Protest frogs vs. MAGA media influencers: the info war over ICE in Portland and Chicago

As the Department of Homeland Security floods social media with “propaganda” videos, and pro-Trump commentators flock to Portland and Chicago in search of a “rebellion,” local residents are responding with… chicken suits and clever jokes.

Thursday night on ABC, Jimmy Kimmel tossed to a “special report” from Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, “reporting from war-torn Chicago.”

Pritzker, wearing body armor, played a TV reporter in the video clip. “We’ve seen people being forced to eat hot dogs with ketchup on them,” the governor quipped.

While Kimmel’s show was airing, a real reporter for The Oregonian was recording a video outside the ICE facility that has long been a magnet for protests in Portland. The topic: “Protest frogs are multiplying.”

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However, “in the bifurcated media world of 2025, one side’s comparative calm is the other’s ‘hellscape’ — as the White House described Portland on Wednesday — and the narrative that the Trump administration has wanted has been supplied by a coterie of right-wing influencers elevated by Mr. Trump himself,” The New York Times’s Anna Griffin and Aaron West wrote in a new piece this morning.

Related:

Costumes: It’s the same old playbook—When will people ever learn?

198 METHODS OF NONVIOLENT ACTION

Communications with a Wider Audience
7. Slogans, caricatures, and symbols
8. Banners, posters, and displayed communications
9. Leaflets, pamphlets, and books
10. Newspapers and journals
11. Records, radio, and television
12. Skywriting and earthwriting

…

Symbolic Public Acts
18. Displays of flags and symbolic colors
19. Wearing of symbols
20. Prayer and worship
21. Delivering symbolic objects
22. Protest disrobings
23. Destruction of own property
24. Symbolic lights
25. Displays of portraits
26. Paint as protest
27. New signs and names
28. Symbolic sounds
29. Symbolic reclamations
30. Rude gestures

…

Drama and Music
35. Humorous skits and pranks
36. Performances of plays and music
37. Singing