The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 31 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Trump’s militarized raids in Chicago just took another really horrific turn. ABC News reports that Trump’s agents disrupted a children’s Halloween parade, resulting in all kinds of mayhem. Tear gas was fired, old people were pushed around, children were terrified. What really struck us as well is what happened next: Illinois Governor JB Pritzker not only denounced it all very forcefully, but issued a sharply worded warning and a challenge directly to top Trump officials. This elevated the issue and forced Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security Secretary, to give an answer that we think is terrible for Trump. All this has ramifications for how Democrats should do politics amid our slide into authoritarianism. And we’re talking about all this with Dave Karpf, a professor of media and public affairs who has a good new piece for The New Republic that touches on this topic. Dave, good to have you on.
David Karpf: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So the Border Patrol unleashed more mayhem in Chicago over the weekend as ABC reports, “Neighborhood residents claimed the agents interrupted a children’s Halloween parade and allegedly deployed tear gas without warning on residents trying to intervene.” ABC also saw video footage showing agents firing tear gas and tackling and arresting several people, including U.S. citizens. Dave, just another day in Trump’s America, huh?
Karpf: Yeah, they keep wanting Democratic cities, blue cities, to be war zones—and then taking actions to turn them into war zones. What strikes me, I live in Washington, D.C., so we’ve been occupied for a few months now. There are always these National Guardsmen on my running route, protecting the park where three-year-olds are having their birthday parties.
What they’re looking for is video and stories that they can share on X and share on social media in order to tell a story to their hermetically sealed media environment—that it’s all war, and they’re out leading the charge to make things better.
And meanwhile, we’ve got objective reality, which is kids in neighborhoods going and having a Halloween parade, and parents getting tear-gassed and just saying, “Can you lay off?” It’s so far of a gap between the stories that they want to be true and the actual, actual world we’re living in. And that’s what we’re up against.
Sargent: Absolutely. And I think Governor JB Pritzker really understands that. Let’s listen to the governor describe what happened.
Governor JB Pritzker (voiceover): Witnesses say the agents swept, in donning automatic weapons, pushed elderly people to the ground and blasted the area with tear gas. They ended up detaining three people. None of them had done anything wrong. Two of them were U.S. citizens. This wasn’t happening before the Trump administration. Now, U.S. federal law enforcement attacking good and decent people, unprovoked, with no explanation. So don’t believe it when they tell you that they’re busting the worst of the worst gangs, or gang members. They’re attacking peaceful neighborhoods and terrorizing kids in Halloween parades. Children across the city are being traumatized. Their parents are being taken from them. Families are being ripped apart, sometimes in the most heartbreaking of circumstances.
Sargent: Dave, what I find so striking about that is the way Pritzker is speaking to the people of his city, but simultaneously speaking to the whole country there. It’s quite a warning. Kids being traumatized. You could be next. What do you think he’s up to here?
Karpf: I think of all the Democratic governors, Pritzker is the one who understands the assignment best. And that’s because he’s both telling stories that are true about what’s happening in Chicago, but also painting a picture of what Chicagoans are facing and making clear that this is an attack from Trump’s forces.
Sargent: Yeah. And I think Pritzker makes another interesting move here that I really want people to listen to. Check this out.
Governor JB Pritzker (voiceover): The Department of Homeland Security claims their highest priority is to protect children. So today I have to ask them. Please, live up to those ideals. I’ve sent a letter to Kristi Noem and to the Department of Homeland Security leadership asking them to pause all of their federal agent operations for the entirety of the Halloween weekend. I’m asking for basic human decency. I think their response will be revealing.
Sargent: So there Pritzker challenges the administration to pause the raids for the good of kids. He knows the administration is not going to agree to that, but this is the point—he’s creatively elevating the issue and bringing it national attention. It forces the administration to respond.
This is how you need to do politics against authoritarians, right?
Karpf: Right. What he’s making clear there—I think he’s doing a really crafty job of raising the stakes by making a request that just seems so reasonable. One of the main classes that I teach is strategic political communication. And the trick that I always try to teach people about framing, when you are engaged in a framing battle, is you want to position yourself as being deeply reasonable and your opponent or the status quo as utterly absurd.
In a lot of strategic campaigning, that’s not available—but when it is, that’s what you should go to. The demand—not that ICE do no enforcement ever—but instead just the simple demand, can you pause your attacks during Halloween weekend so parents and their kids aren’t threatened, is so sharp because he’s both right about it, it illustrates the absurdity, but it also puts them in a position of either being reasonable in response and dialing down the attack, or what we know Noem is bound to do—to say, “No, no, we’re going to be out there, we’re going to keep on attacking,” which elevates this point and makes clear this is a governor trying to stand up for his citizens as they are being attacked by Trump’s forces.
Sargent: Right, and he doesn’t play the kind of game of getting into a debate about whether that’s what Trump’s doing. He just treats it as an established fact that the Trump administration is actually treating Chicago like an enemy war zone, period.
Karpf: Right, yeah. And of course, Trump hasn’t done himself any favors since he keeps on talking about Chicago and other blue cities in those terms. From a comms perspective, Trump keeps on stepping on rakes by insisting that whatever world exists inside his head must be the world outside.
Sargent: Yeah. And I thought Pritzker did another thing that was really interesting as well along these lines. He made a direct appeal to Greg Bovino, who’s the Border Patrol chief—called on him to pause the terror raids over Halloween for the good of the children.
Now, Bovino is a particularly disgusting character. He’s been swaggering around these raids like the Robert Duvall character in Apocalypse Now. You can almost hear him saying, “I love the smell of tear gas in the morning—especially in urban areas I’m subjugating.”
I think the key here—and you’re the communications expert, so maybe you could explain this to us—what Pritzker’s doing is putting a really vile face on what’s happening, right? Which also seems critical.
Karpf: Right. So he’s—well, he’s putting a vile face on it. The thing that I would flag again, from social-movement history: When you are strategizing, one of the things you want to think about is what are the things we’re going to do. But then you also want to think about your opponents and your targets and their vulnerabilities.
So recognizing that Greg Bovino himself is this disgusting character who, given some rope, will go in and use that to rhetorically hang himself, right? Bovino wants to be that sort of villainous figure because he likes it. So that means centering him and giving him the opportunity to be the worst possible person on camera is a smart rhetorical trick.
Well, you wouldn’t want to do that against an opponent who’s going to understand it’s a bad idea for me to perform the villain here. But Bovino and a lot of the people who are left in the second Trump administration relish that and sort of congratulate each other when they do it. And so the least you can do is elevate them, because that then becomes another big part of the story.
Sargent: Well, let’s listen to how Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem answered Pritzker’s challenge.
Reporter (voiceover): Governor Pritzker has asked for Operation Midway Blitz to be on pause for the holiday weekend. Are you willing to do that? And if you’re not, why not?
Kristi Noem (voiceover): No, we’re absolutely not willing to put on pause any work that we will do to keep communities safe. The fact that Governor Pritzker is asking for that is shameful.
Sargent: So Noem tries to put a little spin on this, but now the story is Trump administration won’t pause terror raids during Halloween after Pritzker makes appeal to keep kids safe. Your thoughts, Dave?
Karpf: I always want to stress that winning the comms battle doesn’t actually win the war, but that’s what you can control. And certainly, this is him winning the comms battle, right?
Her responding with this odd thing about, Oh, we’re tracking down the child pornographers. Like ... No, you’re not. That’s not anything. You’re just kind of making that up.
And from a comms perspective, since the follow-up question of What the hell are you talking about? is something that she can’t answer, that’s going to be a dead end for her.
And what we’re left with is the real story—well-framed—of, he’s asking them just to give kids Halloween weekend, and their answer to that is to get spitting mad and say no.
Sargent: Well, I’d like to ask you to elaborate a little bit on your drawing of a parallel between this and the history of social movements.
Obviously, during the civil rights movement, one of the tactics that was employed to really great effect was to provoke the opposition into revealing itself as disgusting and racist and violent—especially violent toward people who were being nonviolent. That was the critical thing that they were trying to put on display for the nation.
Obviously, the media environment was a very different thing back then than it is now. But I think the core insight is the same, right? Can you apply that to the present?
Karpf: Yeah. So it’s—I actually teach this in class as well. It’s a book that I wrote a decade ago.
My favorite example from the civil rights movement is the march from Selma to Montgomery. They had done a similar march in—I believe it was Rochester, New York—and the Rochester government said, That’s OK, you can go ahead and march. And Saul Alinsky has this great line that, “the action is in the reaction.” It sort of sums this up.
But the lack of government overreaction meant that, at the end of that, these courageous activists are left with tired feet and no social change. And they recognized that. And so they went into the place where they knew that the racist sheriff would turn the dogs and hoses on them.
That requires tremendous courage—we shouldn’t sort of undermine and discount that courage—but it’s also real strategic savvy: recognizing they’re going to overreact. And this is an era when there were only three TV stations, and so all the TV stations will be there, and this will then become the national conversation. That was strategy, and it worked.
A critical part of it that I think is important for us to think about now is that media environment is gone. So if they were strategically being bright by understanding how do you create leverage—essentially, make things go viral in the broadcast media environment of the ’50s and ’60s—the question today is how do you make things go viral in this weird, fractured media environment?
And the first answer is that it’s not easy, but certainly the action is still in the reaction. That’s the first lesson. And the second thing is that you need to be telling coherent, shareable stories. This is the thing that has been driving me personally nuts with a lot of the Democratic leadership, where their answer to everything is to talk about the price of eggs and sort of phrase it as kitchen-table issues.
That’s nice as a sound bite—it works if you’re, like, I don’t know, getting interviewed on the nightly news and the entire nation is still watching the nightly news—but it ends up being so trite that nobody’s going to share it. That sort of deadens the energy.
Whereas Pritzker, understanding the assignment—understanding that you need to tell stories that are true and that resonate but also are shareable—if things aren’t shareable, then they don’t go anywhere, because that’s how people engage news today. So you need that third component. And it’s hard, but he’s doing it right.
Sargent: Yeah. It’s interesting to kind of compare the two moments in a way. So as you said, people were kind of, you know, there was a monolithic media environment back then in many ways. And now, of course, the big story is that the media environment is fractured in a million different ways, but still, viralness is the thing that breaks through that problem when it really comes down to it.
Everybody’s kind of in their own algorithmic torpor, you know, they’re kind of in their own silos and you need to break them out of that. And I think the core insight with people like Pritzker and to some extent, Gavin Newsom, the California governor, is that this kind of jarring storytelling that just breaks through the noise and just gets around into people’s spaces. That’s how you get it into their heads.
Karpf: Yeah, so I would complicate that in one way—that I actually think there’s two assignments. And one is amongst ... because there’s a small attentive public that’s in usually the single-digit millions. And then there’s a massive inattentive public, which is in the hundreds of millions in the United States.
And that’s true for social media. That’s also true if we think about the audience of Fox News—the biggest Fox News show is drawing maybe three million people. It’s one percent of the country. So we’ve got the attentive public and the inattentive public.
One of the things you need to do is provide stories and sustenance and hope or outrage to the attentive public—the people who are within your fractured media silo and tuning in. Those are the people who are going to turn out to the No King’s march and ask their peers to come. Those people are going to knock on doors for your election day and maybe even run for something.
And then you also separately need to be telling stories that are going to travel outside of that attentive public, fractured media silo—to reach people who are only incidentally going to engage with this.
So, what I like to keep in mind is you’re not trying to reach the people watching CBS. You’re trying to reach the people who are just tuning into SportsCenter. So what are the things that are actually going to travel beyond the political media conversation?
And that is going to be things like neighbors talking about how kids got tear-gassed at the parade. The governor was pleading that the government, that the president, just give them a break. That type of thing isn’t going to get everybody’s attention for the entire time, but that’s one of those moments where you can extend beyond the narrow attentive public.
Sargent: You know, I think there’s also some solace to be drawn from what we saw with No Kings. Because at least people I talked to—we had one person on here who was at a No Kings march in a red part of Texas, of all places—and saw this.
But I think we saw the types of people turning out at these marches that are outside these information silos of the super-committed. They’re in that second category, the inattentive category.
And it seems to me that (a), this type of thing is really, really, really primed to break through to those people, for the reasons we’ve been discussing. But secondly, we’re already seeing that these people are getting more activated. What do you think?
Karpf: So yeah, that’s—I mean, in sort of classic organizing theory, we talk about a ladder of engagement. Those people turning out to their first No Kings march and having a good time—that’s the first rung on a potential ladder of engagement. That’s just sort of, classically, good work, well done.
The other bit that comes up for me with a protest moment like No Kings—because I always get a lot of questions when that comes up as a social movement theorist—is it effective? And what the people asking that are usually saying is, will this protest bring down and end the presidency? And if not, shouldn’t we complain about it?
And the answer is, well, no, of course the one protest isn’t going to end Trump’s presidency—nothing will. But then what you want to think about is how does this fit into a broader campaign and a broader argument? What work does it do?
And very clearly, the work that it’s doing—since nothing is going, there’s no action that will end his presidency today—the work that it’s doing is sustaining people, giving them hope, giving them vitality, so that they don’t get depressed and give up.
So 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. And let’s be clear: They’re not—Pritzker isn’t seeking out the polarization. He’s responding to it. 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—you’re not going to any of those cities—so 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. 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.