Moderates Are Failing the Media War: Pete, Rahm, and the Propaganda Trap

Last week, Pete Buttigieg went on NPR’s Morning Edition. I’m making this YOUR problem because it was a glimpse into the excitingly bad moderate Democratic talking points on trans athletes in women’s sports.

NPR host Steve Inskeep invoked Chicago’s favorite man to hate, Rahm Emanuel, who has been on Megyn Kelly’s show a few days previously. Rahm’s awkward media tour and presidential delusions are a separate essay, we won’t get into it here.

On Kelly’s show, Rahm was embarrassingly boxed in by, I can’t say enough, Megyn Kelly, specifically about whether or not “a man can become a woman,” Rahm said no, which is, fine, transphobic, but also embarrassing because he got there by being outdebated and tricked by… Megyn Kelly.

At any rate — on NPR, Inskeep wanted to know what Pete thought about sporting transgenders policy, broadly speaking, since it’s an important national policy issue.

Buttigieg’s response: “Most reasonable people would recognize that there are serious fairness issues if you just treat this as not mattering when a trans athlete wants to compete in women’s sports.” He followed up by saying it’s “not a question for Washington politicians,” and should be left to school boards and sports leagues. …Ok.

On its face, this point from Peter might sound pretty mild. Kinda incoherent (we’ll get to that) but not necessarily concerning. Issues are complicated! Stuff is often nuanced! Things happen, and then we say things about it, using words, you know?

But with context, Pete’s nonresponse was far more sinister than it appeared. Pete’s “nuance” validated a right wing narrative trap, designed to scapegoat trans people for political gain as a real, open policy concern. Even a mild response legitimized the idea that “fairness in women’s sports” is a serious national issue.

And it’s a very troubling indicator (even in a sea of daily very troubling indicators) about how the next few years of Democratic moderates elbowing each other in the presidential primary might play out.

Even if you don’t care about trans rights, or, (maybe more likely, if you’re reading this) if you don’t care about the national Democratic Party, it’s worth understanding why this soundbite from Pete is so bad.

Because what Pete said is a barometer of how propaganda spreads in 2025, how media volume shapes perception, and what needs to happen next.

The Right Is Loud

We know the far right is not winning because their ideas are popular. I’ve written about this before, a lot. The far right wins because they’ve built an emotionally loaded, full-spectrum media machine that floods every channel with panic and moral outrage. They crowd the Overton Window, the range of political ideas considered acceptable to say out loud in public discourse. Shifting this window on countless issues through volume is one of the right’s greatest achievements in the last 15 years.

Trans sports participation was not a national political issue until a few years ago, manufactured deliberately. Between 2020 and 2023, the number of bills targeting trans youth exploded from 4 to over 500—not because public opinion changed, but because right-wing think tanks, Christian nationalist lobbies, and media outlets like Fox News decided to make it an issue. They poured money into it, made it a daily talking point, and ran over 400 Fox News segments about trans athletes in only a few months, mostly focused on a handful of students. That’s how propaganda works: volume creates legitimacy.

Sports in schools are their main trans issue, not because they care about fairness in high school volleyball, but because they’ve identified trans people—especially trans kids—as a wedge, an excellent stand-in (read: scapegoat) for many deeply felt grievances in American culture that the right wing echo chamber is already harnessing. The same emotions viral to the point of mainstream legitimacy in creepy engineered jeans ads show up here: discomfort, resentment, gender roles, race, bodily autonomy, the loss of something unspecific and unfair, playing into the idea of "common sense." It lets people feel righteous about exclusion. It allows for an intentionally emotive frame that bypasses facts entirely. And the more it gets repeated, the more these “serious fairness issues” start sounding like a neutral position, a primary and serious issue that impact far more people than they do.

All of this is in spite of the fact that Gallup’s 2024 election-year polling ranked transgender rights dead last out of 22 political issues in terms of voter priority. And yet this topic keeps rising in political interviews and talking points because it's loud, visual, and framed to scare people.

The Democrats Are Not Loud (Because They Can’t Be)

The right uses their media flywheel to intervene. The Democrats stick to using the broader mainstream landscape — but only to hide (even Cory Booker, hiding loudly in Shonda-esque, Lin Manuel adjacent, vague buzzword-y spectacle).

And there’s no more obvious, painful or ever present illustration of this kind of PR than over the last two years, as the U.S. political establishment treats the genocide of Palestinians, and the genuine existential threat it presents to US international integrity legitimacy as, instead, a branding problem with that media landscape in mind. The most “pragmatic” people in the room—Pete, Kamala, Hakeem, Biden—have all tiptoed around genocide because their narrative machinery (and AIPAC funding) told them that saying “ceasefire” was too risky, or that student protesters were the real threat.

Their response to Gaza was a case study in passivity, by design: months of silence, euphemism, and calibrated half-statements designed to avoid backlash, even as a genocide unfolded in full view. Not until AIPAC began losing control of the narrative—and famine photos forced their hand—did many finally speak. This profound failure is such an indictment of our political system, on how way our country is built and how US imperialism and war profit shapes so many things that it feels wildly reductive to compare to anything, let alone Pete’s mediocre answer on trans rights.

But it reflects the tactical failure (that comes from profound, imperialist, moral failure) that defined the Democratic response to Gaza.

When you can’t say anything… you can’t say anything. Complicity makes it impossible to respond to any kind of propaganda until it’s too late, prioritizing safety over justice until safety becomes impossible. And while the ‘pragmatic’ moderates flail, the Rights filled the void and take advantage of their silence.

This is no strategy against the right as it stands, as the content mill pushes high volume right-wing extreme ideas until they feel normal. The danger isn’t that people agree—it’s that politicians start responding as if those ideas are legitimate, just because they’re loud and everywhere. Not by winning the argument, but by creating enough noise that Democrats start asking, “Should we be concerned about this?”

The ‘Grown-Ups’ in the Democratic Party Have No Media Strategy

This is what Rahm—and now Pete—fail to understand. They brand themselves as pragmatists, the grown-ups in the room, the ones who “know how to win.” But even if you ignore the profound hypocrisy and failings of their policies, their tactical choices (including on media) are neither strategic nor effective. They’re out here harping on identity panic —“pronouns,” “fairness,” “biological reality”—just like Megyn Kelly wants while delivering nothing in terms of progressive material gains. No housing. No healthcare reform. No structural fixes.

We are in the end stages of a multi-decade campaign to consolidate power through courts, media, religion, and fear, and it is working. If the people running the Democratic Party cannot grasp that this is an emergency—not a branding exercise—they will lose.

The template is failing on so many levels, even on a tactical level, the level that all these ‘pragmatic’ freaks valorize. Pete is the acceptable face of the Democratic center, and yet someone like Pete—calculated, media-trained, polling-conscious—still can’t recognize when he’s walked straight into a trap.

These candidates, with this kind of strategy, can’t hold the line. And they’re telling you exactly how they’ll handle every other high-volume right-wing panic, even if they have more power: they’ll cave.

The good news is that people across the political spectrum can—and already do—respond to these questions in other ways: naming the tactic, and moving the conversation back to what matters. Candidates like Zohran Mamdani (have you guys heard about him at all?), — or, hell, if we are exclusively talking about trans rights, Andy Beshear — are gaining traction by talking about this differently, while Rahm and Pete echo frames built by people who want to eliminate trans people from public life.

Zohran is also talking about municipal groceries, fare-free transit, and tenant power because moving beyond ‘identity politics’ is about winning people over by organizing around their material needs.

Ultimately, if you are a candidate for public office in 2025 and you cannot recognize the media infrastructure that brought us here—and don’t notice (or care) that you’re playing into a coordinated propaganda line even after five years of data, debunking, and direct attacks:

You will be manipulated.
You will cede ground without realizing it.
You will treat “both sides” as a sign of compassion instead of a surrender to a campaign of erasure.
And you will get boxed in by Megyn Kelly!!

You don’t have to do that.

PS: What Should Pete Have Said?

Because my brain has been cooked by X, I can hear the libertarian reply chorus in my head, who presumably will say something like “Well, what should Pete have even said?”

Here are 5 options offhand, even without any kind of moral or meaningful policy response:

1. “This issue has been deliberately blown out of proportion by right-wing media to target trans kids. Here’s how I feel about bikes, or whatever.”

2. “We’re talking about a handful of high school athletes while millions of people can’t afford rent. What is wrong with these people?”

3. “When I see over 1,200 Fox segments on trans athletes and almost none on insulin prices, I don’t think athletic fairness is the real concern here.”

4. “Did you know that back in ‘92 at a dinner celebrating Clinton’s election, Rahm reportedly stabbed the table with a steak knife and shouted the names of his political enemies while yelling, “Dead!” Or that he would call staffers in the bathroom intentionally? Or that he mailed a dead fish to a colleague and Megynn Kelly totally just let him reframe it on her show? Or that he’s a trained ballerina? Or”

5. Literally anything else.