The Portland Frog Brigade is taking its show on the road. At least eight members of the amphibious group, which gained fame after wearing inflatable frog suits to ICE protests last fall, will be heading to Washington, D.C., to be among the headliners for the State of the Swamp, an alternative event to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday.

Organizers are calling the State of the Swamp event “The Rebuttal to the State of the Union,” with the Portland Frog Brigade tweaking that to “The Ribbital.”

Dozens of celebrities, politicians and activists are lined up to speak or appear, from Robert De Niro and Mark Ruffalo to U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. The event, set for 4 p.m. Tuesday at the National Press Club, can be live streamed at Defiance.org.

“Boycott Trump’s speech,” a banner on that group’s website says. “Join our party.”
“We’re hoping to steal the thunder,” a Portland Frog Brigade spokesperson told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

A Salem man who paid sex traffickers in the Philippines for livestreamed shows of child sexual abuse was sentenced Thursday to 21 years and eight months in prison.

Steven D. Griswold, 44, was arrested in the Philippines in December 2023 and then returned to the United States, where he has been held in custody since.

U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut adopted the sentence jointly recommended by the prosecutor and defense lawyer.

“You orchestrated the serial sexual abuse of a horrific nature against very young children,” Immergut said. “In that sense, you were a predator.”

Dogged litigation and tenacious federal court judges have heroically slowed Donald Trump’s rampage through democracy. But the most critical pushback against authoritarianism and biggest opportunity to rescue democracy is taking place elsewhere.

Historian Thomas Zimmer wrote that “being lawless, immoral, and violent does not make the Trumpists omnipotent…. There remains a vast gulf between Trump’s authoritarian aspirations on the one hand and the realities of a complex modern state and society on the other.

What is happening? Historian Ruth Ben Ghiat sees the United States as joining a worldwide protest movement against autocratic regimes in defense of “dignity, bodily autonomy, the ability to earn a living wage, and basic human rights.” She explained:

Other protests take place in countries where democracy has been severely damaged due to autocratic power grabs that shred constitutional rights, engage in blatant corruption and human rights abuses, and may also militarize civil society by deploying state security forces and allied gangs as enforcers. The United States is now among these examples.

She posited that authoritarian regimes are inherently brittle and unstable, in large part because they “are not built to navigate a future in which survival of climate-change, disasters, resource scarcity, a shrinking labor force, and armed conflict will require fact-based communications, community, care, altruism, and other things such states work hard to suppress.”