Jonathan Choe and the Business of Seattle Fear

Fired by Sinclair’s KOMO over a Proud Boys promo, Jonathan Choe rebuilt himself as the right wing’s favorite Seattle backdrop. His fear-selling content keeps finding friends among the region’s comfortable centrists, and Seattle’s left should stop taking his bait.

Seattle keeps saying no. Choe keeps showing up.

Jonathan Choe has spent more than four years selling the rest of the country a Seattle that exists mostly in his camera frame: a city of needles, tents and “Antifa mobs,” ruined by the people who live in it. A year ago this month, Seattle answered that story at the ballot box. Voters elected Katie Wilson, a transit organizer and open socialist, over an incumbent backed by more than $1.8 million in business and real estate PAC money.

Choe did not take the hint. He now spends his days chasing Mayor Wilson with a microphone and feeding clips to Fox News. To understand why a man with his record still has an audience here, you have to look at who fired him, who hired him, and who quietly benefits from the fear he sells.

This is an opinion piece. Every factual claim below is linked to its source at the end.

Too much even for Sinclair.

Consider where Choe started. KOMO 4 is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, the conglomerate infamous for forcing local anchors to read identical scripts about “biased and false news.” Sinclair is not a newsroom that punishes reporters for leaning right. And yet in March 2022, Sinclair’s KOMO fired Jonathan Choe.

The reason was a Proud Boys rally. That month the group held a “March for America” in Olympia to protest the detention of people charged over the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Choe went on his own, then posted a soft-focus video montage of the marchers that advertised the group’s follow-up Q&A for anyone curious about “their cause.” The soundtrack, Choe later admitted, was a song sometimes played at white nationalist rallies. He tagged KOMO in the post.

KOMO’s news director said the station never approved the coverage and that it failed to meet the station’s editorial standards. Colleagues told The Stranger and Daily Kos that Choe had been courting a firing for a while, including an unapproved appearance on right-wing host Dori Monson’s radio show. Choe denies he wanted out and casts himself as a victim of a “left-wing mob.”

Think about what that means. A station owned by Sinclair looked at Choe’s work and decided it could not put its name on it. Nobody in Seattle should be giving him more credibility than his own former bosses did.

Failing upward on the right-wing circuit.

Two months after KOMO cut him loose, Choe landed a senior fellowship at the Discovery Institute. That is the Seattle think tank best known for pushing “intelligent design” into science classrooms, and the former home of Christopher Rufo’s homelessness writing before Rufo moved on to manufacturing panic about critical race theory. Its Fix Homelessness project campaigns against Housing First and harm reduction, the evidence-based approaches most of this region’s service providers rely on.

From there, Choe built a career as the right’s favorite Seattle backdrop. He has appeared with Jesse Watters, Laura Ingraham, Dan Bongino and Fox & Friends, and on Newsmax. He is a regular on local right-wing talk radio with Jason Rantz and Ari Hoffman, and has guested on “Hold the Line,” the podcast hosted by Seattle police union president Mike Solan. He has reported for Frontlines, the media arm of Turning Point USA. This September he testified before a congressional DOGE subcommittee, and he has openly praised Donald Trump’s executive order defunding Housing First.

The formula never changes. Point a camera at the most desperate person on a sidewalk. Call the city “America’s slums.” Blame progressives. Repeat. The Stranger long ago gave this genre its proper name: poverty porn. It turns human beings in crisis into props for a national audience that will never set foot on 12th and Jackson, and it does nothing to get anyone housed, treated or safe.

Provocation is the product.

Choe calls himself a journalist. But a journalist observes the story. Choe walks into the middle of it, and the confrontations keep piling up.

In October 2023, at a pro-Palestine march, a Seattle Public Schools special education paraeducator named Gabriel Jones said Choe punched them. Video of the lead-up shows Choe telling Jones they would “be killed in Gaza by the muslims.” Jones obtained a temporary restraining order, and Seattle police referred the case to the City Attorney for assault charges. Choe denied it and said “militant activists” were trying to silence him.

Six months later, a group of asylum seekers from Venezuela and Angola briefly pitched tents outside Garfield Community Center in the Central District. Choe showed up with his camera. According to PubliCola’s reporting on the police report, witnesses, including a city Parks employee, said they saw Choe grab a woman by the hair and punch her two or three times. Choe called 911 himself and claimed self-defense. The responding officer found that “plausible” and filed no charges. Witnesses saw it differently.

Then there is the University of Washington, which Choe has turned into a recurring set. As a Turning Point Frontlines reporter he filmed the 2024 Gaza solidarity encampment ahead of a Charlie Kirk event, and he has covered TPUSA’s campus events against trans students since. Each time the script is identical: arrive with a camera and private security at a protest by students and trans people, provoke a reaction, then post the clip as proof that Seattle has been taken over by “Antifa.” The scuffles that follow are not an accident of his reporting. They are the content.

To be fair to the facts: as far as public records show, none of these allegations has produced a criminal conviction, and Choe disputes all of them. But a pattern does not need a conviction to be a pattern. People keep ending up hurt or frightened around this man, and he keeps ending up with fresh footage.

The centrists who keep his story alive.

Here is the uncomfortable part. Choe’s audience is not only MAGA viewers in other states. His “Seattle is dying” story is useful to a class of people much closer to home: the comfortable, tech-salaried, “vote blue no matter who” Democrats of Magnolia, Bellevue and Medina, who would never march with the Proud Boys but share his clips on Nextdoor all the same.

They do not need to endorse Choe. They only need his story. Every viral video of a tent on a sidewalk becomes an argument for sweeps over housing, for police budgets over services, and for a “moderate” in City Hall over anyone who threatens rents or corporate taxes. The fear Choe manufactures is the raw material for their politics.

Look at the 2025 mayor’s race. The PAC backing Bruce Harrell, run by his senior deputy mayor Tim Burgess, raised more than $1.8 million, mostly from real estate interests, developers and executives. Mariners owner and T-Mobile founder John Stanton gave. Remitly CEO Matt Oppenheimer gave. According to The Urbanist, that PAC raised more from Medina alone than the pro-Wilson PAC raised in total. The attack mailers painted Wilson as unprepared and naive about public safety: Choe’s worldview, wearing a nicer jacket.

It failed. Wilson won by about 2,000 votes. In the primary she swept renter-heavy neighborhoods like the Rainier Valley and the Central Area, the same Central District where witnesses say Choe punched a woman. Seattle’s working people looked at the fear campaign and chose housing, transit and taxing the rich instead.

But the money has not gone away, and neither has the narrative. Every time a centrist commentator recycles Choe’s footage as “just showing reality,” they launder far-right content into mainstream Democratic politics. Every time they treat a man fired over a Proud Boys promo as a legitimate critic of a socialist mayor, they help him.

Stop feeding the machine.

Jonathan Choe is not a whistleblower. He is a content business, and the product is division. He needs confrontation the way a fire needs oxygen, so the left should stop handing him either one. Do not take the bait at protests. Film him back, calmly, and let him be the only one shouting. Report harassment through every legal channel available, and document everything.

More importantly, we need to win the argument he is trying to drown out. Seattle’s homelessness crisis is a housing crisis, built by decades of rents rising faster than wages in one of the richest regions on earth. The answer is social housing, treatment on demand, tenant protections and making Amazon, Microsoft and the real estate lobby pay their share. Mayor Wilson’s administration will not get everything right, and the left should hold it accountable from our side, not his.

And to the Magnolia and Bellevue Democrats who share his clips: you are not “just asking questions” about public safety. You are amplifying a man too extreme for Sinclair, so you can avoid paying for the solutions. Choose a side. Seattle already has.