Frogs Against The Machine: Messengers of Upheaval
From Revelation to No Kings, the frog has been an omen for tyrannical forces throughout history.
Ancient Omens From Uninvited Guests
What started in Portland, Oregon – as a single absurd statement by a guy in an inflatable suit, standing face-to-face, against a hostile military force that invaded a sovereign American city by a rogue president against the request of the governor, the mayor, the people, and a federal judge – has potentially become the symbol of resistance against tyranny by people across the globe.
The Frog.
Over the weekend, amidst a record turnout sea of over 8 million people, at No Kings marches across the globe, frogs appeared everywhere. Big poofy inflatable frogs. An absurd, but tactical act of solidarity.
The symbol is ancient. And any tyrannical force should be very nervous.
The frog is the messenger, the uninvited guest, the midwife of upheaval. An omen. A plague. It has been this way for millennia.
The Frogs of History
Egypt learned it first. The Nile swarmed once with frogs so thick they filled bedrooms, kitchens, and ovens. Pharaoh’s magicians tried to replicate the plague, to mimic the uprising and contain it. They failed. All of a sudden, frogs were everywhere, a living rebellion against tyranny, a swamp-born reminder that the river, once a servant, could turn against the throne. Even kings who believe themselves immortal are not immune to the creeping, crawling power of the small, the overlooked, and the seemingly insignificant forces of nature around them.
The frog hops through history and myth, across time and cultures, never static, never simple. It carries fertility and rebirth in the Egyptian goddess Heqet, a midwife who watched over births and resurrection. It climbs to the moon in Chinese legend, the toad of immortality, a witness to the endless cycles of death and transformation. It croaks rain in Native American prophecy, calling the sky to release what has long been withheld from the earth. It mocks kings in African trickster tales, leaping into pots, snapping jaws at power, proving that arrogance and hubris are prey to laughter and surprise. It waits in European wells and fairy tales, reminding princes and kings that nobility can hide in slime, that transformation is always embedded in the unacceptable and the grotesque.
In Revelation, the frog appears again, this time as a spirit, unclean, croaking from the mouths of dragons and beasts and false prophets. There, the frog carries deceit, but also the message that the voice of empire is always contested.
Return of the Frog
And now the frog returns, in the streets of America and across the world, in the absurdity of the inflatable, the oversized, the impossible.
The No Kings movement wears the frog suits like armor. The frog masks the individual and amplifies the collective. One croak, one leap, and the narrative flips: the powerful, violent, and cruel look ridiculous; the ordinary, anonymous, or “weird” suddenly occupy the center of attention. The frog interrupts authority, and in doing so, it reminds us that authority is performative, not eternal.
Across the ages, the frog has been a threshold creature. Between water and land, life and death, silence and song, it crosses borders that humans imagine are permanent. It embodies liminality. It embodies revolt.
Even in corruption, the frog is a herald of attention, a signal that thresholds are being crossed, that boundaries are porous, that kings are mortal. The streets pulse with that same signal. Frogs bounce and dance in unison, mocking the serious, undermining spectacle, calling out the regime for its absurdity.
The protester in the frog suit is not naive. They may not intend to reflect myth and biblical revelation, but there is a strategy at play. This has become tactical and effective. Intentionally or not, they embody the dual nature of the frog: the sacred plague and the cautionary croak.
Apocalypse, Plagues, and Warnings
They remind the onlooker of the Exodus plagues, the river turned against Pharaoh, and the apocalyptic frog-spirits, the deceptive voices that always rise when authority consolidates and attacks the people.
And yet, the frog also carries a warning. When spectacle overtakes substance, when laughter substitutes for moral clarity, the frog can become its own ghost. A reminder from Revelation: symbols can be co-opted, paraded by the powerful, mimicked in the service of control. The frog’s power depends on allegiance to the people, to the truth, to the river that remembers. Without that, it becomes just a costume, a toy, a meme.
Across cultures, across time, and across myth, the frog remains consistent: it embodies chaos married to rebirth, absurdity married to revelation. It reminds us that even the small, the overlooked, the ignored, can carry profound meaning. The frog has always been a creature of revolt, of emergence, of crossing boundaries that seem unbreachable. And here we are, watching that meaning rise again.
A Creature of Thresholds, of Absurd Defiance
Across the No Kings marches, the frog has become a banner of absurd defiance, a tactical weapon of ridicule, a signal that the river of human resistance cannot be dammed. It is a lesson in threshold politics: inhabit the space between worlds, between fear and audacity, between spectacle and substance.
The frog teaches that the small, the unexpected, the grotesque, can undo kings. The frog teaches that laughter and creativity are as much tools of power as fists or guns. The frog reminds us that history is alive, that myth is alive, and that the street is a canvas for both.
Egypt’s river rose. Pharaoh’s heart hardened. The frog was everywhere. Revelation warned of the false croaks, the spirits dressed in green but carrying deceit. Myths in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas echo that duality: the frog is sacred, ridiculous, dangerous, enlightening, funny, terrifying, a creature of thresholds, a herald of disruption.
The streets of Portland, Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere around the nation and globe are the present-day swamps where the frog has returned to remind authoritarians of their weakness, of their mortality.
The Frog Will Not Be Silenced
There is a rage in the frog. Not a human rage, but a cosmic, inevitable one. It laughs at arrogance, mocks authority, croaks in chorus until the walls of power shake. It embodies hope, fear, memory, and prophecy simultaneously. The frog is a reminder that every empire faces limits, that every crown can be contested, that the absurd, the grotesque, the liminal, can overturn the serious. It is a reminder that the river will always rise against what forgets it. It is a reminder that resistance is often camouflaged as play, rooted in the joy that stands fearlessly against aggression.
The frog is a teacher of emergence. It is the voice of the people, the river, the rain, the moon, the swamp, the threshold, the croak that will not be silenced. It leaps in our streets, into our feeds, our news cycles, our cities, and into our consciousness.
It reminds us that power is performative, that laughter and audacity are weapons. The frog invites us to cross boundaries, to inhabit thresholds, to act when authority forgets its accountability. The frog is the present and the past, the mythic and the real, the absurd and the sacred. In its croak, we hear the promise of liberation, the echo of prophecy, the pulse of revolt.
The regime brought this upon itself. It has set this prophecy in motion with its detestable, sickening behavior. The streets, the swamps, the waters, the myths, the legends, the prophecies, the history itself, are all conspiring in one chorus against this attack. The sighing of a million frogs in the distance grows closer, louder, and legion.
There is no way to stop it now.
The frogs are coming.
Overwhelming, absurd, and relentless.