Between Worlds: Why the Frog Is the Perfect Symbol for These Times
When you see protesters in Portland standing nose-to-nose with ICE agents in full tactical gear—but the protesters are wearing chicken suits, shark costumes, and yes, frog outfits—you might dismiss it as absurdist theater. You’d be wrong.
Those kids understand something profound about narrative disruption. Federal agents need you to look scared or angry so they can play the hero defending America from dangerous threats. But when they’re pointing an assault rifle at someone in a chicken suit, the frame breaks. The absurdity forces everyone watching to see the reality: heavily armed federal agents treating peaceful American citizens like enemy combatants.
It’s hard to look like a badass when you’re in a staredown with a guy in a frog costume.
But I think maybe there’s something deeper happening here, something that connects to why my partner is at home crocheting frog hats for the upcoming No Kings rally, and why that image fills me with hope rather than despair.
Besides, that I simply like frogs.
When I was a kid, I had an invisible friend named Soppy Reservoir (I always had an advanced vocabulary for my age.) Soppy got blamed when bathtime hijinks overflowed the tub. My brother had something different—he was terrified by what he called “the frog patrol.” They frightened him, but they sounded pretty cool to me.
The Magic of Liminality
I’ve been thinking about why frogs keep appearing as symbols of resistance in these dark times, and I think I understand it now.
Frogs are liminal creatures. They literally transform from one form to another—tadpole to frog, water-breather to air-breather. They live in that magical space between, as they move between water and land, and between one form of being and another entirely.
Like dawn and dusk.
Like the border where sea meets sand.
Like the spaces occupied by transgender and nonbinary folks, and by anyone else who refuses to stay in the rigid categories that authoritarian systems demand.
Like the faeries of folklore, who exist in the spaces between human and not, between our world and the next, between what can be explained and what must simply be witnessed.
Why Authoritarians Fear the In-Between
The Dark Enlightenment—that neo-fascist ideology promoted by tech billionaires like Peter Thiel—needs clear hierarchies. Fixed identities. People who stay in their assigned boxes and accept algorithmic control. They’re building what writer Jim Stewartson calls a “God projector”—a system that asks you to surrender your individual will to their artificial reality.
Their message, stripped down:
“Welcome to God. Now delete yourself.”
But a person in a frog costume says: I refuse your categories. I exist in the spaces you can’t control. I transform. I cross boundaries. And you can’t stop me.
The liminal is where magic happens. Where transformation occurs. Where the algorithm breaks down because it can’t compute the in-between.
The Tactical Brilliance of Joy
The organizers of the No Kings rallies have chosen the motto “We won’t let them steal our joy.” They’re asking people to dress like it’s a party, to bring creativity and celebration to resistance.
This isn’t frivolity. It’s strategic brilliance.
The Regime needs everyone playing their assigned roles—authorities as stern protectors, dissidents as dangerous threats. Costumes refuse the script. They assert human creativity and joy in the face of militarized control.
It’s also genuinely safer. It’s harder to justify violence against someone in a chicken suit. Harder to claim they were threatening. The visual record becomes our protection—any crackdown looks like exactly what it is: authoritarian overreach against peaceful, even playful, resistance.
The Revolution Will Be Joyful
When Hannah Arendt fled Nazi Germany and later watched the Nuremberg Trials, she formulated her concept of the “banality of evil”—that totalitarianism isn’t about individual monsters but about systems that remove empathy from the equation. She believed the antidote was pluralistic action: people coming together while maintaining their individuality and creativity.
A person crocheting frog hats for a resistance rally is exactly that kind of action. It’s assertion of humanity, community, creativity—all the things the Dark Enlightenment wants to eliminate.
Frogs transform. They refuse fixed categories. They live in the liminal spaces where control breaks down and magic becomes possible.
So yes, we’re wearing frog hats to fight fascism. And if that sounds absurd to you, you’re beginning to understand why it works.
Ribbet. The revolution will be joyful, liminal, and impossible to delete.