cover the NEWS….not goofy conspiracy theories that have no basis in reality.

In fact, I’d love to never have to cover a “conspiracy theory” ever again, the problem is they’re making that very hard to do!

The other problem is I’ve been doing this for nearly 10 years now (we started this website from scratch in 2015) and in that time a ton of “Conspiracy Theories” have turned into “Conspiracy FACTS.”

So while I wish I could just ignore this, I can’t.

Now I want to be very clear upfront I don’t know if this video is fake or not — but I do know it merits having the discussion.  And it’s not “insensitive” to do so.  Sorry folks, seeking the truth is paramount.

I also know that currently opinion on that question is running about 50/50, actually 53/47 in favor of “Fake” as of the time this article is going to press.

That is based on comments I see online, Twitter posts I see online, and this very straightforward Poll I just posted.

Please add your vote:

Ok, so now let’s dig in.

I’m going to approach this much the same way as I approach the whole Moon Landing “Conspiracy Theory”….meaning that I’m not all that interested in stuff like fake shadows or weird reflections of light, etc.  That’s not what interests me.  I’m not here to dissect a photo down to the minutia.

No, the things that are catching my attention are much larger and more common sense questions about things that just don’t look or feel right here.  So we’re going to focus on those.

In no particular order, let’s just take them one at a time, starting with the most basic of all:

 

Is that the same person?

I can’t say 100% yes and I can’t say 100% no.

I’ve actually been pretty open and upfront about this…I suffer from “face blindness”.  It’s a real thing.  Brad Pitt has it too.  Aside from our alarmingly good looks, it’s something else Brad Pitt and I share.

So I’m not the best judge of this, which is why I’m simply presenting it as a question, not as something I’ve figured out.

If it were just me asking the question, that wouldn’t be newsworthy.  But as I mentioned above, Twitter is flooded with a lot of people asking a lot of questions.

Now let’s examine another high-level, big picture thing that is causing many people to ask if this is real.

And this is one of the biggest reasons I say it’s not crazy to have this discussion: because they’ve already lied to us at least TWICE and many would say THREE or more times about images and video of Kate — that turned out to not be Kate.

Anyone remember this from a week or so ago?

Remember when they told us that was William and Kate out shopping?

Zoom in and they told you this was Kate:

Same person?

Not even close:

I think it’s almost universally admitted now that was NOT Kate.

So they lied once already, right to your face!

Then there was this photo from a few weeks earlier that they put out and immediately retracted after people claimed it was fake/AI in multiple spots.

So that was fake photo / lie number two.

If we were just questioning the new video in a vacuum and there was no history of fake photos/videos, that would be one thing.

But within the last month, they’ve passed off at least two photos/videos that are now either admitted to be fakes or almost universally deemed to be fakes.

So we’ve been lied to twice in the span of one month, but we’re now just supposed to accept this new video as real?

“We’re super serious guys, this one is real, we super duper promise!”

Sorry folks, but I would argue it’s wildly naive to just accept that at face value and not even have any skepticism.

But then there’s the video itself.

I would have loved nothing more than to not have to cover this today, but they’re making that impossible…

The first thing I noticed right away was why is the video zoomed out and blurry?

Did you notice that?

Is this really the best the Royal Family can do?

Of course not.

But this is not really up for debate — the video IS shot at distance and it IS fuzzy and not sharp.

Why?

You have to assume that choice was made intentionally.

And I’m not the only person asking that question:

Then you have the glaring absence of William in the video.

In an ironic moment, she says a great strength during this time is having William by her side, which makes it all the more obvious he isn’t in the video:

Who shoots a video like this and doesn’t have their husband by their side?

And don’t tell me he was “busy”.

Very strange.

Even people who aren’t calling the video fake say this is very strange he was absent:

Now let’s get right to the elephant in the room: was the video created by AI?

To everyone who says “that is clearly Kate, stop trying to find conspiracies” may I humbly challenge you with this?

Don’t trust your lying eyes folks, not in this day and age.

Take a look:

Backup video here:

Of course that would be using AI to simply replace Kate with her arch nemesis, Meghan Markle.

And that was done for free, in about a minute, with AI available to the public.

Look how GOOD it is!

The funny thing is it looks even better and than the “original” Kate video!

It’s zoomed in and sharp, not distanced and fuzzy.

But they nailed it.  The words are synced up PERFECTLY to the mouth.  Even small gestures and facial emotions are perfectly displayed.

It’s almost eerie!

Now if that can be done for free, online, in about a minute, imagine what the Royal Family has access to.

So to everyone saying it’s “obviously Kate” respectfully I have to say you simply have no idea if that is true or not.  No one does.

What is real these days?

You.  Don’t.  Know.

Or how about the time they made a Deep Fake video of the Queen herself?

This will blow your mind if you’ve never seen it before.

And understand this was 3 years ago, imagine what they can do now:

It’s not just me asking these questions or skeptical about things.

Elon Musk himself just posted this meme this morning, which I can only assume is in response to the Kate Video debate:

Then we had people running the video through AI detectors and getting results like this:

And this:

To be fair, I did tests of my own using several different AI Detection websites and I personally replicated both of the results listed above, but I also had others come back as “No Deepfake Detected”.

So it’s funny that just as with the broader debate on this topic, even the AI Detection tools seem to be split about 50/50.

Finally, I want to end with an article from the LA Times that has this headline:

Don’t blame the public for failing Kate Middleton. Blame the palace

 

 

Essentially, the LA Times is running the exact same article as I just wrote here.

They’re saying that if people are skeptical about this video now, it’s a self-inflicted, unforced error by Kate and her team at the Royal Palace.

In other words, they lied to us twice already, and several things about this video appear very questionable, so it’s no surprise that people are now asking questions and not accepting this video at face value.

And that is not crazy.

You are NOT crazy if you are questioning this video.

You are a free-thinker who is using the 5 senses and the Common Sense that God gave you and you’re pointing out that several things aren’t really adding up here.

That’s not just my opinion, that’s what the LA Times also just wrote:

In light of this news, senior writer Meredith Blake and columnist Mary McNamara continue their conversation about the mania surrounding the princess’ absence from public view and Kensington Palace’s handling of the media scrutiny.

Mary McNamara: The thing about conspiracy theories is they can be fun when they are theories, but it’s always rotten when they turn out to be right.

Along with the truly bonkers suggestions that the princess was dead or in a coma, or the notion that the Waleses’ marriage was on the rocks, many have suspected that Kate’s months-long recovery from a planned surgery indicated something more serious, like cancer treatments. Which turns out to be the case.

I hope that whatever form of the disease she has, they found it early and that she is indeed responding well to treatment and not feeling too ghastly. My prayers go out to her, as a patient and also a mother of three young children.

With King Charles III also undergoing treatment for an undisclosed form of cancer, I suppose one can understand why Kensington Palace did not want to make the announcement sooner — two cancer diagnoses is a lot for any family, never mind one under such a microscope.

Even so, it seems like a huge mistake. Everyone, including members of the royal family, are entitled to privacy, but Catherine is the future queen of England and the media has been erupting with all manner of speculation and criticism for weeks now.

It seems awful to contemplate anyone in the middle of cancer treatment having to watch their altered Mother’s Day photo being put on a wire service kill list and then dissected the world over, but it was such an unforced error.

Not on Kate’s part, I hasten to add — those who control the royal communications apparatus are to blame for that mess, and frankly for the entire “Where’s Kate?” situation. By ostensibly trying to protect her privacy, the silence of Kensington Palace made Kate the center of a string of news cycles. Obviously, the convulsions of Reddit are not the Waleses’ primary concern at the moment, but the ancillary coverage, including ours, can’t have helped.

And while it would be easy to blame the internet or the salacious nature of royal gossip, the palace should have known better. After being fed a steady diet of the ever-smiling, perfectly styled princess for years, the public was inevitably going to question her prolonged absence and the very vague explanations for it.

Why not just let people know the truth, for heaven’s sake? Most people have experience with cancer, if not their own then their family members’ or friends’. If today’s announcement had been made in February or even two weeks ago, we could have all be sending the princess and her family our thoughts and prayers instead of wondering where her wedding ring was or if a stand-in had been used for the most recent “the Prince and Princess of Wales go shopping” photo.

What were they thinking, Meredith?

Meredith Blake: I think it’s clear the Firm has failed Kate on many levels with this entire debacle. The messaging has been catastrophic from Day 1. If there is anything that Kate has earned after decades of unwavering perfection in the face of relentless scrutiny, of years under enormous pressure without ever putting a foot wrong, it’s the right to a few months away from the prying eyes of the public and the meme-hungry internet hordes (a group that includes me). Given what we know now, the jokes about Kate isolating while she grew out bad bangs or recovered from a Brazilian butt lift seem cruel. At the same time, I wish that’s all Kate were dealing with.

As to the “why” of it all, one part of Kate’s message that really stood out to me — and, frankly, made me feel awfully guilty for playing some microscopic part in all of this mess. It’s when she explained her absence from the public eye over the last few weeks by saying, “It has taken us time to explain everything to George, Charlotte and Louis in a way that is appropriate for them, and to reassure them that I am going to be OK.”

In other words, she didn’t want the world to know what was going on with her health before she’d been able to talk to her kids about it — or before she had some grasp on it herself. I’ve got kids the same age as Kate’s, and they are old enough to understand the gravity of a cancer diagnosis. I can completely understand why she wanted to wait to make any kind of public statement, and to process this news in private with her children. For Charles, her father-in-law, things are different: His children are grown and he is the monarch, not the spouse of the heir to the throne, so his health is an urgent matter of national interest.

I think this whole disaster has shown that the palace’s communications team is not suited to the task of shaping the public image of the royal family in an era when memes and conspiracy theories take off at lightning speed. That being said, I am not entirely sure what they could, or should, have done differently. If Kate wanted to keep the news private — a completely reasonable choice — then what else could or should they have done? Other than brushing up on their Photoshop skills — and not blaming the whole thing on Kate, a woman with cancer.

The last few days I had started to think about “Kategate” in light of the frenzy around Britney Spears and her conservatorship, something that originated with her most devoted fans on social media and became a massive news story. #FreeBritney advocates were dismissed as crazy, but ultimately vindicated. I don’t want to claim that those of us who’ve been concerned by (or at least obsessed with) Kate’s situation the last few weeks were right to go down the rabbit hole, but clearly this was not “QAnon for Wine Moms,” as at least one major national publication has dubbed it.

It turned out things were worse than the palace was letting on, and the people in charge of managing Kate’s image were failing her spectacularly.

So there you go folks.

I still don’t know if the video is real or not….but I know it’s not crazy to ask questions.  Not in this case.

Even the LA Times agrees.

So what do you think?

Please add your vote above and let’s see how this ends up!

My guess?

Right down the middle, 50/50.


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