Transcript: Trump ICE Raids Worsen as Dem Gov Drops Bombshell Warning

So, like, it’s powerful because the numbers are large and because people leave that feeling like, I have hope, that was fun, we’re going to do more of this. All of that is sustaining people who are tuned in but worried about, what do I do with all of this? It makes them not feel alone. And it also brings new people out who then say, okay, I’m now going to become part of that attentive public.

Sargent: Well, I think there’s also another core insight that I’d like to bounce off you. I think it’s driving what Pritzker is doing here again, maybe Newsom to some extent, and it’s more specific to MAGA in Chicago. The idea is that when you polarize the shit out of these issues, it forces people to take sides in them. Noem and Bovino know they absolutely cannot back down in any way if Pritzker, some two-bit democratic governor, issues a challenge, right? So they have to double down. They have to excite the MAGA base, which wants them, let’s be clear, wants them to treat Chicago like enemy territory.

That’s what MAGA wants and that’s why you’ve got all these little, you know, minions running around filming all this. Look, we’re really crushing the enemy in these cities and so forth. It goes out to the MAGA masses and all. But the middle of the country is reacting badly to all this. Most Americans hate the bullying, the military cosplay and the use of hyper-militarized equipment on defenseless people.

That triggers people’s anti-totalitarian instincts. And I think Pritzker and Newsom and maybe a few others, maybe Chris Murphy to some degree, know this, right? They know that if we get this conflict elevated, people in the middle are gonna take our side.

Karpf: Right, yeah. So by elevating it, the hope is that—because, again, people in the middle are almost by definition people who are not paying a lot of attention—and so you have to craft stories and engage in that polarization. Let’s be clear: they’re not—like, Pritzker isn’t seeking out the polarization. He’s responding to it, right? Like, he would not be able to engage in these rhetorical acts if Trump hadn’t decided, what the hell, let’s go send the National Guards from other states to invade.

The decision to try to send federal troops to occupy cities that didn’t vote for Donald Trump is outrageous. And then the challenge is, we need to elevate this outrage so that people are aware—because otherwise it’s just the stories in their heads, right? It seems to me one of the reasons why Donald Trump thinks that Portland has burned to the ground, or is constantly burning, is that when he tunes into Fox News, they’re showing video from, like, 2020—like the worst moments in 2020—and he thinks it’s live because his brain is soup.

So that difficulty of, if you do not escalate it and tell stories that are true, that people who don’t want to pay attention will pay attention to, then you’re left just leaving them in control with power—and they’re the ones with the guns. So you need to escalate this and fight back enough for the rest of the country to tune in and say, what do you mean Chicago’s a war zone? It’s Chicago. They’ve got terrible bagels, but otherwise it’s a lovely city.

Sargent: Right, and also there’s another danger in not engaging this the way Pritzker is, which is that it allows Trump and his propaganda apparatus to monopolize the information space with his storytelling about what’s happening.

So again, most of the people in that second category are trapped in their information silos. They’re scrolling about whatever they’re scrolling about. But some of the MAGA noise kind of filters through to them, right?

So they just, you know, what they hear is, well, they’re running a law enforcement operation in this place because there are a bunch of deadly criminals in that place. And if they only hear that, they maybe start to get seduced and sleepwalked into believing that this response isn’t the absolute outrage that it actually is. Can you talk a little bit about that danger and why that has to be countered?

Karpf: Yeah, I mean, in the absence of counter-narratives, Trump and his team and Fox News are certainly able to spin up a story to make themselves sound kind of reasonable. If it were actually the case that Portland was a war zone and on fire all the time—in a world where that was actually true—it could make sense to send in federal troops to help out.

And if your only knowledge of Portland or Chicago or Washington, D.C. is the story that is getting told by the president of the United States without pushback—like, you’re not going to any of those cities—so, like, okay, I guess that’s true. Why would he be invading the cities? If it wasn’t true, that would be kind of weird, right?

So for people who are sort of getting these stories as background noise, if there is no counter-narrative, there’s no kind of conflict saying, hey, man, what the hell are you talking about? Your brain is mush, then people are going to just sort of accept that or say, I don’t know what’s going on here, I’d rather stay tuned out and just leave the regime in control. So you do need to engage in these fights and win them.

Sargent: Well, just to close this out, in your very good piece, you discuss the information problem. You essentially conclude that the fractured environment we’re talking about, the need to command attention, really requires Democrats to make sustained investments in some sort of new media apparatus. Can you talk about that and talk about how that applies to what we’re learning out of Chicago?

Karpf: Yeah. So, and unfortunately, I’m going to be a downer here, but analytically, we both have a fractured media environment, but that is combining with a 20- or 30-year program amongst the right to build up their own information ecosystem.

This is the story of talk radio in the eighties and nineties, through Fox News, through the Republican blogosphere, and then onward to their podcasting empires today. They spent money and built up talent and built up an ecosystem.

And progressives spent… and I was a progressive organizer back in the aughts. I remember when we were talking about, we need Air America, we need to fight back against Fox News. It’s not that people didn’t know that they needed to do it — it’s that they didn’t make the sustained investment.

So we’ve got that, plus a fractured media environment. And then the thing that makes it even more dangerous is, on top of that, we now have arch-conservative billionaires buying up both mainstream media and social media.

Right, like, we have centi-billionaires — Elon Musk bought up Twitter and turned it into X. It’s now a right-wing echo chamber. Larry Ellison is one of the lead investors in the team that’s going to be buying up TikTok — they’re going to control that algorithm too.

Mark Zuckerberg has gone right-wing. Larry Ellison’s son bought CBS and is in the process of trying to buy CNN. And Jeff Bezos went right-wing and owns The Washington Post.

So now we have all of these mainstream outlets whose owners are putting their thumbs on the scale, and they’re buying up more of them while they also buy up the major social media platforms. That ends up creating an echo chamber where the other side just has a bigger megaphone.

We have the truth on our side, but people don’t hear the truth if the other side has a much larger megaphone. The reason why I’m a bummer on this is the ideal way to fix this is a bunch of liberal centi-billionaires — you know, people with over $100 billion — need to start counter-investing. And unfortunately, there are no liberal centi-billionaires.

So we’re going to need to engage in a sustained effort of building out this sort of media operation like they did 30 years ago, but the clock is ticking and we have fewer resources than we need. So the thing that I’m trying to do in the piece is at least point out: if we are ignoring that, then we’re never going to get better results. We need to start at least trying to summit that mountain.

Sargent: And the Chicago situation, I think, shows this about as clearly as you could possibly want. It really lays out the information challenges we face, right?

Karpf: Right. Yeah. And again, Pritzker can go on air, he can say that, and it can go viral. Though the challenge is, you’re probably going to end up still seeing, you know, Fox News and the set of outlets that are still getting permitted to interview the president — they’re not going to quote him or cover him because they have learned that they’re not supposed to do that.

And so while he’s… in terms of what he’s doing on that stage in front of a microphone, I don’t think he could do much better. The thing that’s going to limit him is, as well as you’re playing, you’re still on a tilted playing field.

Now Pritzker is a billionaire, so maybe he can invest in some media that would help. We’ve also got The Onion and, you know, we’ve got The New Republic.

But we need to take — we need to take this stuff seriously. Otherwise, even when we’re clearly outplaying them in terms of the, you know, sort of the basic blocking and tackling of how you do comms, the other side has got too much power.

Sargent: Dave Karpf, that was all really beautifully said. I hope Democrats listen to it. They really seem to be reluctant to absorb this type of stuff. Thanks for coming on with us, man. It was really grim, but really, really interesting.

Karpf: Thanks. Great talking to you.