Can People in Frog Costumes Beat Fascism?
The "State of the Swamp" event highlights the power and limits of absurdity and whimsy in political protest.
Robert De Niro wrapped up an event called "State of the Swamp"—a largely Democratic Party–coded counter-event to President Donald Trump's State of the Union speech last night—grimly and angrily.
He called out a variety of Trump-era policies as things that make America an unlovable nation now. This double–Oscar winner was also sincerely frightened that the president will do all he can to manipulate the midterms so his party doesn't lose. Though an actor and a showman, De Niro was not trying to be light and amusing.
Earlier at the same event, a different side of the Resistance was on display. A couple of Oregon Democratic officeholders—Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Maxine Dexter—both appeared on stage with, and gave enthusiastic shoutouts to, a gang of activists in silly inflatable frog costumes. They were from one of the main groups organizing this event, the Portland Frog Brigade, dedicated to, in their own words, "peaceful, creative dissent."
That sort of goofiness—which also includes naked bike riding—got the Portland anti–Immigration and Customs Enforcement activists of the past season roundly mocked both by Trumpists and those who find that sort of whimsy just cloying and annoying, both unserious and (perhaps even worse) uncool.
The Portland Frogs insist, though, that their particular path "into resistance…uses spectacle and humor with intent: to build community, generate joy, and pierce the aura of authoritarian power, cutting through the fear it depends on, and exposing the hollowness beneath its claims of omnipotence."
Even if an outsider not totally enchanted by a particular form of whimsy might find it even more annoying than a serious protest, for the community doing the protest, a sense of antic and norms-testing frivolity is indeed a uniquely fulfilling bonding agent, and widens the sense of social possibilities in ways that can be strangely fruitful.
Building a sense of solidarity combined with a sense of fun is a noble goal, whether in protests or show business or just trying to enjoy your life with your friends. In an on-stage interview at the State of the Swamp, held last night at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., with Rob Potylo as his character "Robby Roadsteamer," a slightly less noble (though not ineffective) goal was offered as a plus: that mocking your opponents' beliefs or power with silliness really pisses them off. Roadsteamer wears goofy items such as giraffe costumes, sings anti-ICE and anti-MAGA songs at rallies, and taunts cops, and he has been arrested multiple times in two states while doing so.
Roadsteamer used various references that limned the depressing extent to which America's cultural battles have been consistent for at least 60 years now as he called on memories of the cultural and political rebellion of the '60s antiwar and civil rights and general counterculture movements. The same questions of race and ethnicity, war and peace, decorum vs. vulgarity (though the political valences of that particular division have nearly reversed from 1966 to 2026), the social status of anyone who's not a straight white man, and whose values should dominate media and education, are still haunting America now.
Roadsteamer used images from America's still-remembered boomer counterculture past for the energy he's hoping to recreate for the anti-MAGA movement. "We don't have to be angry or violent," he said. "We just need to create the new Grateful Dead parking lot." Later, he said the progressive resistance needs "less V for Vendetta masks and blowing up Teslas and more of a Grateful Dead, Haight Ashbury scene." For himself, he points out that a "twerking giraffe gets arrested singing songs. [Authorities] are terrified by it. This shit works."
Wyden hat-tipped to the frog spirit as to why Portland did indeed drive out ICE this season. Based on what Trump had been saying, Wyden pointed out, people "expected a violent mob," but they merely saw prancing people in absurd costumes. "Trump consider[ed that] a war zone….We took on authoritarianism, and we had the frogs, and we won."
It is likely no longer tenable in the Trump era for the two standard sides of the political divide represented by MAGA and the progressives behind Defiance.org (the major organizer of the State of the Swamp) to disagree amicably and keep their conflict restricted to electoral politics (even as libertarians note glumly that both sides support state power, generally unconstrained by the Constitution, to achieve their goals, and that when it comes to things such as Trump talking points at tonight's SOTU about, say, drug costs and corporate housing purchases, those goals seem to mesh).
From Abbie Hoffman and other radical clowns in the 1960s to today's alt-right trying to own the libs, the mixture of mockery and comedy with politics, however life-affirming to the people doing it, can't help but read contemptuous; it's less a way to win over converts as to smash your foes' faces with the metaphorical pie of disrespect for them and their values.
Seeing a sense of life-affirming play may win people on the margins to the anti-Trump cause, or inspire those who already don't like him to get more public about it, but part of its appeal is not so much converting political opponents but aggravating them.
It's one way to upend a culture, and the Abbie Hoffman spirit did upend a culture, and in some respects MAGA is a counterrevolutionary backlash to the victories of Hoffman's counterculture (even as it accepts his notion that vulgar disrespect for political opponents is the way to go).
Whether it succeeds in its larger political-change goals, it's a winning strategy in the sense that it gives a wider sense of life, belonging, camaraderie, and joy to the side doing the protesting. "We've got to find joy or we will crack," an activist said on stage at the State of the Swamp.
Roadsteamer's '60s-coded vision of the Grateful Dead parking lot specifically summons memories or fantasies of a community of people living, working, traveling together, bound by choice and seeking fun and not constrained by locked-in rules or predetermined cultural or ethnic identities, making their living in self-chosen and varied ways. That approach is potentially not just anti-Trump, but anti-politics in the best sense: forging the kind of life you want, with those who want to live it with you, while ignoring or evading the forces that try to impede your ability to thrive as you please. That vision is against the current American government run by the authoritarian Trump. But it is quintessentially American.