A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. You can sign up for free here.
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.”
The video showcased how Portlanders are wearing inflatable costumes to mock what one of the frog cosplayers called “insane government overreach.”
The dress-up “dismantles their narrative a little bit,” Jack Dickinson, also known as the “Portland Chicken,” told Willamette Week. “It becomes much harder to take them seriously when they have to post a video saying Kristi Noem is up on the balcony staring over the Antifa Army and it’s, like, eight journalists and five protesters and one of them is in a chicken suit.”
Pritzker and Dickinson have something in common: They’re using the tools at their disposal — smart phone cameras, social media apps and satire — to turn “war” rhetoric into a punchline. “The Daily Show” did it too, with this clip labeled “REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.”
Conservative journalist Andy Ngo pushed back early Friday morning by claiming the costumes in Portland “serve the function of masking the violent extremism to make the direct action appear like a family-friendly gathering on camera, and to whitewash the past ultraviolence.”
So, as always, it comes down to which videos and posts people choose to believe.
Performers at pseudo-events
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.
Trump’s anti-Antifa roundtable is just one example. “Right-wing podcasters, writers and pundits are flocking to Democratic deep-blue cities to document the scene for their massive audiences but also, in some cases such as Portland, to spar with left-wing demonstrators,” NBC’s David Ingram and Jo Yurcaba reported.
It’s often helpful to think of pseudo-events like these anti-ICE protests as stages, because then you can observe the performers accordingly.
Take this quote, for example: Local TV reporter-turned-MAGA poster Jonathan Choe told NBC, “This is now a full-blown information war that we’re in, so being on the front lines is more important than ever…”
Photographers as fact-checkers
Sometimes a simple photo montage can serve as 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 from Oregon.
Photographer Spencer Platt had just published dozens of gorgeous day-in-the-life-of-the-city shots. A man sunbathing in a public square; a woman ordering coffee; a couple strolling through a park; this was the reality in the city Trump called a “hellhole.”
Yes, Platt also took photos at night of officers standing in formation while protesters gathered outside the ICE facility. But the photos showed the disconnect between Trump’s “Portland is burning to the ground” rhetoric and the on-the-scene reality.
Oregon Public Broadcasting did something similar last weekend, producing an Instagram video with timestamped photos that contradicted Trump’s hyperbole.
“Our OPB team is reporting the facts on the ground as they unfold with as much context as we can offer,” said the network’s CEO, Rachel Smolkin. “When the facts diverge from statements about the city, we note the discrepancies. Video and photos are powerful reporting tools in this type of news coverage.”