Frogs protest against MAGA media influencers: the information war on ICE in Portland and Chicago

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

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

Pritzker, wearing a bulletproof vest, played the role of a television reporter in the music video. “We’ve seen people forced to eat hot dogs with ketchup on them,” the governor joked.

While Kimmel’s show aired, a real reporter from The Oregonian newspaper recorded video outside the ICE facility, which has long been a draw for protests in Portland. The subject: “Protest frogs multiply.”

The video showed how Portland residents wore inflatable costumes to mock what one of the frog cosplayers called “insane government overreach.”

The disguise “dismantles their narrative a bit,” Jack Dickinson, also known as the “Portland Chicken,” told Willamette Week. “It becomes a lot harder to take them seriously when they have to post a video saying Kristi Noem is on the balcony looking at the Antifa army and there are, like, eight reporters and five protesters, one of whom is in a chicken costume.”

Pritzker and Dickinson have something in common: They use the tools at their disposal – smartphone cameras, social media apps and satire – to turn the rhetoric of “war” into a punchline. “The Daily Show” did it too, with this clip labeled “REAL images of Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised. »

Conservative journalist Andy Ngo pushed back early Friday morning saying the Portland costumes “serve to mask violent extremism to make direct action on camera appear like a family gathering and to whitewash past ultraviolence.”

So, as always, it comes down to which videos and messages that people choose to believe.

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

Trump’s anti-Antifa roundtable is just an example. “Right-wing podcasters, writers and pundits are flocking to deep-blue Democratic cities to document the scene for their massive audiences but also, in some cases like Portland, to clash with left-wing protesters,” NBC’s David Ingram and Jo Yurcaba reported.

It’s often helpful to think of pseudo-events like these anti-ICE protests as scenes, because you can then observe the artists accordingly.

Take this quote, for example: Jonathan Choe, local TV reporter turned MAGA poster boy. told NBC“We are now engaged in a real information war, so it is more important than ever to be on the front lines…”

Sometimes a simple photo montage can be the most powerful fact check.

Earlier this week, when President Trump resumed his insistence that “Portland is on fire,” I logged onto Getty Images and searched for photos of Oregon.

Photographer Spencer Platt had just published dozens of magnificent photos of city life. A man sunbathing in a public square; a woman ordering coffee; a couple walking in a park; this was the reality in the city Trump called “hell.”

Yes, Platt also took nighttime photos of officers in training while protesters gathered outside ICE facilities. But the photos show the disconnect between Trump’s rhetoric that “Portland is burning” and the reality on the ground.

Oregon Public Broadcasting did something similar this past weekend, produce an Instagram video with time-stamped photos that contradicted Trump’s hyperbole.

“Our OPB team reports the facts on the ground as they unfold, with as much context as possible,” said network CEO Rachel Smolkin. “When the facts differ from the statements about the city, we see the discrepancies. Video and photos are powerful reporting tools in this type of media coverage.”