What we learned from a fake IDF shirt

Late Saturday night, just two hours after an attacker tried and failed storming the White House Correspondents Association annual dinner with a gun, and an hour after he was named as Cole Allen, an X account with the handle @the_maga_report shared this photograph:

The photo seems to show Allen, sitting at home, drinking something from a silver can. But @the_maga_report was most interested in his shirt:

Despite coming from a small account with no sourcing, the photograph went viral, helped along by Russia Today, the Kremlin’s propaganda channel with its 3.5 million followers:

And now the photo and claim is everywhere, posted as a reply by people ‘just asking questions’ in response to basically anyone talking about the shooting. I’ve seen lots of speculation that Allen was detained shirtless because the authorities were trying to hide the shirt, for example.

Is the image genuine?

I don’t know for sure, but it’s very likely to be fake.

There are no foolproof signs of AI generation or manipulation; no SynthId or six-fingered hands (though that rarely happens anymore). Some “AI detectors” said it was real, and some said it was generated, but all that proves is that AI detectors are useless crap —which we knew already.

There are a few things that do suggest AI but are ambiguous, like the yellowed ‘piss filter’ and a few minor off details, e.g.:

The New York Post wrote up more of these inconsistencies, though I don’t find them terribly convincing on their own.

One possible clue here is the texture. The full-sized image has a sort of grainy, spackled, impressionist effect to it that resembles a digital camera in very low light.

This isn’t a known AI sign. Or, to be more accurate, it wasn’t until last week, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT Image 2, a new image generation model. Users have reported that ChatGPT Image 2 seems to generate grainy, grimy images so often that some suspect it’s a stealth form of watermarking. So that’s a good hint that this might be fake but generated using a newer, less familiar tool.

Much more suspicious, though, is the total lack of provenance. In all the posts about this supposed “Instagram image”, nobody knows the username of the supposedly-suspended Instagram account it was taken from. Nobody has shared other posts from the account or taken any screenshots. We’re supposed to rely on the word of “the Maga Report” that this image was really on Allen’s Instagram.

The Maga Report

So who is @the_maga_report? The Maga Report is a small X/Twitter account. It has 500 followers now but I suspect a lot of those only started after its recent “scoop”.

What does it post? Despite the name, it’s not pro-Trump. In fact, it seems to be part of the Candace Owens/Tucker Carlson/Jake Shields nexus that believes Trump is being controlled by the Jews and Israel. Here’s a couple of The Maga Report’s posts from just the last week:

Talmudic Jews, Israel did 9/11, Jews killed Charlie Kirk, Jews are Khazars and abusers and betrayers and… well, you get the idea.

Interestingly, the account seems to have only pivoted to MAGA content in the last year or so, perhaps since the Charlie Kirk assassination. The account only changed its name to the MAGA Report in September 2025, and before that shared left-leaning content on Israel/Palestine, replied often to Hassan Piker and other Young Turks. It also commonly created and shared AI-generated images two years ago when they were still pretty new.

Summing up: the original source for the Cole Allen IDF shirt claim and image seems to be an obscure Twitter account which, despite being called “the MAGA Report”, is actually a former left-winger who was radicalised into right-wing antisemitism via Candace Owens, Jake Shields etc and who has a documented interest in making AI fakes. I think we can pretty confidently say we have the true origin of the IDF shirt image.

The impact of a fake

So what if it had been real? Anyone can buy an IDF-branded T-shirt or have got one from a thrift store.

Whoever runs the MAGA Report seems to have created the image to suggest that the shooting was a hoax and that Trump was in on it. In that worldview, Trump is an Israeli agent and the IDF generated a false flag attack to create sympathy for their guy.

This was cooked up by someone on the antisemitic far right. The exact same theory, though, has found equally fertile soil among even the liberal centre-left.

America has become heavily conspiracy-brained, and every violent incident is followed by its political tribes arguing that the assailant was actually one of “them”, not one of “us”. Despite Cole Allen leaving a note inaccurately described as a “manifesto” that touches on his motivations, social media is full of left-of-centre people insisting that he must actually be a far right assassin or IDF plant, as proven by his shirt.

On the other side, MAGA types are split between the antisemitic wing that says it’s an Israeli-Jewish plot to threaten Trump, a warning shot, and the rest who say it’s all the fault of the media, the Democrats and Bluesky.

Generative AI is getting better and faster. Every incident, every news story now has dozens of instantly-generated fake pictures trying to support different narratives or promote conspiracy theories. What can we do?

• Focus less on the images themselves. Sometimes they’ll have clues and inconsistencies, particularly if the image is in a public place, but you can’t count on it. More definitive is provenance: where did this image or video first come from? Who shared it and how did they get it? Can you check the source yourself?

• Don’t trust AI tester apps or other LLMs to spot fakes. They don’t work. The exception is SynthID; if Gemini tells you an image has a SynthID watermark, then it was at least edited, if not fully generated, by Gemini’s tools.

• Be sceptical. It’s always the “question everything, it’s a conspiracy” types that are the most credulous. Take a few seconds to think and check before sharing things that conform to your prior beliefs.

Antisemitism is a liquid: it crosses political boundaries and takes the shape of the container it fills. This particular fake was created by a far-right antisemite who started out their journey on the left. The image was spread by, among others, the Russian government, and was adopted by people on the centre-left to promote the same conspiracy theory.

I’m writing a book about antisemitism on the contemporary Right, in part because left-wing antisemitism has been extensively studied in recent decades but right-wing antisemitism has been, in a sense, taken for granted.

But even as I write, I need to remember the distinction between right-wing and left-wing antisemitism is kind of arbitrary. Antisemitism pre-dates the distinction between left and right and it jumps back and forward with ease. Only vigilance can keep it in check.