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Immigration agents in Portland spraying crowd control chemicals into a protester’s frog costume went viral in October
The revolution will not be televised, but it might have webbed feet and bulging eyes.
It also might have a unicorn’s horn or a chicken’s feathers.
As protests against the Trump administration continue in US cities, demonstrators are adopting the energy of a community costume parade or block party. They’ve taught salsa lessons, handed out snacks, and ridden unicycles, as armed law enforcement look on.
Mixing humour and politics – a tactic social scientists call “tactical frivolity” – is not new. But it has become a defining feature of American protest in the Trump era, embraced by both left and right.
And one symbol has emerged as particularly salient – the frog. It began when video footage of a confrontation between a man in a frog suit and immigration enforcement agents in Portland, Oregon, went viral. And it has since spread to protests across the country.
“There’s a lot going on with that little inflatable frog,” says LM Bogad, a professor at University of California, Davis and a Guggenheim Fellow who specialises in performance art.
From Pepe to Portland
It’s hard to talk about protests and frogs without talking about Pepe, a cartoon character embraced by far-right groups during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
When the meme first took off online, the image was used to signal certain emotions. Later, it was deployed to show support for Trump, including one notable meme retweeted by Trump himself, depicting Pepe with Trump’s signature suit and hair.
Pepe was also depicted in right-wing online communities on 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit in darker contexts, as Adolf Hitler or a member of the violent white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan. Online conservatives traded “rare Pepes” and set up cryptocurrency in his name. His catchphrase, “feels good, man”, was deployed as an inside joke.
But Pepe didn’t start out so controversial.
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A man seen wearing a Pepe shirt during the 6 January 2021 riot at Capitol Hill, where Trump supporters attempted to prevent his loss to Joe Biden
Its creator, artist Matt Furie, has been vocal about his distaste for how the image has been used. Pepe was supposed to be simply a “chill frog-dude” in this artist’s universe of characters.
The frog first appeared in a series of comics in 2005 – apolitical and best known for pulling his pants all the way down to pee. In the 2020 documentary Feels Good Man, which chronicles Mr Furie’s efforts to wrest back control of his work, he said his Pepe drawing was inspired by his experiences with friends and roommates in his 20s.
Early in his career, Mr Furie experimented with uploading his work to the nascent social web, where other users began to borrow, remix and reinvent his character. As Pepe spread into the more extreme corners of the internet, Mr Furie tried to disavow the frog, even killing him off in a comic strip.
But Pepe lived on.
“It shows you that we don’t control symbols,” says Prof Bogad. “They can change and shift and be reworked.”
Until recently, the popularity of Pepe meant that frogs were largely associated with the right. But that changed on 2 October, when a confrontation between a protestor dressed in an inflatable frog costume with a blue neck scarf and an immigration officer in Portland, Oregon, went viral.
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The moment came just days after Trump ordered the National Guard to Portland, calling the city “war-ravaged”. Protesters began to gather in droves on a single block, just outside of an immigration enforcement facility.
Tensions were high and an immigration officer sprayed a chemical agent at a protester, aiming directly into the air intake fan of the puffy frog costume.
The protester, Seth Todd, responded with a joke, saying he had tasted “spicier tamales”. But the incident went viral.
Mr Todd’s attire was not too unusual for Portland, known for its quirky culture and left-wing protests that revel in the absurd – public yoga and 80s-style aerobics lessons, and nude cycling groups. The city’s unofficial motto is “Keep Portland Weird”.
The frog even played a role in the ensuing legal battle between the Trump administration and the city, which argued the National Guard deployment was unlawful.
While the court ruled in October that Trump had the right to deploy troops, one judge dissented, referencing in her minority ruling the protesters’ “well-known penchant for wearing chicken suits, inflatable frog costumes, or nothing at all when expressing their disagreement with the methods deployed by ICE”.
“Observers may be tempted to view the majority’s ruling, which accepts the government’s characterization of Portland as a war zone, as merely absurd,” Judge Susan Graber wrote. “But today’s decision is not merely absurd.”
Trump’s deployment was “permanently” blocked by courts just a month later, and troops have reportedly departed the area.
But by then, the frog had become a potent anti-administration symbol for the left.
The costume was spotted across the country at No Kings protests last autumn. There were frogs – and unicorns and axolotls and dinosaurs – in San Diego and Atlanta and Boston. They were in small towns like Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and big international cities like Tokyo and London.
The frog costume was backordered on Amazon, and rose in price.
Controlling the optics
What brings both frogs together – Pepe and the Portland frog – is the interplay between the humorous, benign cartoon amphibian and a deeper political meaning. This is what political scientists call “tactical frivolity”.
The strategy rests on what Mr Bogad calls the “irresistible image” – often silly, it’s a “disarming and charming” display that calls attention to your ideas without obviously explaining them to a viewer. It’s the goofy costume you wear, or the symbol you draw, or the meme you share.
Mr Bogad is both an expert in the subject and a veteran practitioner himself. He’s written a book on the subject, called Tactical Performance: The Theory and Practice of Serious Play, and taught workshops around the world.
“You could go back to the Middle Ages – when people are dominated, they use absurdity to speak the truth a little bit and still have plausible deniability.”
The idea of this approach is three-fold, Mr Bogad says.
As protesters take on a powerful opposition, a silly costume takes control of the optics. “It makes it look worse if you respond with violence,” he says.
Second, an image can set a certain tone for those within the movement and would-be supporters. In the case of Portland, “it was like a radical costume ball and we all got invited,” Mr Bogad said.
Crucially, this kind of tactic can offer political cover for criticism. Sometimes that shows up in claims of political memes as “just a joke” – a defence against critics who would brand your views as dangerous. But it’s especially useful in circumstances where government criticism can be dangerous, Mr Bogad says.
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A frog costume spotted in Berlin during the No Kings protests
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The costumes have been frequently seen at protests in Washington DC
He points to Otpor, the Serbian pro-democracy protest movement that supported efforts to overthrow Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 through pranks and street comedy. For years, critics of Chinese President Xi Jinping have shared images of Winnie the Pooh to signal their opposition online, where more bold-faced criticism could face censorship.
Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong have also embraced Pepe, unaware of his political affiliations in the US.
“Of course, authoritarians don’t like to be laughed at,” he says. This kind of symbolism works because “without even giving a speech, you are undermining the authoritarian script”.
At home in Oregon, a group of Portlanders doubled down on the viral fame and banded together to form “Operation Inflation”, which collects and distributes inflatable costumes to protesters.
They started a website where supporters can donate $35 to buy suits “for community members to wear at ICE protest sites to help deflate (pun intended) the tensions surrounding protests”.
Brooks Brown, a co-founder of Operation Inflation, says the point is to “shift the story that’s being told”, by the Trump administration, that all protesters are part of a violent mob.
“Our job is to build a different stage, and to force them onto ours,” he says.
Brown says the inflatables bear similarities with the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, when protesters would often dress in their Sunday finest and sit motionless as they were harassed by counter-protesters and arrested by aggressive police.
Pepe, Mr Brown says, “was a fascist symbol for 4chan. And now we’re being reclaimed. Feels good man.”
By late October, his group had bought more than 350 outfits, and is planning a “pipeline” to send supplies to other cities where inflatables have been used at protests.
Once synonymous with the right, the Portland frog has now been sometimes dubbed the “Antifa Frog” online – referencing the decentralised, leftist movement that opposes far-right causes and has been designated a domestic terrorist group by Trump.
Memes depict him fighting Pepe, two frogs battling for national attention.
