Description
Drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of Carnival, this paper interrogates a tactical shift in opposing creeping authoritarianism in Western democracies through what I refer to as performative transgressive frivolity. On 2 October 2025, in Portland, Oregon, local activist Seth Todd donned an inflatable novelty frog costume and appeared at a protest of the aggressive arrest and deportation actions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) under the current administration of US President Donald Trump. Social media quickly responded with images, memes, and TikTok videos of befuddled federal agents backing away from a slowly advancing Todd. After being pepper-sprayed through the air-vent hole of his costume and telling a journalist later that ‘I’ve definitely had spicier tamales,’ Todd was labeled as the Anti-Fascist Frog; and a movement was born. One that, in solidarity, crossed the Atlantic to Dublin, Ireland, where on 18 October, the day of a nation-wide ‘No Kings’ Protest in the US, protestors gathered in front of the US Embassy, many wearing their own inflatable costumes. As it spreads and scales across the US and beyond, this seemingly fatuous gesture is an expression of political protest rooted in ‘tactical frivolity,’ wherein absurdist humour disrupts power asymmetries and challenges dominant political framings. Following historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, performance is inherent to authoritarianism, with populist political movements relying on and requiring a particular ‘aestheticization of politics.’ Protesting via the inflatable frog costume – now with an ever-expanding puffy wardrobe of unicorn, dinosaur, chicken, and other performatively non-threatening characters – skewers the hyper-masculine aesthetic favoured by agents of the state, and punctures narratives of security that frame left-leaning American cities as ‘war zones’ under the thrall of Antifa and foreign ne’er-do-wells.
