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Sidney Blumenthal taken in by Fred Trump campaign ads that appear to be fake

A pair of racially charged videos that purport to be campaign ads created for Donald Trump's father in 1969 appear to be well-produced hoaxes, according to a POLITICO review of YouTube records and those of the group that posted them.

Long-time Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal referenced the videos in a recent essay about Trump published in the London Review of Books:

"In 1969, Fred Trump plotted to run for mayor of New York against John Lindsay, a silk-stocking liberal Republican. The reason was simple: in the wake of a New York State Investigations Commission inquiry that uncovered Fred’s overbilling scams, the Lindsay administration had deprived him of a development deal at Coney Island. He made two test television commercials. One of them, called ‘Dope Man’, featured a drug-addled black youth wandering the streets. ‘With four more years of John Lindsay,’ the narrator intoned, ‘he will be coming to your neighbourhood soon.’ The ad flashed to the anxious faces of two well-dressed white women. ‘Vote for Fred Trump. He’s for us.’ The other commercial, ‘Real New Yorkers’, showed scenes of ‘real’ people from across the city, all of them white. Fred Trump, the narrator said, ‘is a real New Yorker too’. In the end he didn’t run, but his campaign themes were bequeathed to his son."

But the videos were not actually created by Fred Trump's campaign, because the campaign never existed. Terry Golway, a senior editor at POLITICO who has written extensively about the history of New York City politics, said that he cannot recall Fred Trump ever being mentioned as a potential candidate to run against Lindsay in 1969.

The London Review of Books has since removed that paragraph from Blumenthal's essay and issued a correction: "A paragraph referring to Fred Trump’s campaign for mayor of New York, although it accurately reflected Trump’s racial attitudes and his hostility towards Mayor John Lindsay, has been removed because the campaign ads referred to appear to be clever fakes."

The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler, who writes the paper's "Fact Check" column, also shared the videos on Twitter, before later deleting the tweets.

The videos were created and uploaded to Youtube and Vimeo last year by "Historical Paroxysm," an art project that creates and shares "found footage from alternate realities." Other videos uploaded by Historical Paroxysm include (fake) saran wrap ads supposedly from 1988 and sex-free pornography supposedly from 1991. Both the saran wrap ads ad the porn videos were created by Laura Moss, a freelance filmmaker.

Historical Paroxysm identifies itself as an anonymous collective, but it appears to be run by Moss and her husband, Brendan O'Brien. On IMDb, Moss is credited as the co-writer and director of "Porn Without Sex," the fake 1991 porn film, while O'Brien is credited as the co-writer and co-producer. And it was O'Brien who posted the supposed Fred Trump campaign ads on Historical Paroxysm's account in October.

On the same day that O'Brien posted the Fred Trump ads, independent producer Devin Landin shared the "Dope Man" video with a comment suggesting that it was deliberately created as a commentary on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

"See if you can catch all the subtle allusions in this ad for Fred Trump (SPOILER: THEY'RE NOT SUBTLE AT ALL!)," he wrote on Facebook. "What is it they say about apples and trees and distance?" (He has since deleted the comment.)

After POLITICO inquired about the origin of the supposed campaign ads, they were removed from Historical Paroxysm's YouTube and Vimeo accounts. Moss, Landin and Historical Paroxysm did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Blumenthal declined to talk on the record.