Joe Rogan’s Harsh New Takedown of Trump ICE Raids Hands Dems a Weapon

Ever since Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection victory, Democrats have been consumed in debate over how to do politics in the so-called “attention economy.” How can Democrats access the information spaces that Trump seems to have mastery over? Do they need an army of their own Joe Rogans, or not? 

No, they don’t. But Joe Rogan can provide Democrats with a bit of guidance. In particular, Rogan, who backed Trump in 2024 but is politically idiosyncratic, has been one the most relentless critics of ICE on the Internet. This—plus new polling data on ICE I’ve obtained—tells us something important about that argument over information Democrats are having.

This week, Rogan harshly criticized Trump’s ICE raids again after the horrific and unjustified killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. “You don’t want militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching up people, many of which turn out to be U.S. citizens that just don’t have their papers on them,” Rogan said:

“Are we really gonna be the Gestapo?” Rogan asked. “Where’s your papers—is that what we’ve come to?”

Rogan has targeted ICE constantly. He has repeatedly denounced ICE arrests of day laborers outside Home Depot and at construction sites. He has sharply criticized the arrests of non-criminal immigrants. He has attacked ICE for “scaring the shit out of everybody” and for “arresting people in front of their kids.” Other star podcasters who reach large, mostly male audiences have said similar things.

All this suggests again that ICE’s brutality—and Trump’s—has achieved an extraordinary level of penetration into the culture, reaching into online spaces where people who aren’t fixated on politics hang out.

This is its own important development, and there is mounting evidence of it everywhere.

A private memo circulating among Democratic operatives from Blue Rose Research, the firm founded by Democratic strategist David Shor (who to put it mildly is not known for aggressiveness on immigration), lays out the results of intensive testing on impressions of ICE among national voters.

“In testing of 15 viral videos about the Minneapolis shooting, raw eyewitness footage and straightforward reporting consistently drove meaningful increases in Trump disapproval,” reads the memo, which I’ve obtained, though it also says some ideologically charged messages were less effective.

The testing also found that the killing has “broken through with voters,” the memo says, with 86 percent saying they have heard at least “a little” about it and 76 percent saying they’ve seen footage. And importantly, the testing also finds that Democratic proposals to rein in ICE have broad support. Voters favor requiring warrants for arrests by 29 points, and back a prohibition against masking during arrests by 16 points, though “Abolish Ice” remains a few points underwater.

Meanwhile, a new Quinnipiac poll finds that majorities of American voters believe the killing in Minneapolis was unjustified and disapprove of the way ICE is enforcing immigration laws. A large majority also reports watching video of the killing.

I asked Quinnipiac for a breakdown of these findings among voters aged 18 to 34 and among voters without a college degree, the latter being a proxy for the working class:

• Among the 18-to-34 set, 70 percent disapprove of ICE enforcement, 65 percent say the shooting was unjustified, and 83 percent have seen video of the killing.

• Among non-college voters, a majority (51-45) disapprove of ICE enforcement, a plurality (46-40) says the shooting was unjustified, and 81 percent have seen video of the shooting.

These demographics—young and working-class voters—are among the groups that Democrats have struggled to transmit information to and that Trump-MAGA have been very effective at reaching. Admittedly, the percentage of working-class voters who say the shooting was unjustified could be higher. But, given the pundit refrain that when Democrats bring up immigration-related issues they risk instantly alienating working-class voters, it’s significant that they tilt against the shooting.

It’s even more heartening that a majority of working-class voters disapproves of ICE enforcement. That is, they disapprove of ICE’s activities in general, even though Trump-MAGA-GOP propaganda has relentlessly depicted it as “law enforcement,” which it really isn’t any longer. 

And the finding that truly enormous majorities of young and working-class voters have seen video of the shooting suggests such incidents—intensely jarring, morally revolting, compulsively shareable—are reaching a lot of people who aren’t political obsessives. 

There’s other evidence of this, too: In many cities under siege by ICE, resistance networks have sprung up organically, and one thing we keep hearing about these efforts is that they’re engaging a lot of people who aren’t Democratic base voters and aren’t fixated on politics. Taylor Carik, a Minneapolis resident, writes in Liberal Currents about the extraordinary solidarity taking hold among ordinary people banding together against “domestic military occupation.”

I’ve long thought imagery of the Trump-ICE war on blue America—the heavily-armed government militias ripping people out of cars; the hypermilitarized vehicles on urban boulevards: the mind-numbing, up-is-down propaganda videos; the masks and concealment of identities; and, of course, the wanton killings—are activating a kind of anti-totalitarian instinct in many ordinary people. America isn’t supposed to have such trappings of dictatorship saturating their everyday lives, a lot of people think. Rogan’s latest broadside—“Are we really gonna be the Gestapo?”—speaks to that intuition.

But let’s be clear: Trump and MAGA are operating from their own theory of the case on all this. Recall The Washington Post’s recent report on ICE’s massive $100 million mobilization push: the agency is recruiting heavily with ads targeting fans of UFC fights, NASCAR, people who dabble in guns and military tactical equipment, and people showing an interest in military recruitment. These are MAGA-adjacent information spaces, and these messages are meant to appeal to what John Ganz calls the “mob elements” and “demimonde” of the GOP base.

So Trumpworld is consciously selling those denizens a vision of ICE as a new form of patriotic national service, one that portrays the mass purging of immigrants—including naturalized ones—as an act of national purification and renewal. All those slick government-sponsored propaganda videos that portray ICE raids as the work of conquering heroes are consciously depicting the unleashing of ICE on wicked, urban, cosmopolitan, non-MAGA America as a sustained act of restorative violence.

Yet the evidence is strong that this is not how it’s being received among even the people that Trumpworld hopes to reach. 

For MAGA, all the turmoil and violence is a feature, not a bug. The MAGA mode of politics is all about unleashing ethnic hatreds and supercharging antagonisms among Americans, violent ones very much included. Which in turn has awakened a need to feed more and more of this madness to an insatiable MAGA base.

But it’s causing most people to recoil in horror. It’s penetrating deeply into info-spaces where Democrats fear to tread. But they can  now try to go into them and say the answer to Rogan’s question—“are we really gonna be the Gestapo”—is: No, we aren’t. There’s a far better way.