Breaking the Anvil: Why Pepper-Spraying an Inflatable Frog Was a Strategic Mistake
A Mongoose Perspective on Tactical Frivolity and Why Authoritarians Always Learn This Lesson Too Late
There’s a video you might have seen. ICE agents pepper-spraying a Portland protester in an inflatable frog costume, trying to hit the breathing vent. The optics are perfect: armored federal agents deploying chemical weapons against a joke. Against absurdity made manifest. Against someone whose entire tactical posture is “I’m dressed as a frog, what are you going to do about it?”
The answer, apparently, was pepper spray.
Bad move.
The U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual could have told them this would backfire. There’s a core principle in COIN doctrine that every failed occupation learns eventually: excessive repression doesn’t suppress resistance, it manufactures it.
Here’s how it works:
Bystanders become sympathizers. When neutral people see disproportionate force deployed against non-threatening targets, they think “that could be me” and start picking sides.
Sympathizers become actives. When people already skeptical of authority watch agents pepper-spray someone in a frog costume, they think “I can’t just watch anymore” and start participating.
You create more insurgents than you eliminate. Every brutal crackdown radicalizes more people than it suppresses. The math is simple and relentless: if you’re creating resistance faster than you’re suppressing it, you’re losing.
That magnificent bastard in his inflatable frog costume understood this instinctively. He created a scenario where any response by authorities would backfire. Ignore him? He wins by existing. Arrest him peacefully? He gets dragged away in a frog suit, which is hilarious and makes them look ridiculous. Deploy chemical weapons? Congratulations, you just radicalized everyone watching.
Authoritarians never understand this simple application of the force gradient. Kristi Gnome’s Evil Minions had a choice to make. They chose option three.
The Anvil and the Hammer
There’s a concept I heard years ago from Beau of the Fifth Column: breaking the anvil. The regime thinks it’s the hammer, striking the anvil of resistance, trying to break it through force. Strike harder, they think. Hit more often. Eventually the anvil will crack.
But that’s not how metallurgy works.
The anvil is designed to absorb impacts. The hammer, striking repeatedly against something that won’t break, eventually shatters itself. Every blow that fails to break the anvil weakens the hammer instead.
There’s no denying it: seven million protesters practicing Tactical Frivolity is a very big anvil indeed.
You can’t pepper-spray mockery into submission. You can’t arrest absurdity out of existence. You can’t deploy overwhelming force against someone in a shark suit without looking exactly as threatened and fragile and weak as you really are.
Since that video, there are lots of shark suits at protests. Dinosaur costumes. Pokemon(s?) … Unicorns. Inflatable everything.
My wife Lady T and I wore frog hats - simple green crocheted hats with frog eyes on the top. She made the hats herself. (Like Joss Whedon reportedly said after the Woman’s March protests in 2016: “Resistance, plus arts and crafts? This is how you get white women to join the revolution.”
Those silly hats were our way of participating in something already happening, something that COIN doctrine would predict: when repression becomes excessive, resistance becomes creative, distributed, and impossible to centrally suppress.
How do they crack down on people wearing frog hats? They can’t. There’s no organization to infiltrate. No leader to arrest. No central planning to disrupt. Just thousands of people independently deciding that dressing like amphibians is our contribution to maintaining humanity under pressure.
The technique is called Tactical Frivolity, and it’s elegant systems design. It’s distributed resistance that degrades gracefully - if they arrest one dinosaur, ten more appear. It’s mockery as strategic doctrine - every overreaction proves the point. It’s joy as defiance - refusing to let them make us grim makes us harder to break.
And most importantly: it’s the anvil. Every time they strike at it, they weaken themselves.
The Simulation Meets Reality
In a piece called “The Simulation is Collapsing,” writer Mike Brock argues that after November 2024, a manufactured consensus emerged: authoritarianism was inevitable, resistance was futile, accommodation was wisdom. The oligarchs bent the knee. The platforms amplified the narrative. The doomers counseled surrender.
But Brock argues that simulation only works until lived experience contradicts it. They cannot simulate away people’s grocery bills. They cannot simulate away ICE raids in our cities. They cannot simulate away our electricity bills rising to fund AI speculation. They cannot simulate away federal agents pepper-spraying a peaceful protester in a frog costume.
Reality always bats last, and the truth has ultimate veto power over simulation. Anyone who has used a VR headset in a small room learns this fact very quickly. And sometimes painfully.
Tuesday night, reality voted. Democrats swept Virginia, New Jersey, and New York. These were not close races - Dems won with massive margins. Proposition 50 passed in California by 2-to-1, setting up a 5-seat House pickup in 2026. It happened in virtually every race, as legal scholar John Pfaff noted - governors, mayors, school boards, water boards, state justices … in a perfect moment of Tactical Frivolity, Pfaff even announced the Democrats voted in “a new dungeon master in a rural Iowa D&D club.” (Mongoose says: We cannot confirm or deny this claim, nudge nudge wink wink.)
Young women voted based on “those ICE images” and economic concerns. Federal workers in Virginia, furloughed or fired, showed up angry. Voters connected the dots between federal agents terrorizing communities and economic structures serving oligarchs while abandoning workers.
The COIN doctrine prediction played out in real time: excessive repression radicalized the population. Bystanders became sympathizers. Sympathizers became actives. And the actives voted like Democracy depended on it.
Why They’ll Escalate Anyway
Here’s the uncomfortable part: they’re going to learn exactly the wrong lesson from Tuesday.
Authoritarian psychology can’t process being wrong. They can’t accept that the simulation was false. They can’t recognize that most people aren’t sociopaths and won’t decide to become sociopaths. So when performance fails to produce submission, they will escalate.
Brock predicts it: more aggressive ICE raids, more warrantless detentions, more explicit threats, more desperate attempts to restore the simulation through force.
The COIN manual would predict the same thing. Failing counterinsurgencies always escalate when initial tactics fail. They hit harder. Deploy more force. Raise the stakes. Try to intimidate through brutality to win what they couldn’t achieve through lesser means.
And every escalation creates more resistance than it suppresses. Every federal agent deployed creates more sympathizers. Every frog costume pepper-sprayed creates more frog hats. Every brutal crackdown proves the protesters are right about what they’re resisting.
The hammers keep striking. The anvil keeps enduring. And the authoritarian tools begin to chip and fracture.
This is what makes the authoritarians so dangerous: they’re trapped in a death spiral where force reveals fragility demands more force. They can’t stop because stopping would mean admitting they were wrong. So they’ll escalate until something breaks.
The question is whether the hammer breaks before the anvil does.
Standing Up Straight
I’m a federal worker on day 35+ of a government shutdown, working without pay, watching my savings drain while waiting for Congress to figure out basic governance. I fix HVAC systems for a living - I understand distributed systems that degrade gracefully. Multiple points of failure. Redundancy. Resilience.
Tactical Frivolity is good systems design.
It’s distributed: there’s no single point of failure to target. It’s creative: constantly adapting to new circumstances. It’s resilient: every crackdown creates more participants. It’s joyful: maintaining humanity under pressure instead of letting fear fragment you into something you’re not.
The frog hats Lady T and I wear on our walks aren’t some aggressive revolutionary action. They’re our way of saying: we see what you’re doing, we’re not afraid, and we’re not going to let you make us grim. We’re going to keep walking, keep watching, keep doing our part. We’re standing up straight and looking the devils right in their faces.
That’s the mongoose way: eyes open, evidence first, never let your theory run ahead of the facts. And the evidence from Tuesday says the anvil is holding.
The simulation is collapsing. Reality is reasserting itself. The COIN manual’s predictions are playing out in real time. And somewhere, federal agents are probably still trying to figure out how to suppress people in dinosaur costumes.
Good luck with that.
The hammer is breaking. The anvil endures. And there are frog hats everywhere.