As Pressure Mounts for Dems to Do Literally Anything, Top Senator Simply Says, ‘We Are Cooked’ 

In response to a Fox News segment about how the right has swallowed up the media ecosystem, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy conceded that the current state of things is… not great!

By Kylie Cheung  |  February 19, 2025 | 11:48am
Screenshot: CSPAN LatestPolitics
As Pressure Mounts for Dems to Do Literally Anything, Top Senator Simply Says, ‘We Are Cooked’ 

Over the last few weeks, Democratic politicians haven’t been able to go out in public without members of their own base shouting at them to “do something” or “do your jobs”—meaning something, anything, that’s not just tweeting that Trump’s latest executive order is unconstitutional, or that Trump is bad. Unfortunately, the majority of the party’s leadership isn’t exactly rising to the challenge.

For example, on Tuesday, in response to a recent Fox News segment about how the right has swallowed up the media ecosystem, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy—who holds a Senate leadership position—simply conceded that “we are cooked.” Helpful!

Since Donald Trump won reelection, conservatives have been doing something of a victory lap. On Monday night, Fox News’ Jesse Watters felt particularly braggadocious, going off on a little rant about how the right has successfully taken over the news. “We are waging a 21st-century information warfare campaign against the left,” he said. “Someone says something on social media, Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it… and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.”

Indeed, viral disinformation campaigns were instrumental to Trump’s reelection. As was the surging popularity of seemingly apolitical manosphere podcasters and influencers, who encourage their hoards of young, male followers to erroneously blame women and diversity for everything miserable and wrong with their lives, and coalesced around Trump.

Murphy shared a clip of Watters’ comments on Twitter and wrote, “This is true. And until the left builds an infrastructure to confront this reality—and stops acting like political communication is still just buying millions of TV and digital ads every two years—we are cooked.”

It’s a fair and important criticism, and it’s definitely a good time for Democrats to be honest about how, err, “cooked” we are. But let’s be real: Murphy, a top Senate Democrat, holds far more power to enact any of the change he’s pressing for than you or I do. If he’s going to tell us we’re “cooked,” it’s not exactly a helpful sentiment lest he tells us what he’s going to do with his power to help address these issues. 

As for Democrats’ struggles with reaching people and controlling the narrative, that’s certainly an issue. But the other issue is that it’s not really clear what Democrats’ values even are, which probably makes it a lot harder to communicate them. And Murphy, specifically, has been pretty unhelpful on this, being among the foremost Democrats to try to push the party right on immigration, touting the high deportation numbers overseen by the Biden administration, all while the party is supposedly trying to demonize Trump’s mass deportations and vile xenophobia.

But thank you, Chris, for telling us that “we are cooked.” Noted!

 
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