By the time I arrived, the waterfront park in downtown Portland, Oregon was already awash with people as far as the eye could see. The No Kings protest in June had turned out around 10,000 people across the city; this one saw several times that number just downtown, with thousands more choosing to join localized protests in their neighborhoods or in the suburbs.
Unable to get a precise crowd estimate, I tried instead to count inflatable frog costumes. I gave up on this about twenty minutes later: there were simply too many frogs.
Last month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designating so-called “antifa” a domestic terror group — a designation that does not exist. The EO was followed by a national security presidential memorandum directing members of his cabinet to forcefully hunt down and prosecute the shadowy forces of antifa and their allegedly well-moneyed funders. A couple of days later, the president ordered the National Guard into “War ravaged Portland” to “protect” ICE from antifa, turning the mid-sized city into one of the epicenters of the fight.
A lawsuit ensued, and as the state of Oregon and the city of Portland went to court to accuse Trump of hallucinating a war zone where none existed, a new resistance symbol was born. A viral video captured a protester in an inflatable frog suit staring down — so to speak — a flock of militarized ICE agents, and inflatable costumes were suddenly de rigueur not just at protests in Portland but all over the country.
In Portland, June’s protests were dominated by American flags and the symbol of a crossed-out crown. The October protests, on the other hand, were all about the frog. All throughout the crowd, there were inflatable frog costumes of varying degrees of quality — mostly green, with a couple of pink frogs and Halloween-themed skeleton frogs. There were many other inflatables, too — unicorns, sharks, dinosaurs, chickens, squirrels, flamingos, aliens, Garfield — but the frog had become ubiquitous in all forms. There were people in frog kigurumi onesies, people in frog masks and frog hats and little paper frog cutouts taped onto beanies. Signs and t-shirts featured frogs and words like “ribbet” and “hop.” A trio of inflatable frogs posed for photos by the waterfront trail; protesters crowded around them with their phones, as eager as children at Disneyland waiting to take photos with Mickey Mouse.
Aside from the signage, the crowd itself would not look terribly out of place at Disneyland. Many of the signs were iterations on “Stop fascism” or “Fuck ICE” or “Fuck Trump.” Women strode through the park wearing sweatshirts and t-shirts adorned with “Aunt Tifa” in glittery letters. Several signs made reference to the executive order and the national security presidential memorandum that had painted antifa as an organized centralized movement paid for by George Soros. “Not a paid protester I’d pay to protest this bullshit” read one sign; “Hey Cankles-McTaco-Tits! Nobody paid me to be here” read another. An inflatable zebra carried a sign reading “Soros: Venmo me @AntifaZebra.”
“The administration thinks that we’re all being paid by antifa to be here,” said Ralph Christiansen, who has lived in Portland his entire life. He was carrying a sign that read “Still waiting for my antifa check” and wore a baseball cap over his gray hair that identified him as a military veteran.
“I haven’t gotten it yet,” Christiansen joked. “Maybe I didn’t fill out the right paperwork or something.”
“I’m a vet, and I think a lot of the people that are in policy-making now aren’t in favor of us,” he said, when The Verge asked him why he was protesting. “Every day I wake up, and it’s like, what has he done now? What have they done now?” He described the strikes on boats off the coast of Venezuela. “Every day it’s something new, and I’m really tired of it. I hope things like this can change it.”
“The lies are getting so old, so old,” said Connie Copeland, an older woman who was carrying an “I am Aunt Tifa” sign. A local resident born in Oregon, she said she had been to every No Kings protest in the area all year.
“People are being snatched off the streets without any kind of consideration of who they are, and it’s just so overwhelmingly obvious that we are in trouble and that we’ve got to stand up and speak out,” said Copeland, who was wearing a t-shirt with a frog on it.
When asked about the clip that had spawned a million frogs, she confirmed that she had seen it and loved it. “Oh, it’s just fantastic. Because again, it’s a peaceful thing and Portland is the best ever at being peaceful and loving and accepting everyone.”
“I’m looking around and don’t see a war zone anywhere,” said City Councilor Sameer Kanal on stage, going on to praise the weather, the parks, the Willamette River, and Portland’s various sports teams. “We have therapy llamas at the airport and naked bike rides and we have chickens and frogs defending democracy.”
The waterfront park area around the Battleship Oregon Memorial is almost two miles away from the ICE facility where the original Frog squared off against camo-clad feds; a small but dedicated group of protesters has been showing up regularly each night for months. A weekend No Kings protest might draw people of literally all ages; the crowd at the ICE facility tends to skew young. There is a broad swath of reasons why this would be the case, the most important being that federal law enforcement keep shooting at people with pepper balls. Getting repeatedly hit with less-lethals is a young person’s game.
“These young nonviolent protesters are the speartip of our movement,” said one rally speaker, drawing a line that both connected and separated the No Kings protests from the ICE facility protest. But it was clear that the ICE facility protest had set the agenda in one respect at least. “We will answer fascism with absurdism, as only Portland can,” said the speaker, to raucous cheers from the crowd.
Later, another speaker took the microphone to chant, “Show Trump what democracy looks like!”
“This is what democracy looks like!” the crowd responded.
“Show Trump what Portland looks like!”
The crowd, all glitter and fur and bobbling inflatables, shouted, “This is what Portland looks like!”
The weather had become more seasonally appropriate when I made my way down to the ICE facility. The downtown waterfront showcases Portland’s charms — the sparkling river, the bridges arching overhead, the trees currently bristling with golden autumn leaves. The ICE facility, meanwhile, is crammed between a freeway off-ramp and a Tesla dealership, in an afterthought of a building in a neighborhood that is built up around the OHSU Hospital.
About a dozen feds — in camo, body armor, helmets, masks — were posted up on the roof of the building, looking down at a crowd of 500 people, many of them in costume. There were unicorns, dinosaurs, axolotls, lobsters, and of course, a lot of frogs. Three inflatable bald eagles wobbled around carrying a sign that read “Real Americans are antifa.” Others came dressed in foam Halloween costumes — a banana and Patrick from Spongebob Squarepants (but in fishnets) started dancing furiously when an EDM mix of Britney Spears started to play.
Counter-protesters and right-wing streamers are a regular presence at this site, but for the time being, their presence was dwarfed by the massive upswell of pageantry. I did encounter some outside the immediate vicinity — a pair of men screaming “Heil Hitler” and “Hitler should put you in jail” in my direction over loudspeaker. The intended effect was dampened by the fact that they were on Lime scooters, and also by how frantically they zipped away when a revving motorcycle started to pursue them around the block.
If No Kings felt a little like Disneyland, the ICE protests felt like a carnival in a parking lot, or maybe a pride parade in an REI clearance section. Stacks of gigantic speakers blared everything from dubstep to Lily Allen. At one point, the speakers played “Bella Ciao,” a song made popular by the Italian antifascist resistance against dictator Benito Mussolini, to zero reaction from the crowd. (I’d never heard that song at a Portland protest before Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer was arrested; one local journalist confirmed he hadn’t heard it either.) The next song choice — “Y.M.C.A.” by Village People — was better-received, and the protesters began to energetically do the YMCA dance at the ICE agents looming over them.
About a third of the protesters wore gas masks or respirators; the fumes from pepper balls and mace still lingered on the sidewalks, making it unpleasant to stand there without a face covering of some kind.
“ICE is the only fucking terrorism in Portland,” a protester told the feds over a loudspeaker, mocking them for their militarized kit. “Look around. Your enemy is a barista named River.”
“Look around. Your enemy is a barista named River.”
While the feds postured from the top of the building, state troopers passed unimpeded through the crowd on bicycles. Local police liaison officers strolled back and forth. Signs and chants still derided the police but no one seemed to be particularly bothered by the actual police. All eyes were on ICE, instead.
“Jump!” the crowd chanted at the feds on the roof. “Jump!”
As the feds turned a blindingly bright spotlight towards them, middle fingers sprouted across the crowd. When I glanced behind me, I could see a sea of upturned faces in the rain, eyes shining in the light.
