How frogs went from right-wing meme to anti-ICE protest symbol

The revolution won’t be televised, but it may have webbed feet and swollen eyes.

It can also be unicorn horns or chicken feathers.

As protests against the Trump administration continue in US cities, demonstrators are embracing the energy of a community costume parade or block party. They gave salsa lessons, handed out snacks and rode unicycles under the supervision of armed law enforcement.

Mixing humor and politics (a tactic social scientists call “tactical frivolity”) is not new. But it has become a defining feature of American protests in the Trump era, embraced by both left and right.

And one symbol emerged as particularly striking: the frog. It all started when video footage of a confrontation between a man wearing a frog costume and immigration enforcement officers 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 the University of Davis and Guggenheim Fellow who specializes in performance art.

It’s hard to talk about protests and frogs without mentioning Pepe, the cartoon character adopted by far-right groups during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

When the meme was first posted online, the image was used to signal certain emotions. It was later used to show support for Trump, including a notable meme retweeted by Trump himself depicting Pepe in Trump’s signature suit and hair.

Pepe has also been portrayed in darker contexts in right-wing online communities on 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit as Adolf Hitler or a member of the violent white supremacist group Ku Klux Klan. Online conservatives traded in “rare Pepes” and set up cryptocurrency in his name. The catchphrase “It feels good, man” was used as an inside joke.

But Pepe did not have such a controversial start.

Its creator, artist Matt Furie, expressed his displeasure with how the image was used. In this artist’s universe of characters, Pepe was just supposed to be a “calm frogman”.

Toad first appeared in a comic book series in 2005; He was apolitical and was best known for pulling his pants down to urinate. In the 2020 documentary Feels Good Man, about Mr. Furie’s efforts to take back control of his business, Pepe said his drawing was inspired by his experiences with friends and roommates in his 20s.

Early in his career, Mr. Furie tried uploading his work to the nascent social network; here other users began borrowing, remixing, and reinventing his character. As Pepe spread to 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.

“This shows you that we don’t control the symbols,” Prof Bogad says. “They can be changed, relocated and reworked.”

Until recently Pepe’s popularity meant that frogs were largely associated with the right. But that changed on October 2, when a confrontation between a protester wearing an inflatable frog costume and a blue neckerchief and an immigration officer in Portland, Oregon, went viral.

The moment came just days after Trump ordered the National Guard to Portland, calling the city “war-torn.” Protesters began gathering in groups on a single block just outside the immigration enforcement facility.

Tensions were high and an immigration agent sprayed a protester with chemicals, aiming directly at the air intake fan of his fluffy frog costume.

One protester, Seth Todd, joked back that he tasted “spicier tamales.” But the incident went viral.

Mr. Todd’s outfit was not all that unusual for Portland, known for its quirky culture and absurdist left-wing protests, public yoga and ’80s-style aerobics classes and naked cycling groups. The city’s unofficial motto is “Keep Portland Weird.”

The frog even played a role in a legal battle between the Trump administration and the city over the alleged illegality of the deployment of the National Guard.

While the court ruled in October that Trump had the right to send in troops, a judge dissented, citing his minority’s ruling that protesters’ “well-known tendency to wear chicken suits, inflatable frog costumes, or nothing at all when expressing opposition to methods employed by ICE.”

“Observers may be inclined to view the majority’s decision, which accepted the government’s characterization of Portland as a war zone, as merely absurd,” Judge Susan Graber wrote. he wrote. “But today’s decision is not just absurd.”

Trump’s deployment was “permanently” blocked by the courts just a month later, and troops reportedly abandoned the area.

But by then the frog had become a powerful anti-government symbol for the left.

The costume was seen at No Kings protests across the country last fall. There were frogs, unicorns, axolotls, and dinosaurs in San Diego, Atlanta, and Boston. They were in small towns like Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and major international cities like Tokyo and London.

The frog costume is available for pre-order on Amazon and its price has increased.

What brings both frogs (Pepe and the Portland frog) together is the interplay between the witty, good-natured cartoon amphibian and a deeper political meaning. This is what political scientists call “tactical futility.”

The strategy relies on what Mr. Bogad calls the “irresistible image” — a “disarming and compelling” spectacle that draws attention to your ideas, often foolishly, without clearly explaining them to the audience. The ridiculous costume you’re wearing, the symbol you’re drawing, or the meme you’re sharing.

Mr. Bogad is both a subject matter expert and an experienced practitioner. He wrote a book on the subject, Tactical Performance: The Theory and Practice of Serious Play, and has conducted workshops around the world.

“You can go back to the Middle Ages; when people were dominated, they used absurdity to tell a little truth and still have plausible deniability.”

The idea for this approach is threefold, Mr. Bogad says.

A silly costume takes control of the optics as protesters face powerful opposition. “If you respond with violence, it looks worse,” he says.

Second, an image can set a certain tone for those within the movement and its supporters. In Portland’s case, “it was like a radical costume ball, and we were all invited,” Mr. Bogad said.

More importantly, such tactics can provide political cover for criticism. Sometimes this comes off as “just a joke” in political meme claims; a defense against critics who brand your views as dangerous. But Mr. Bogad says it is especially useful in situations where criticism of the government could be dangerous.

He highlights the Serbian pro-democracy protest movement Otpor, which supported efforts to overthrow Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 through pranks and street comedy. For years, critics of Chinese President Xi Jinping have been sharing images of Winnie the Pooh to signal their dissent online, where bolder criticism can face censorship.

Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong also embraced Pepe, unaware of his political connections in the United States.

“Of course authoritarians don’t like to be laughed at,” he says. This type of symbolism works because “you undermine the authoritarian script without even making a speech”.

A group of Portlanders in Oregon doubled down on viral fame and banded together to form “Operation Inflation,” collecting inflatable costumes and distributing them to protesters.

They launched a website where supporters can donate $35 to purchase suits “for community members to wear at ICE protest sites to help reduce tensions (pun intended) surrounding protests.”

Brooks Brown, one of the founders of Operation Inflation, says the main goal is to “change the narrative told” by the Trump administration that all protesters are part of a violent mob.

“Our job is to build a different stage and force them onto ours,” he says.

Brown says the floats bear similarities to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, when protesters would dress up in their best clothes on Sundays and sit still as they were harassed by counterprotesters and arrested by aggressive police.

Pepe “is a fascist symbol for 4chan,” Mr. Brown says. And now we’re being taken back. He sounds like a good person.”

In late October, his group purchased more than 350 suits and is planning a “pipeline” to send supplies to other cities where inflatables have been used in protests.

Once synonymous with the right, the Portland frog is now sometimes called the “Antifa Frog” online; This refers to the decentralized left-wing movement that opposes far-right causes and has been identified by Trump as a domestic terrorist group.

Memes depict him fighting Pepe; Two frogs battle for national attention.