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This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering the state.
A deepfake video of Washington County chair candidate Nafisa Fai speaking in front of an upside-down U.S. flag went viral Thursday—moments before she participated in a candidates forum that evening.
On the same day as the forum, an account on X called “End Wokeness,” with 3.9 million followers, posted the video, a 26-second clip of Fai speaking at a community event in Minnesota last weekend. The post said:
Oregon politician Nafisa Fai just held a rally in MN, speaking Somali, with an American flag UPSIDE DOWN.
Enough with the pretending already.
These are not Americans.
Comments on the post suggested that she be deported.
The X account has been reported by The Washington Post and others to be the source of false claims that Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, eat cats and dogs.
Fai, who lives in Aloha, is running against fellow Commissioner Pam Treece in the Nov. 3 election to become chair of the Washington County Board of Commissioners, which oversees the county’s $2 billion annual budget. Her race has already endured one bizarre turn of events last month, when then-Chair Kathryn Harrington resigned her position six days after flipping her middle finger at Fai during a board meeting.
The Fai video on X was reposted in the right-wing universe by others, also with millions of followers, including Benny Johnson, Lara Logan, U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), and The Blaze, the account for Blaze Media.
Fai did speak in Minnesota last weekend, she said. She was traveling when she received an invitation to give an address to inspire young people to choose a path of hard work and career ambition. Fai doesn’t remember specifically checking the orientation of the flag before delivering her speech—something she vows to do from now on—but she said she would never display the American flag that way.
The flag was, in fact, displayed right side up, according to Hoodo Mohamed, who attended the event and spoke to OJP. “We had a ton of flags. We had 100 flags. We had flags on all the tables. I still have two flags from the event.” It was a very pro-America event, Mohamed said.
A clip from the event was provided to OJP. It shows the flag right side up.
The X video appears to have been selectively edited to include some English phrases Fai used, including “people of color,” “lawyer,” “CEO” and “lawn mowing,” Mohamed said. But the actual message was that in America, “you can make your dream come true, if you do the work.” You can go from cutting grass to becoming a corporate executive, Mohamed said.
Fai, 49, came to this country as a teenager from Somalia. “If I could, I would fight for this country, you know, go to war for this country,” Fai said. “So, I think people questioning that was the hard part for me.”
Jacob Roloff of Hillsboro was at the forum in Hillsboro on Thursday when he saw an older woman confront Fai, clearly believing the video was real.
“The woman was definitely upset about the fake video of the flag,” Roloff said. “It just speaks to how messed up our media sphere is.”
The online comments against Fai follow a push publicized this week by Trump’s Department of Justice to strip the citizenship of a sitting U.S. congresswoman, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Somali American whose Washington, D.C., house was searched Monday.