FAQ
You have questions. We have answers.
In the absence of clear information, people often fill in gaps through personal experience and bias, forming assumptions that are frequently wrong. To avoid misunderstandings, we’ve answered the questions we hear most often. If something isn’t covered here, reach out and we’ll add it.
Q: Who are you, actually?
A: The Portland Frog Brigade is a political theater club dedicated to peaceful creative dissent. We have about 80 volunteer members, with roughly 20 actively organizing and regularly Frogging.
We are all volunteers. Most of us are working artists and regular workers — high school art teachers, full-time artists, therapists, forestry workers, gig workers, graphic designers, and self-employed creatives.
Q: What’s your mission?
A: Our mission is to model and advocate for creative, peaceful resistance in support of the Constitution and the rule of law. Also, a generous helping of FUCK ICE. We are strategic but flexible, responding to changes on the ground as they occur.
Q: What do you do?
A: Leveraging the Frog — now an internationally recognized symbol of peaceful creative resistance — we operate on four pillars, combining high-visibility actions with mutual aid:
FRAP — Frog Resistance Assistance Program
We support protestors at the PDX ICE facility by collecting donations to purchase food from immigrant-owned businesses to stock the free food table, and by buying medical supplies for the medic station.
Actions
We engage in creative, peaceful, high-visibility actions like protests, town halls, rallies, honk-and-waves, stunts, and cultural moments like “State of the Swamp.” These actions attract attention, widen participation, and challenge authoritarian narratives.
Chapters
We launch and support independently run brigades in other cities. Minnesota and D.C. are active. Phoenix and New Orleans are forming. We’ve purchased and distributed 400 suits to seed growth. The goal is distributed infrastructure — frogs where they’re needed, working from a shared playbook, the “How to Frog” kit.
Merch
Merchandise spreads the symbol and lowers barriers to entry. It is not a profit center. It covers operational costs — we only do as much as we have funds to support.
Q: How much money are you making off this?
A: None. Total funds raised since we began: roughly $9,000.
Those funds have gone to suits, printing, transportation, batteries, shipping, staging, and operations. No one is paid. Several members have personally fronted costs.
We formed an LLC for liability protection when organizing or participating in public events. Our books are available to anyone who wants to review them.
Q: Why peaceful resistance?
A: Because it works — and history supports that.
Political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan analyzed 323 major resistance campaigns from 1900–2006:
Nonviolent campaigns succeeded about 53% of the time.
Violent campaigns succeeded about 26% of the time.
Movements mobilizing at least 3.5% of the population rarely failed.
Nonviolent movements scale. They draw participation from families, workers, elders, civil servants, and others who might not engage otherwise. They fracture regime legitimacy.
Violence often justifies repression and consolidates state power.
The U.S. government holds extraordinary military and economic power. Direct physical confrontation is not a viable asymmetrical strategy to go up against that force.
We scale people power. Peaceful dissent enables that.
Q: Is creative political theater actually a strategy?
A: Yes.
What may look like frivolity is strategic — tactical frivolity. Authoritarian systems rely on inevitability and fear. Humor destabilizes both.
Examples:
The Yippies theatrically levitated the Pentagon.
Poland’s Orange Alternative mocked repression through absurdity.
Serbia’s Otpor used pranks and street theater against Milosevic.
ACT UP’s die-ins shifted national awareness during the AIDS crisis.
Creative dissent weakens the psychological foundation of repressive systems and invites broader participation. It does not replace legal strategy, journalism, electoral work, labor organizing, or direct aid. It widens the coalition that makes those tactics effective.
Q: Where is the original Frog?
A: The frog symbol emerged organically when Toad (the original Frog) was pepper-sprayed at the ICE facility. It became a viral collision of absurdity and state overreaction. Symbols of that kind are exceedingly rare.
As the symbol gained national and international resonance — press, fan art, memes, imitators — we chose to build infrastructure around it rather than let it fade. Our goal is to maximize its potential as a symbol for peaceful creative resistance. You see that today with new brigades forming in Minnesota and Washington, D.C., with Phoenix and New Orleans coming up.
We invited Toad to join our group. They declined, which we respect.
Q: How do you work with other organizations?
A: We support established activist organizations like Indivisible, No Kings, Defiance, and others by amplifying their messaging and showing up in ways that increase visibility and participation.
We also work in parallel with groups maintaining a consistent presence on the ground, such as Operation Inflation, who are at the ICE facility every day. Our role is to add visual amplification, material support, and broader participation where it’s useful.
Intra-movement tension and disagreement are common in activist spaces. We are committed to ensuring our work complements rather than competes. We work to coordinate with other organizations to ensure our actions add value and do not impede or detract from theirs. When we miss the mark, we adjust (this is our first time fighting fascism after all!).
Q: What was “The State of the Swamp”?
A: The State of the Swamp was a live rebuttal to the State of the Union at the National Press Club, featuring Frogs and 50 nationally recognized speakers, funded by donations to Defiance.org and ticket sales, and produced by a small volunteer team.
Earlier that day, over 60 D.C. activists Frogged up and delivered copies of the Constitution to members of Congress, reminding them of their oath.
The action generated 215 million impressions, more attention than any SOTU rebuttal in history, and the D.C. Frog Brigade formed directly from that action and is now active.
Q: Can I Frog with you?
A: Yes. Anyone can Frog. Download our How to Frog kit to learn how.
If you want to start a brigade in your city, reach out.
If you want to join the Portland Frog Brigade, here’s how.