As reported by Lawfare, “This year’s defense policy bill—the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—would roll back data disclosures that help the department understand the real costs of what they are buying, and testing requirements that establish whether what contractors promise is technically feasible or even suited to its needs.” This change comes amid a push from the Secretary of Defense to “Maximize Lethality” by acquiring modern software “at a speed and scale for our Warfighter.” The Senate Armed Services Committee has also expressed interest in making “significant reforms to modernize the Pentagon’s budgeting and acquisition operations…to improve efficiency, unleash innovation, and modernize the budget process.”
The 2026 NDAA itself says that the “Secretary of Defense shall prioritize alternative acquisition mechanisms to accelerate development and production” of technology, including an expedited “software acquisition pathway”—a special part of the U.S. code that, if this version of the NDAA passes, will transfer powers to the Secretary of Defense to streamline the buying process and make new technology or updates to existing technology and get it operational “in a period of not more than one year from the time the process is initiated…” It also makes sure the new technology “shall not be subjected to” some of the traditional levers of oversight.
All of this signals one thing: speed over due diligence. In a commercial technology landscape where companies are repeatedly found to be overselling or even deceiving people about their product’s technical capabilities—or where police departments are constantly grappling with the reality that expensive technology may not be effective at providing the solutions they’re after—it’s important that the government agency with the most expansive budget has time to test the efficacy and cost-efficiency of new technology. It’s easy for the military or police departments to listen to a tech company’s marketing department and believe their well-rehearsed sales pitch, but Congress should make sure that public money is being used wisely and in a way that is consistent with both civil liberties and human rights.
The military and those who support its preferred budget should think twice about cutting corners before buying and deploying new technology. The Department of Defense’s posturing does not elicit confidence that the technologically-focused military of tomorrow will be equipped in a way that is effective, efficient, or transparent.
Within twenty-four hours of Republicans getting crushed in elections they’d convinced themselves were winnable, Fox News deployed the counter-move.
Not denial—the losses were too visible for that. Bret Baier had already explained to Fox & Friends viewers how bad it was. “It’s a big loss,” he said. Not just the results, but “the spreads are surprising.”
Not acceptance—that would threaten the narrative that MAGA represents the inevitable American future.
Instead, on Wednesday night’s edition of The Ingraham Angle, Laura Ingraham offered viewers a reframe so brazen it became an on-screen graphic:
“By Winning, Democrats Are Actually Losing.”
The emperor has no clothes. And what makes this moment pedagogically valuable is that lots of people are noticing simultaneously. The propaganda is at its most naked. Which means we can analyze how it works precisely when it’s failing to work.
When You Can See It
Propaganda works by being invisible. The best propaganda doesn’t feel like propaganda—it feels like common sense, like the way things obviously are, like what everyone already knows.
When propaganda becomes visible as propaganda, it loses most of its power. Once you can see the strings, the puppet stops being convincing.
Ingraham just made the strings visible. Not through some subtle slip, but by putting “By Winning, Democrats Are Actually Losing” on screen as a graphic. This is propaganda’s nightmare scenario: the mechanism exposed precisely when it’s most desperately needed.
Let’s break down the structure so you can recognize it when it’s less obvious:
The Core Move: Reality Inversion
When observable reality contradicts your narrative decisively, you have limited options. Denial becomes impossible when the contradiction is too visible. Acceptance destroys the narrative you need to maintain.
So you invert: acknowledge the reality while controlling what it means. Transform the evidence that contradicts your narrative into evidence that confirms it.
Ingraham’s version:
Democrats won—can’t deny.
But their policies will fail—contestable.
So people will flee to red states—contestable.
Which means Democratic victory produces Republican benefit—inversion complete.
Therefore by winning, they’re actually losing—reality inverted.
Good propaganda makes this subtle. It spends weeks establishing premises. It lets viewers do the inversion themselves through implication.
But Ingraham had twenty-four hours. The fracture was fresh. The narrative needed immediate repair. So she just… said it. Put it on screen. Made it a graphic.
That’s not sophisticated propaganda. That’s desperate propaganda. And desperate propaganda exposes its mechanics because it doesn’t have time for subtlety.
The Terror of Being Seen
Here’s what you need to understand about what this moment means for Laura Ingraham, for Fox News, for the entire propaganda infrastructure:
Their power depends on invisibility.
Not invisibility of the network—everyone knows Fox News exists, knows it’s conservative. That’s not the invisibility that matters.
The invisibility that matters is the machinery itself. The mechanisms through which they shape perception, manufacture consensus, control interpretation. Those need to be invisible or they stop working.
When you can see someone trying to make you believe something, you become resistant to believing it. Persuasion operates through the illusion of discovery—you think you’re arriving at conclusions independently when really you’re being guided there. Once you see the guidance, the spell breaks.
Ingraham just made the guidance visible. And this is terrifying for propagandists because once people see the machinery, they start seeing it everywhere.
If you can see Ingraham inverting reality to maintain narrative, you might start asking: what else has been inverted? When they said the economy was terrible while data showed recovery—was that reality inversion too? When they said protests weren’t representative—was that the same move? When they said Trump’s felony conviction would help him—was that the same desperate gymnastics?
One visible instance threatens to illuminate the entire structure. Recognition cascades backward through everything you’ve believed. This is the propagandist’s nightmare.
But it gets worse for them. Because propaganda doesn’t just require individual belief—it requires collective suspension of disbelief. It needs to be socially reinforced. Your family believes it, your neighbors believe it, your social media feed confirms it. When everyone around you accepts the frame, questioning it feels crazy. That social reinforcement is what makes propaganda sticky.
But when lots of people simultaneously notice the emperor has no clothes, that reinforcement fractures. If you think you’re alone in seeing the absurdity, you might doubt yourself. But if you suspect lots of people are simultaneously recognizing it—if Twitter is mocking it, if even conservative commentators seem skeptical, if your Fox-watching uncle texts you “that was weird”—then the collective suspension of disbelief cracks.
That’s what propagandists fear most. Not individual disbelief—that can be isolated, dismissed. But mass simultaneous recognition that the machinery is visible, the narrative is constructed, the consensus is manufactured.
When lots of people at once see the strings, the puppet show ends.
The Prostrators and the Propagandists
Laura Ingraham trying to convince viewers that Democratic victories are actually defeats would be merely pathetic if it existed in isolation. But it doesn’t.
She’s performing this desperate reality inversion while Tim Cook presents a gold-plated tribute in the Oval Office like some feudal vassal paying homage to his lord. While Zuckerberg congratulates Trump. While Bezos killed the Post endorsement then offered “extraordinary” praise. While Marc Andreessen proclaims “morning in America”—liberation from the terrible oppression of having to pretend to care about other people at dinner parties.
The propagandists and the prostrators serve the same master: the simulation of MAGA inevitability. Ingraham maintains it through reality inversion. The tech oligarchs maintain it through strategic submission.
And both have soiled their reputations into the annals of history with the same calculation: that bending the knee is wisdom, that accommodation is strategy, that surrendering dignity is just being realistic about power.
They’re wrong. And Tuesday night proved it.
The Economic Royalists Chose This
Let’s be clear about what happened after November 2024. These weren’t small business owners protecting their livelihoods. These were some of the wealthiest, most powerful people on the planet—people with resources to resist, with platforms to speak truth, with security that ordinary people don’t have—choosing to prostrate themselves.
Tim Cook didn’t need to perform feudal tribute. Apple has more cash reserves than most countries’ GDP. Cook could have maintained dignified distance. He chose submission instead.
Bezos owns the Washington Post—a paper with “Democracy Dies in Darkness” as its motto. He killed their endorsement, then offered extraordinary praise to Trump. He has wealth that makes him effectively untouchable. He chose to touch his forehead to the ground anyway.
These aren’t victims. These are people who looked at Trump’s explicit authoritarianism and decided their wealth and power would be safer if they signaled submission early.
They made a bet: MAGA represents the inevitable future, resistance is futile, accommodation is wisdom.
Tuesday night, reality called that bet. And they lost.
The Sociopaths Are Shocked
What links Ingraham’s desperate propaganda and Cook’s feudal tribute is the same fundamental miscalculation: they thought everyone would become what they are.
The propagandists thought everyone would accept obvious inversions if delivered confidently enough. The prostrators thought everyone would bend the knee once they demonstrated it was safe to do so. Both groups convinced themselves that cynicism is realism, that principles are obstacles, that most people are just waiting for permission to abandon dignity.
They were shocked to discover: no. Most people aren’t sociopaths. Most people won’t accept that winning means losing. Most people won’t prostrate themselves to authoritarians just because billionaires did it first.
The propagandists control the platforms. The prostrators control the wealth. Together they manufacture consensus, shape information flows, fund the campaigns, own the infrastructure.
And they still lost. Because manufactured consensus only works until lived experience contradicts it. Because reality has veto power. Because most people can still recognize that two plus two equals four even when Laura Ingraham explains otherwise and Tim Cook nods along.
What Tuesday Night Means for the Prostrators
The propagandists are scrambling to repair the simulation because their credibility depends on narrative maintenance. But what about the prostrators?
It means their bet is failing. The calculation that MAGA inevitability made accommodation wise—that’s looking shaky.
Because here’s the thing about authoritarian systems: they don’t reward early submission. They despise it. Trump publicly humiliated Musk despite Musk’s hundreds of millions in support. You think Tim Cook’s golden tribute bought him security? It bought him contempt—Trump’s and ours.
The prostrators thought they were being strategic. They were being cowards. And now they’re trapped. Having soiled their reputations through public submission, they can’t easily reverse course. Having signaled that they’ll bend to power, they’ve marked themselves as bendable.
And the simulation they bent to support is fracturing. Which means they prostrated themselves to a future that might not arrive. They surrendered dignity for security in an order that’s proving less inevitable than claimed.
What This Teaches Us About All Propaganda
This moment is valuable precisely because the propaganda is so naked. When you can see the machinery clearly in one instance, you can start recognizing it everywhere:
Watch for acknowledgment followed by inversion. “Yes that happened, but it actually means the opposite because…”
Notice predictions stated as certainties. “Will fail” becomes “are failures.” Grammar converts uncertainty into inevitability.
Track coherence debt. How many special exceptions does accepting this require? How much explaining away of observable reality?
Test predictions. Inversions depend on future consequences. Did those consequences happen? When they don’t, does the framework adjust or create new explanations?
Check alternative frameworks. Does this interpretation require believing this source exclusively? What would someone outside this information silo conclude?
Ask what’s being protected. Inversions happen when reality threatens something desperately needed. What narrative does this inversion protect?
These aren’t just tools for analyzing Fox News. They’re tools for analyzing all propaganda—including propaganda that aligns with your values, that comes from sources you trust, that feels like common sense.
Because left-wing propaganda exists too. Technocratic propaganda. Progressive propaganda. The structure is the same even when the content differs.
Learning to see propaganda when it’s naked—when it’s obviously desperate—teaches you to see it when it’s sophisticated.
Two Plus Two Equals Four
There are truths that survive every inversion, every sophisticated reframing, every attempt to make reality mean its opposite.
Democrats won elections in New Jersey, Virginia, and New York. That’s what winning is—getting more votes, your candidates taking office.
You can predict those victories will lead to bad governance. You can work to defeat those officials in future elections. You can argue their policies will fail.
But you cannot make victory into defeat through definitional gymnastics. You cannot invert observable reality through prediction about what it might eventually mean.
When Fox News puts “By Winning, Democrats Are Actually Losing” on screen, they’re not offering analysis. They’re attempting reality maintenance for viewers whose framework just got contradicted.
The sophistication of the attempt doesn’t make it true. The confidence with which it’s delivered doesn’t make it coherent. The fact that some people accept it doesn’t make it correspond to reality.
Two plus two equals four. Democrats winning elections means Republicans lost. And no amount of propagandistic inversion changes that, no matter how desperately the simulation needs it to.
The Wire Still Holds
The simulation fractured when Republicans lost decisively. Laura Ingraham’s attempt to repair it through naked reality inversion is evidence of fragility, not strength.
You don’t need to tell people that winning is actually losing unless losing threatens your entire framework. You don’t make the propaganda machinery visible unless you’re desperate enough that visibility is worth the risk.
The terror for propagandists isn’t that this particular inversion might fail. It’s that lots of people are simultaneously seeing the machinery. That once you see propaganda as propaganda, you start seeing it everywhere. That recognition cascades backward through everything you’ve believed.
The wire is holding. Not because Fox News isn’t powerful—they are. The inversion will work on some viewers. The simulation will partially reconstruct.
But when propaganda becomes naked, when the machinery is visible, when lots of people simultaneously notice the emperor has no clothes—that’s when resistance becomes possible. Not because you’ve won, but because you can finally see clearly what you’re fighting.
And understanding their desperation—seeing how scared they are—is strategic intelligence. They’re not operating from strength. They’re scrambling. The propagandists are deploying naked reality inversion. The prostrators are doubling down on bets that are already failing.
That’s when they’re most dangerous. Desperation produces escalation. But it’s also when they’re most vulnerable. Because every desperate move that fails to restore the simulation reveals further fragility.
May Love Carry Us Home
The cognitive technology for recognizing propaganda isn’t just intellectual—it’s grounded in love for what’s real.
Love for truth that withstands inversion. Love for your own capacity to see clearly even when powerful forces try to make you doubt what you observe. Love for people trying to maintain coherence in hostile information environments.
That love is what makes you resist when Laura Ingraham explains that winning is losing. Not because propaganda doesn’t work on you—it works on everyone sometimes. But because when it becomes visible, when you can see someone trying to make you believe the impossible, love for truth is what lets you say: no. I see what you’re doing. And I choose reality instead.
The machinery is visible. The emperor has no clothes. Lots of people are noticing simultaneously. And that recognition—that moment when propaganda reveals itself as propaganda—is where resistance begins.
Not in never being manipulated. But in seeing manipulation when it happens. Not in being immune to propaganda. But in recognizing it when the machinery becomes visible and choosing truth over the inversion.
Two plus two equals four. Winning means winning. And we can see you trying to tell us otherwise, Laura. We can see the strings. And once you see them, you can’t unsee them.
The circus continues. But this time, we’re watching the performance with clear eyes. And that clarity—that refusal to accept obvious inversion—is how the wire holds.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
VPN company CyberGhost just sent Cloudflare a bogus DMCA takedown demand, claiming that our article about their last bogus copyright takedown demand, somehow violates their copyright.
I’m not sure I’d trust a VPN company that fucks up this badly.
There are a lot of sketchy VPN companies out there, and it’s sometimes tricky to tell which ones are legit, and which ones to be wary of. I would suggest that if your VPN company is running around sending totally bogus DMCA notices that’s a bad sign. But if your VPN company is sending bogus DMCA notices to take down stories about its bogus DMCA stories, well, then you really have found the worst of the worst.
Enter CyberGhost.
Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about a bizarre copyright takedown involving CyberGhost. In that case, it had sent the takedown to Facebook because we had reposted the Daily Deal we had offered in 2016 for a CyberGhost subscription. As with all Techdirt posts, it had automatically reposted to our Facebook account.
For no clear reason, CyberGhost falsely claimed that Facebook post (but not our original post) violated its copyright (it does not). So yeah, this seemed like CyberGhost sending a copyright takedown of us running a promotion for their VPN from eight years earlier. How bizarre.
It seemed totally pointless to contest it, so we just wrote the article about how silly this was of CyberGhost—or whatever incompetent team it had hired to send poorly targeted automated takedowns—and moved on with our lives.
Until earlier this week, when we got an alert from Cloudflare that CyberGhost had issued a DMCA takedown notice. This time it wasn’t about us promoting them. It was about our articles about their bogus copyright notice.
Yeah, so the “original work” is some sort of promotional page on CyberGhost’s website, and they’re claiming that our article about their bullshit DMCA takedowns is infringing on their copyright?
What the actual fuck?
Anyone with any sense at all could see that our news article about CyberGhost’s bullshit copyright takedown of an advertisement for CyberGhost’s VPN service could not possibly violate CyberGhost’s promotion for its VPN service. That’s not how any of this works, and certainly suggests that CyberGhost is sending frivolous DMCA takedowns that clearly violate 512(f) of the DMCA, which says that sending a DMCA notice that misrepresents that the material is infringing “shall be liable for damages.”
Hey CyberGhost: withdraw this obviously bullshit takedown notice, fire your DMCA people. Stop being thuggish and incompetent at copyright law.
If you can’t manage those fundamentals, why should anyone trust you with securing anyone’s traffic?
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This news should be far more heartening than it is. In any normal version of the United States, it might have been. The administration’s willingness to perpetrate immoral and illegal evil on a daily basis has outpaced efforts by citizens and the judicial branch to stem the tide.
Still, maybe this is hopeful? I mean, if mandatory detention of people suspected of immigration violations is this obviously (and almost unanimously) illegal, doesn’t that mean it eventually has to end?
More than 100 federal judges have now ruled at least 200 times that the Trump administration’s effort to systematically detain immigrants facing possible deportation appeared to violate their rights or was just flatly illegal, according to a POLITICO review.
The rulings come from judges appointed by every president since Ronald Reagan, including 12 appointed by President Donald Trump. One of those appointees took the bench just last month.
Any ruling against Trump and his policies receives the same response: “activist” judges are ruining America and probably love crime. That some of these “activist” judges were appointed by Trump tends to go ignored by the loudmouths engaged in PR work for the nation’s leading producer of unlawful bullshit.
And that’s the case here as well.
“President Trump and Secretary Noem are now enforcing this law as it was actually written to keep America safe,” said Tricia McLaughlin, who predicted appellate courts would side with the administration.
The Justice Department echoed DHS, saying “President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda is a top national security priority that this Department of Justice will continue to vigorously defend whenever challenged in court.”
But mandatory detention of migrants isn’t something that’s ever been considered legal, much less normal. People accused of criminal acts (rather than the civil violations most immigration offenses are) are generally able to avail themselves of their due process rights, as well as being able to return home until their cases are presented to the court.
That’s not what’s happening to migrants under Trump. Nearly everyone picked up by ICE, CBP, or any number of federal officers now expected to concentrate on civil violations rather than actual crime gets sent to a detention center, reversing three decades of immigration enforcement practice that allowed migrants without prior criminal records or who had longstanding ties to this country to remain free until their cases were called. It’s even worse than that now: ICE is using the same policy revision to deny detained migrants access to legal assistance or to ask judges to release them on bond.
This stems from the administration’s willful misreading of prior policies and previous case law. It applies the term “applicants for admission” (who can be detained until cases are heard) to any migrant its roving goon squads come across, even if they’ve already been in this nation for years and/or are already engaged in asylum requests or nationalization efforts. That’s why the DHS and DOJ are dismissing pending immigration violation hearings: to convert those seeking to remain in this country into indefinite detainees… and then into deportees to whatever country the US government feels like sending them to.
Sure, there’s still an argument to be made (albeit in extremely bad faith) that “liberal” judges are going after Trump just because they don’t like Trump. 87 of these judges were appointed by Joe Biden, Barack Obama, or Bill Clinton. But 27 judges appointed by GOP presidents have reached the same conclusions, including 12 appointed by Trump himself.
The ultimate question is whether or not this will ever matter. The Trump administration seems to feel it won’t. It’s not changing its policies and it is certainly aware that a majority of Supreme Court justices are activists who play for the “right” team. All it has to do is keep the appeals process rolling until the Supreme Court takes up the case. If it loses that one, it might be shocked. But it may also be that the clock runs out on this administration before it manages to generate precedent it doesn’t like. It still has more than three years to go. And until the upper levels of the court system step up to shut this down, its presumptively illegal actions will continue uninterrupted.
Last year almost a dozen major U.S. ISPs were the victim of a massive, historic intrusion by Chinese hackers who managed to spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year. The “Salt Typhoon” hack was so severe, the intruders spent much of the last year rooting around the ISP networks even after discovery.
AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, apparently didn’t think it was worth informing subscribers any of this happened. Many of the attack vectors were based on simple things like telecom administrators failing to change default passwords on sensitive hardware entry points.
“The Federal Communications Commission will vote in November to repeal a ruling that requires telecom providers to secure their networks, acting on a request from the biggest lobby groups representing Internet providers.”
In a folksy Halloween blog post, Carr tries to pretend this somehow improves cybersecurity. According to Carr, ISPs pinky swore that everything is fine now, and frames obvious regulatory capture as the agency being more “agile”:
“Following extensive FCC engagement with carriers, the item announces the substantial steps that providers have taken to strengthen their cybersecurity defenses. In doing so, we will also reverse an eleventh hour CALEA declaratory ruling reached by the prior FCC—a decision that both exceeded the agency’s authority and did not present an effective or agile response to the relevant cybersecurity threats. So, we’re correcting course.”
Let me be clear about something: the Biden rules were the absolute baseline for oversight of telecom, basically requiring that ISPs do the absolute bare minimum when it comes to securing their networks, while being transparent with the public about when there’s been a major hack. This stuff was the bare minimum, and the U.S. is too corrupt to even do that.
This is part of Carr’s effort to destroy whatever was left of flimsy U.S. corporate oversight of regional telecom monopolies so he can ensure he has a cushy post-government job at a telecom-funded think tank or lobbying org. To that end, he’s been taking a hatchet to the very shaky FCC oversight standards that already helped result in the worst hack in U.S. telecom history.
It’s yet another example of how Trump policy is indistinguishable from a foreign attack. In many ways it’s worse, given that at least with Russia, Iran, and China, you’re spared the kind of phony piety and sanctimony coming from inside your own house.
We knew this was coming, but it doesn’t make it any less stupid. The road to the IRS’ Direct File program was long and hard-fought. We here at Techdirt have been talking about, and advocating for, something like the Direct File program for at least 15 years. The concept behind the program is a simple one. For a class of citizens with very simple income and tax payments, the IRS already has all the information it needs to process a tax return. In those cases, the IRS can simply mail the information it has to a taxpayer, ask them to sign off verifying the information is complete and accurate, and then process the return. The problem with this is that it cuts out the tax-prep industry that absolutely adores preying on these very same people to milk them for tax-prep services they don’t actually need.
For decades, the industry did exactly that. Even as the government partnered with private tax preparation companies like Intuit to provide federally backed “free” tax-prep websites and platforms, those same companies did everything they could to hide those free services and, in lieu of that, try to sell add-on services to those who were supposed to be able to file for free. While this eventually led to massive FTC fines for Intuit, this was the Faustian bargain that came from years and years of lobbying: The government would work with private industry for free filing programs in exchange for those same companies getting the government to line vulnerable citizens up like cattle headed to slaughter.
The IRS’ Direct File program came directly in the aftermath of the shady shit companies like Intuit did. It piloted in 2023, was a resounding success, and went live in 12 states in 2024. In April of this year, reports of Trump’s plans to end the program filtered into the news, even as the reviews by users of Direct File were overwhelmingly positive. Then, in August, IRS Commissioner Billy Long, himself a tax-prep industry player, said the program would be gone.
And, if you were holding onto any hope that this administration would keep a program in place that citizens love and ultimately reduces the overhead on the IRS, consider your hopes dashed. The IRS has begun notifying the states that had Direct File programs that the program will not be available for 2026 tax filings.
In an email sent from the IRS to 25 states, the tax agency thanked them for collaborating and noted that “no launch date has been set for the future.”
“IRS Direct File will not be available in Filing Season 2026,” says the Monday email, obtained by Nextgov/FCW and confirmed by multiple sources. It follows reports that the program was ending and Trump’s former tax chief, Billy Long, remarking over the summer that the service was “gone.”
Instead, that whole big beautiful bill we have heard so much about contained directions for the IRS to once again partner with private industry in a Free File program. The exact situation we were in that led to so much outrage at the behavior of those private companies, which in turn led to the creation of Direct File to begin with. This is simply winding the clock backwards to something people hated and calling it “progress.”
“It’s not surprising since the Trump administration sabotaged Direct File all through this year’s filing season, at the urging of tax prep monopolies like TurboTax,” Adam Ruben, the vice president of the Economic Security Project, told Nextgov/FCW. “Trump’s billionaire friends get favors while honest hardworking Americans will pay more to file their taxes.”
This isn’t something that can even be argued, honestly. It’s exactly what is happening. And, frankly, actions like this put the lie to Donald Trump’s claim to be fighting for the “little guy”. It’s all a bullshit grift, you see, with middlemen who are as wealthy as they are needlessly having Americans queued up to be conned.
This was a good program. The people who used it liked it. No serious negative consequence was experienced in its use.
And Trump did away with it so that mega-corporations like Intuit can continue skimming money from citizens in order to tell the IRS what it already knows.
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President Donald Trump and officials in his administration say National Guard troops are needed in “War ravaged” Portland, Oregon, to protect a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office that he described as being under siege.
But a ProPublica review found a wide gap between the reality on the ground and the characterizations by the president and the Department of Homeland Security, which said ICE facilities like Portland’s were under “coordinated assault by violent groups.”
We reviewed federal prosecutions and local arrests, internal protest summaries by the Portland Police Bureau, sworn testimony from local and federal officials as well as more than 700 video clips containing hours of footage posted to social media by protesters, counterprotesters and others. We focused on the three months before Sept. 5, when Trump made his first remarks about sending troops to Portland.
The evidence shows officers and protesters were indeed involved in incidents with varying levels of intensity on a little more than half the days. Protesters and counterprotesters exchanged blows at times. With some frequency, smoke and tear gas filled the air and shots from less-lethal police weapons could be heard.
There was no evidence of what could be termed a coordinated assault.
On most of the days or nights when officers and protesters clashed, local police and federal prosecutors ended up announcing no criminal arrests or charges — even though any number of crimes can be cited if someone commits violence against federal officers or property.
In addition, while protests continued across the summer, most of the alleged action by protesters that resulted in federal prosecution or local arrests ended two months before Trump said troops were needed in Portland.
While federal judges decide whether Portland protesters’ behavior constitutes a rebellion, ProPublica set out to examine the degree to which they were inciting unrest and the role that federal officers played. Video by Joanna Shan/ProPublica
A federal judge has temporarily blocked Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Portland, saying that his administration had not proven that the protests can be fairly characterized as a rebellion, a risk of rebellion or an ongoing lack of order that prevents government officials from carrying out their duties.
Last week, the Justice Department argued in federal court that the last of these three categories — a breakdown of public order so severe that ICE officials can’t do their jobs — is what unfolded in Portland, justifying the president’s decision to federalize Oregon’s National Guard.
The judge is expected to issue a final ruling this week, and the case is expected to continue before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
If the courts go against Trump, he has another tool that could bring troops: the federal Insurrection Act, which experts say has a lower bar to being used and could involve active-duty military.
While the courts deliberate, ProPublica set out to examine the degree to which protesters were fomenting unrest and the role that federal officers themselves played.
Two policing experts who reviewed videos said federal officers at times used force inappropriately, echoing a Portland police official who testified in court that federal officers were instigating the chaos night after night.
Brian Higgins, former police chief in Bergen County, New Jersey, and a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said some of what federal officers did in the video clips was not typical.
“My question would be, ‘If you used force, why did you not follow through with an arrest?’” Higgins said.
For instance, on Sept. 1, masked officers in combat gear responded to protesters who placed a prop guillotine on the sidewalk in front of the ICE building. The officers chased away the protesters with tear gas, smoke and other less-lethal weapons, grabbed the guillotine and hauled it inside. No criminal charges were announced.
“If there was nothing else to justify the officers coming out and doing this, you’ve got to scratch your head,” Higgins said.
Justice Department attorneys said in a court filing that the presence of the mock guillotine required federal officers “to exert physical force to keep order.” Videos show a protester blowing bubbles in the moment before federal police advanced on the crowd.
The scene of protesters dispersing and officers giving chase became the centerpiece of a Fox News broadcast on Sept. 4, the night before Trump said Portland’s protests had drawn his attention.
Our review showed that the force used against demonstrators had clearer provocation in initial protests. From the start of June to July 4, Portland police arrested 28 people, while federal prosecutors said they charged 22 with criminal offenses including arson and assault.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told ProPublica in a statement that the arson and assault charges show “this isn’t a peaceful protest that’s under control, like many on the Left have claimed, it’s radical violence.”
“President Trump is taking lawful action to protect federal law enforcement officers and address the out-of-control violence that local residents have complained about and Democrat leaders have failed to stop,” Jackson said.
But from July 5 through Sept. 4, the violence appeared to slow significantly. Portland police announced no arrests of protesters during this time, and federal prosecutors announced criminal charges against just three.
Only one was accused of a violent offense: felony assault for allegedly spitting in an officer’s face after an arrest for flying a drone around the building. The person pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor drone offense; the assault charge did not move forward. Another person’s misdemeanor charge, alleging failure to obey an officer, was also dropped. The case against the third person, another misdemeanor allegation of failing to obey, is proceeding.
In legal filings supporting the use of troops, federal officials described a handful of additional violent incidents from July 5 through Sept. 4. They said that protesters hit an officer with a stick on July 20, threw screws on the ICE facility’s driveway on July 24, pounded fists on vehicles on Aug. 9 and 11, threw rocks and a firework over the building’s fence on Aug. 16, injured two officers in an attack on Aug. 25 and provided directions online to an officer’s home on Aug. 28. No criminal charges were announced in these cases.
Source: Federal data represents criminal charges from news releases from the U.S. Attorney’s office. Portland police data shows arrests announced by the Portland Police Bureau. Note: Incidents shown by week.
During the roughly two months leading up to Trump’s Sept. 5 remarks, videos from more than 20 days or nights show federal officers firing on, grabbing, shoving, pepper-spraying, tackling or using other munitions on protesters. They deployed hissing cans of tear gas, sometimes sending clouds of the chemical irritant floating toward a nearby low-income apartment building.
No local arrests or federal criminal charges were announced on these days or nights, and only a handful of the dates corresponded with incidents of protester aggression asserted by federal authorities in their legal case for sending troops.
In most cases, videos from these events show masked federal officers using aggressive tactics that lack a clear reason.
On Aug. 13, an officer tackled a protester from behind. Rhein Amacher via Matthew Adams on X. Redaction in original video.
One federal officer runs and tackles an unsuspecting protester from behind on Aug. 13, causing what the man said in a legal filing was a head injury and concussion. The person was not charged with any crime.
In a clip from Sept. 6, the day after Trump’s remarks about Portland, a federal officer walking back into the ICE building turns, walks out of his way toward a protester and pushes the man so hard he falls to the ground and rolls over backward. The officer then continues inside the building.
On Sept. 6, an officer walked out of his way to push a protester so hard the person fell to the ground and rolled over. Rhein Amacher via X
Seth Stoughton, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who studies policing, reviewed videos from the protests at ProPublica’s request and said some of the federal officers’ uses of force looked “gratuitous.”
“Going out of your way to shove someone while you’re on the way back from arresting someone serves no purpose other than intimidation,” he said, “and intimidation is not a lawful government objective.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to emails requesting comment on its officers’ tactics.
Allegations of Protester Violence Subsided Over Time
There’s no doubt that the summertime protests were often confrontational, emotional and loud. Protesters, some dressed in black, often wore gas masks and shouted profanities at federal personnel. In June, some were also violent.
Five people faced arson charges after separate events on June 11 and 12 in which prosecutors said fires were set. One was in a trash can against the ICE building, while in another instance prosecutors said a protester used a flare to set fire to wood stacked against the front gate.
Videos from June 14 show a protester striking an officer in the head with a wooden stake that holds a protest sign. Another clip shows protesters using a stop sign as a battering ram on the front door of the ICE building.
On June 14, protesters rammed a stop sign into the ICE building’s front door. Throughout the month, protesters outside the facility were at times violent. Velly Ray via YouTube
Portland police declared a riot and made two arrests that day; federal prosecutors also said they charged three people with assault.
On June 24, a video shows someone waving a large knife at officers, being tased while running away and falling face first onto the sidewalk. Federal prosecutors filed charges against three people from that night’s protest: the person accused of wielding the knife, another accused of shining a laser pointer in an officer’s eye and one accused of hurling a gas canister back at officers, hitting one.
In addition, a Homeland Security news release from July 11 shows photos — without providing dates — of what the agency said were flyers posted in federal officers’ neighborhoods showing their names, images and addresses. The release said such information was also posted online.
Federal authorities have said protests led them to close the ICE building and work out of temporary office space from June 13 until July 7, after which the facility reopened. An analysis by Oregon Public Broadcasting found that immigration bookings continued, albeit at a slightly slower pace than average for Trump’s second term.
But violence initiated by protesters mostly subsided after July 4, based on charges or arrests announced by authorities and video reviewed by ProPublica.
The summer’s last criminal allegation of protester-on-officer violence — at least for anything other than spitting — came from a large Independence Day protest that led to federal criminal charges being filed against four people. They were individually accused of kicking an officer, throwing an incendiary device at officers, graffitiing the building and destroying fiber optic cables at the facility.
Evidence of protester violence for the rest of the summer is limited beyond the two misdemeanors and one felony charge announced by prosecutors.
In addition to the instances asserted by the government in court filings but not charged criminally, the FBI recently issued statistics that suggest dozens of people may have received citations. In the federal system, these are similar to traffic tickets and are generally issued for minor offenses. But when asked for details by ProPublica, the agency would not specify how many were issued or during what time frame.
Meanwhile, the use of force by federal officers continued.
Violence Without Violent Provocation
In most of the cases where videos captured police using crowd control tactics or other elements of force on protesters, there were neither announcements of criminal charges that followed nor allegations of protester violence made in the administration’s case for sending troops.
An official with the Federal Protective Service, which polices federal buildings, testified in court last week that federal officers use a loudspeaker to warn large groups to move. If they don’t, he said, officers physically move them.
Stoughton, the University of South Carolina law professor, said officers should use tear gas and other heavy chemical munitions sparingly when dispersing a crowd.
He added that many city police departments would be very hesitant to use these munitions “if it’s going to have this completely predictable environmental contamination on people who are utterly uninvolved with the protest.” In Portland, there’s an apartment building across the street from the ICE facility.
In addition, Stoughton said, police managing crowds ordinarily would first take time to engage people verbally, face to face, to try to get them to step aside.
“You typically don’t just want to jump right to higher levels of force,” Stoughton said, “because the point is to limit the potential for escalation.”
On two occasions shown on video, aggressive moves by officers appeared to be intended at least in part to allow them to seize protest symbols: a burned American flag that officers bagged and took indoors and the Sept. 1 display of a mock guillotine, an implement that 18th-century French revolutionaries used to decapitate royalty.
Video from the event captures someone playing a song by the Oakland hip-hop group The Coup with the chorus, “We got the guillotine, you better run.” An American flag can be seen burning at the guillotine’s base.
Stoughton said municipal police departments like those in Portland know they have to balance protesters’ First Amendment rights with public safety. “There is no more protected First Amendment interest than the ability to protest government action, to criticize the government,” he said.
A guillotine “can be purely symbolic,” he said. “That can be purely expressive.”
The Federal Protective Service incident commander that night, Will Turner, said in court that agents did not know the guillotine was a prop and thought it was real at the time. “We took it as an actual threat,” he said.
Objects like the guillotine or statements from protesters telling ICE agents to kill themselves appear to be protected speech, said Timothy Zick, a law professor at William & Mary Law School who studies public protest and the First Amendment, because they do not pose a true threat to officers.
It is “likely the sort of political hyperbole and heated rhetoric the Supreme Court has treated as protected speech,” Zick said. “The statements are likely to be considered part of a political protest.”
Notably, officers were sometimes able to clear crowds without aggressive tactics.
Footage on those occasions shows vehicles leaving the ICE compound without incident. Officers move out and onto the sidewalk, and protesters stay out of the way of the vehicles.
In one of those nonevents, as officers return to the ICE compound and the gates start to close, the thin crowd chants: “DHS — doesn’t have sex.”
A federal officer brings his hand to his mouth on the video.
He appears to blow a kiss.
What Happens Next
Trump’s order remains tied up in the courts.
Federal District Judge Karin Immergut blocked the deployment once, then again on Sunday, saying the Trump administration had “commandeered” the National Guard to quell protests that do not constitute a rebellion and had eased after a “high watermark of violence and unlawful activity” in June.
“The trial testimony produced no credible evidence of any significant damage to the ICE facility in the months before the President’s callout and no credible evidence that ICE was unable to execute immigration laws,” the judge wrote. “Protesters frequently blocked the driveway of the ICE building, but the evidence also showed that federal law enforcement officers were able to clear the driveway.”
Immergut said the deployment violated the 10th Amendment, which says that powers not given to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved to states. The judge said Trump “had no lawful basis to federalize these Oregon National Guardsmen.”
Earlier in the appeals process, two appellate judges who upheld Trump’s decision said protester violence from earlier in June was a relevant concern that must be considered in the case.
A panel of judges from the 9th Circuit is expected to hear arguments from both sides next.
Last week, I wrote about how the Trump administration has replaced any sort of concept of governance with governance-by-trolling—a government optimized purely for making a huge segment of the country angry while the base cheers them on. The entire apparatus of federal power has been repurposed into a machine for generating engagement through cruelty, with no actual governing philosophy beyond “own the libs.”
The usual response from Democrats has been to offer… nothing. Safe, poll-tested blandness. That kind of vacuum is exactly what allows governance-by-trolling to thrive—at least MAGA offers some vision, however deranged.
Tuesday night, New York City voters delivered a decisive rebuke to both MAGA nihilism and the traditional Democratic technocratic blandness. Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old Democratic Socialist who was polling at literally 1% in February, won the election for mayor. And he did it by doing exactly what conventional political wisdom from the Democratic political consultants says you’re not supposed to do: he ran on an authentic vision of what he actually believes in, rather than running away from anything the consultants deemed a “political third rail.”
He didn’t shy away from his support for trans New Yorkers or immigrants. He stood side by side with them proudly throughout the campaign. He didn’t play down his own religion, background, or policy ideas, even as some of them challenged Democratic Party orthodoxy.
The contrast couldn’t be starker. On one side, you had another version of the politics of cynical spite and traditional political backroom king-making—Andrew Cuomo’s campaign, backed by at least $22 million from 28 different billionaires, running attack ads calling Mamdani a dangerous radical, questioning whether he “understood New York culture” because he was born in Uganda, and quite literally suggesting he would cheer for another 9/11. Pure governance-by-baseless concern trolling, optimized to generate fear and anger.
On the other side, you had someone who said “this is who I am, this is what I believe in, and here’s my positive vision for making your lives better.” Free buses. Universal childcare. Frozen rent for rent-stabilized apartments. City-run grocery stores in food deserts. Simple, clear policies that people could understand and see themselves benefiting from.
Guess which one won?
Even if you don’t agree with his policies or political leanings, you have to be able to see that he offered quite the contrast to traditional politics these days. Even publications staffed with Never Trumper former Republicans, like the Bulwark, pointed out that Mamdani’s “socialist” policies are well within the confines of modern liberal democracy, while Donald Trump’s are not. For all the baseless fear that Mamdani will “seize the means of production,” Donald Trump is literally doing it.
Leadership Means Leading, Not Following the Polls
As Anil Dash wrote in his excellent piece “Turn the Volume Up,” one of the defining features of Mamdani’s campaign was that it started with principle:
You have to start with the principle.You must have a politics that believes in something. You can’t win unless you know what you’re fighting for. Something specific, that people can see and believe. Something that people will know when it’s been achieved. It can’t just be a vague platitude, and it can’t just be “root for our team” or “the other guy is bad”. Zohran and his team understood this profoundly well, and made a campaign focused on substance — grounded in humanist principles, and tied to extremely clear, understandable and specific policy deliverables.
This is exactly what the Trump administration—and Cuomo’s campaign—completely lack. They don’t believe in anything except their own power and the validation that comes from making their opponents angry. There’s no vision beyond “give us power” and “watch the other side cry.”
Every week, we see another crop of Democratic political consultants pushing out their big plan to win elections. And almost all of them involve the same basic strategy: ditch what they claim are “unpopular” wedge issues. Embrace “popularism”—just supporting the policies we know poll well, and avoiding anything else. Don’t talk about trans rights. Downplay your support for progressive economic policies. Take a harsh stance against immigration. Don’t talk about diversity. Find the safest, most poll-tested positions possible and stick to those.
Indeed, last week, before this election, we saw the launch of yet another of these (there have to have been at least a dozen similar things this year, it’s hard to keep track of them all) called “Deciding to Win.” It had a bunch of big-name political consultant types (David Plouffe! Matt Stoller! Nate Silver! James Carville!) sign onto it. Yet it urged the same fucking thing this group of strivers always says: “play down anything that is seen as a culture war, political third rail.” What that usually means is “throw marginalized groups like trans people and immigrants under the bus.”
It’s running scared. Not running to lead.
Mamdani did the opposite. He was a strong, vocal supporter of trans rights, immigrants, and Palestine from day one, and it didn’t hurt him one bit. The consultants from the sidelines seemed to be screaming about how he had to minimize his Muslim faith and his membership in the Democratic Socialists of America. Instead, he leaned into both.
And rather than hurt him, this authenticity became a core part of his appeal. Even voters who disagreed with specific policies responded to someone offering a genuine vision over consultant-approved talking points.
Leadership is about leading people by convincing them of your vision. Not just feeding them what the polls say will work. If you want people to follow you, it means you need to be worth following. You need to present a vision of a world they can believe in, that they want to help achieve. That’s leadership. Campaigning just on focus groups and polls gives you a median campaign, with nothing that excites people. It gives them nothing to believe in.
Worse, the popularism approach cedes all the framing to your opponents. They’re going to call you a radical communist Marxist socialist anyway—just ask Kamala Harris, who got labeled all of those things despite mostly running a campaign so cautious it could have been designed by the most risk-averse consultant imaginable. She started with energy and authenticity, then let the consultant class convince her to pivot away from anything even remotely appealing, to emphasize traditional Republican talking points on guns and immigration, and to downplay support for trans rights, Palestine, and other “divisive” issues.
And she lost.
Meanwhile, Mamdani got called all the same things—communist, radical, dangerous extremist who doesn’t understand America—and he just… floated above it. He didn’t waste time trying to prove he wasn’t those things. He just kept talking about free buses and childcare and what he actually believed in. He showed people what he stood for rather than spending all his energy explaining what he wasn’t. And he made it clear that he believed in his vision not because he thought it would get him elected, but because he thought it was actually the best platform to actually help New Yorkers.
As Dash notes, this required a kind of courage that’s become rare in Democratic politics:
If you run from who you are, you have already lost.
Coming on stage for a political victory toJa Rule’s New York(I had bet that there would be some Jadakiss involvement in whatever walk-on music he picked), and walking off toDhoom Machale, while saying with his full chest that he’s a Muslim, a New Yorker, and a young Democratic Socialist — these are the moves of a person who knows that those who are motivated by hate will never back down if you try to hide or be evasive about who you are. A coward dies a thousand deaths, and a politician who hides their identity loses a thousand elections before a single vote is cast. We see Vivek Ramaswamy tap-dancing around his faith every day, and the white supremacists that he’s cozied up to will never let him win. But fourteen years ago, the racist and hateful media falsely called President Obama’s private birthday party a “hip-hop BBQ”. And as I said years later,you should just have the damn hip-hop BBQ— they’re going to accuse you of it anyway. Lean into who you are, own it, and let the haters stay mad.
This gets at something fundamental about how to actually beat back today’s fascism and the politics of spite. You don’t do it by accepting their framing and trying to prove you’re not what they claim you are. You do it by offering a compelling alternative vision that people actually want to vote for.
The Cowardice Is Coming From Within
That kind of courage is rare in Democratic politics for a reason. Unfortunately, the consultant and donor class’s grip on Democratic politics remains so strong that even the party’s own leaders couldn’t bring themselves to support their most dynamic candidate. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand—both representing New York—refused to endorse Mamdani at all. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, also from New York, only gave his endorsement in the final days before the election and then claimed he didn’t think Mamdani was the future of the Democratic party.
Think about what that says. You have a candidate who is energizing voters, bringing new people into the process, winning a massive grassroots campaign against a billionaire-backed opponent—and the Democratic leadership is too scared to publicly support him until it’s basically over, if at all.
Why? Because they’re terrified that Trump will call them communists too? Or that the billionaire donors who supported Cuomo won’t keep supporting them? They’ve internalized the consultant wisdom that says you can’t be seen anywhere near a Democratic Socialist, that you have to keep your distance from anyone who actually believes in progressive policies, that the safest play is always to hedge your bets and play it safe.
They’re Going to Call You a Communist Anyway
The Democratic consultant class never seems to understand one simple thing: Republicans are going to call any Democratic politician an extreme leftist radical communist no matter what they actually believe or say—or how they actually lead. They called Joe Biden a socialist. They called Kamala Harris a Marxist. It’s just blatant baseline name-calling that gets deployed against literally anyone with a (D) after their name.
So if they’re going to call you that anyway, you might as well actually stand for something and give people a reason to vote for you rather than just trying to prove you’re not what Fox News and MechaHitler1488 on X says you are.
Mamdani understood this intuitively. When they called him a communist, he didn’t waste time explaining why Democratic Socialism is actually different from communism or how his policies are really quite moderate. He just kept talking about concrete things that would make New Yorkers’ lives better. He worked to front-run and mock the typical GOP tried-and-tested criticisms. Literally a day before the election, he posted a video about Vito Marcantonio, a popular NYC politician in the 1940s who was regularly called a communist, who delivered for New Yorkers.
Traditional political consultants would have told him to hide from and denounce anyone who was investigated by the FBI for his “leftist” views. But Mamdani reminded people that these kinds of scare tactics and nonsense are often used against legitimately popular politicians who deliver for their constituents.
The consultants told Harris to run away from trans rights and progressive economics. She largely did, and lost. The same consultants would have told Mamdani to do the same thing. He ignored them completely and won by a massive margin.
When Both The Message And The Messenger Are Authentic
Cuomo had everything the consultants say you need: name recognition, political dynasty, massive funding, endorsements from establishment figures like Bill Clinton. And he had the benefit of running against a young, relatively unknown candidate who by all traditional metrics should have been easy to defeat.
But Cuomo didn’t have a message beyond “I should be in charge” and “the other guy is scary.” That’s not a vision. That’s just entitlement wrapped in fear-mongering. And when you don’t believe in anything yourself, you can’t make anyone else believe in you.
Mamdani, by contrast, is an exceptionally skilled communicator who understood how to meet people where they are. His campaign’s mastery of social media—from TikTok to Instagram to YouTube—wasn’t just about being “very online.” It was about authentically connecting with voters in the spaces they actually occupy, rather than demanding they come to him. He also showed it daily, all over New York City. Over and over again, the clips you saw of him showed him walking the streets in all five boroughs, happily talking to people all over.
Mamdani kept reinforcing a clear, simple, positive message that people could understand and see themselves benefiting from. As Dash explained:
They have to be able to talk about us without us.
This is one of the refrains that comes up most when I’m talking to people about communications, in almost any context from organizing to business to building a community. A message has to be simple enough, memorable enough, and clear enough that even someone who’s just heard it for the first time first time can repeat it — in high fidelity — to the next person they talk to. The Mamdani campaign nailed this from the start, focusing not just on “affordability” in the abstract, but specific promises around free buses, universal childcare, and frozen rent in particular. The proof of how effective and pervasive those messages have been is that detractors can recite them, verbatim, from memory.
That’s a message. That’s something people can understand and repeat. “Free buses, universal childcare, frozen rent.” You don’t need a focus group to tell you whether people want their rent frozen or free bus rides.
Compare that to the typical consultant-approved Democratic campaign message, which usually amounts to “we’re going to fight for working families by implementing sensible, pragmatic solutions that move us forward, not backward.” What does that even mean? How do you repeat that to your neighbor? How do you know when it’s been achieved?
Hope Beats Hate
There’s one more element to Mamdani’s success that’s worth highlighting: joy. As we’ve written about before, Mamdani’s citywide scavenger hunt wasn’t just a campaign stunt—it was a demonstration of what politics could be when it’s about creating something positive rather than just attacking opponents.
Thousands of New Yorkers came out not because they were angry at Cuomo, but because Mamdani offered them something joyful to participate in. He showed them a vision of NYC where politics isn’t just about endless grievance and combat, but about building community and celebrating what makes the city great.
Indeed, this vision even meant that he won by a huge margin among young men, a group that many consultants have written off as permanently MAGA fans of Joe Rogan-style podcasts. Mamdani got people excited across the board in nearly every age group and demographic.
This stands in stark contrast to the politics of spite that defines MAGA. As I wrote last week, Trump’s entire governing strategy is optimized around one question: how mad can we make the other side? There’s no vision beyond that. No positive agenda. Just endless trolling and performative cruelty designed to generate engagement from the base.
Mamdani proved you can beat that by offering something better. Not by trying to out-troll the trolls or by running away from who you are to avoid their attacks, but by presenting an authentic, positive vision that gives people something to vote for rather than just against.
The New Republic’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling captured this at Mamdani’s victory party:
Hope over tyranny, hope over big money and small ideas, hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible, Mamdani said. We won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.
The Path Forward
Mamdani’s victory doesn’t solve all of the Democratic Party’s problems. One mayoral election in New York City isn’t a national political revolution. But it does offer a clear roadmap for how to actually beat back the politics of spite and fascism. Especially given that across the country, in almost every election where Democrats were on the ballot, they won handily. They took the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections, with Virginia’s being against an actively transphobic Republican campaign. They even won elections in surprising places like Georgia and Mississippi.
Running campaigns where you show what you’re for, instead of cowering in the face of attacks, can work. People want a positive vision of the future. They don’t like the constant attacks. But they also want authenticity and a vision for the future.
The roadmap is sitting right there: Don’t accept your opponents’ nonsense culture war framing. Don’t waste time trying to prove you’re not what they claim you are. Don’t let consultants talk you into abandoning the issues and constituencies that need you most. And definitely don’t try to out-troll the trolls.
Articulate a clear, positive vision of what you actually believe in. Be authentic about who you are. Give people concrete reasons to vote for you, not just against the other side. Be joyful about the opportunities of the future for everyone. Trust that voters are smart enough to see the difference between someone who believes in something and someone who’s just performing for engagement metrics.
The politics of nihilism and spite, whether it’s Trump posting videos of himself dumping shit on citizens or Cuomo running racist attack ads, is ultimately hollow. It has no vision, no substance, nothing to offer beyond the temporary satisfaction of making your opponents angry, scared or both.
Mamdani proved that the politics of belief—of actually standing for something, of offering people hope and a positive vision—can win decisively. The Democratic Party establishment probably won’t learn that lesson. They’re too invested in the consultant and billionaire donor class that keeps feeding them the same failed playbook.
But candidates don’t need the party establishment’s permission. And voters don’t need to wait for the consultants to catch up. Mamdani won because he ignored the people telling him to play it safe and instead trusted voters to respond to something real. That option is available to anyone willing to take it. The blueprint is right there, proven and tested. All it takes is the courage to actually believe in something beyond politics.
