Lacy, often seen as the Pink Frog at protests at the Portland CE building, poses for a picture near OPB with her husband, Jordy Lybeck. The couple appeared on “Think Out Loud” on Monday, March 30, after the “No Kings” series of protests in Portland and in cities all over the country.
Allison Frost / OPB
Operation Inflation was conceived last fall when protests at Portland’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement building routinely drew counter protesters and a large law enforcement presence. Jordy Lybeck and his wife, Lacy, wanted to impact the nature of news coverage as Pres. Trump threatened to send National Guard troops to Portland.
As Trump’s baseless assertions that Portland was “war-ravaged,” a “burning-hellhole,” where the mayor and the governor of Oregon were “petrified for their lives” appeared with increasing frequency, so did their determination to help correct the record. They began providing inflatable animal costumes to those protesting at the ICE facility.
The images of people playfully wearing large, inflatable costumes visually contradicted the narrative of a war torn city. They said they are also creating pure “absurdity” as counter-protestors yelled at larger than life frogs, chickens, unicorns and other creatures.
Jordy Lybeck and Lacy join us to tell us about their strategy for supporting protests, how the movement has spread to other cities and how this weekend’s No Kings demonstrations went down.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Inflatable frogs and other animals were once again on Portland streets this weekend. They were part of the No Kings protests that happened all across the country. Many of the costumes were provided by Operation Inflation, which started in Portland before spreading to other cities. Jordy Lybeck and his wife Lacy created Operation Inflation last fall when protests at Portland’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement building routinely drew tear gas and counterprotesters. They join us now to talk about Saturday’s No Kings demonstrations and the broader approach to protests. It’s great to have both of you on the show.
Jordy Lybeck: Good to be here.
Lacy Lybeck: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Miller: How would you describe the scene during the day for the No Kings protests on Saturday? Jordy, what did you see?
J. Lybeck: I saw the community coming out in every way that they felt like they could, any way that they felt like they would be heard, any way that they felt they could relate to one another and empower each other. We spent all day down at the ICE facility and we saw the blue line of the driveway, the infamous blue line where, if you cross it you get in trouble. We saw that it was lined with pastors and the faith community. We saw people who were artists, we saw people who were jugglers. We saw people that were just upset protesters. We saw Portland community, and that’s one of the things that makes Portland so inspiring is that people come out in every way, shape and form that they can.
Miller: Lacy, what was your experience on Saturday?
L. Lybeck: I would say the same. Before I was detained, I was seeing the community, despite the circumstances, being in really high spirits just because they were surrounded by each other. Ever since we started staying down at the ICE facility every day, I realized it has the same effect on me. If I stay away for a few days or take a couple of days off, I start to feel a little bit like political fatigue and hopelessness about the world. And so…
Miller: Fatigue if you’re not protesting.
L. Lybeck: Well, if I’m not around my community, like seeing people looking out for each other, I think it’s really important for the human psyche right now. So on No Kings, it was a really busy day. And despite what everyone’s there outraged protesting against, they were all in really good spirits, it felt. Since we’re there every day, it’s kind of easy for us to tell the difference day by day, how the vibe is and the energy, the underlying energy.
Miller: But you said at the beginning, “before you were detained.” What happened to you on Saturday?
L. Lybeck: Yeah, it was pretty early, I think around eight o’clock. It wasn’t nighttime fully, yet, it was still getting dark. DHS and border patrol agents had come out of their gate, and were, I guess, creating a line on their building. They weren’t really pushing anyone off the driveway because there was lots of people. They were just kind of staging themselves there and I was being the pink frog, keeping things light, walking back and forth being a general and inspecting their uniforms, making sure they had badge numbers and asking them about their guns.
J. Lybeck: And dancing.
L. Lybeck: And dancing, yeah, and dancing and keeping things light with the crowd behind me, which, directly behind me was actually the church singing. At some point, I really got under their skin though, with what I was saying, because they just grabbed me. It felt really random, to be honest. When we look back at the footage, I can see some of the other agents, like, a surprised face at their colleague having grabbed me. So I don’t think they planned to do that, but they all jumped when he did.
J. Lybeck: One thing that we were worried about with the No Kings protests at the ICE facility is that, as a lot of people know, that there was an injunction on the use of chemical weapons because of a win that we got from the lawsuit with the ACLU; and just days before the protest, Trump issued a stay on the injunction, meaning that for all intents and purposes they were given the OK to use chemical weapons on some level by the administration.
So we were really worried that they would be using chemical weapons, that they would be using tear gas like they did on the last No Kings, and we didn’t see any of the tear gas but we saw that they had a number of agents and border patrol that were armed with live munitions, rifles and pistols that were being aimed at protesters, which is not what we thought we would see that day.
L. Lybeck: Yeah, which is why I was inspecting their weapons because when the gassing happened to that big crowd of 2,000 people on the 24th…
J. Lybeck: That was January 31.
L. Lybeck: …and then the crowd after that, I guess they did it two weekends in a row. Then there was lots of gassing. But we were kind of scrambling at that point because that wasn’t something they had been doing for a lot of winter. And since we were the support for the community, we were mostly making sure we had stuff for mace from the agitators that were coming.
So we got a bunch of stuff for tear gas and prepared for the worst when it came to the stay on the injunction. And the whole crowd was prepared with gas masks, too, to protect themselves from the gas, and agents kept coming out in their own gas masks. They did have chems on their person, but they didn’t end up using them. So it makes me feel like they just wanted us to either not see them, have a reason to have a mask on when they’re not allowed to, or they wanted us to think they were going to use gas so we would have a mask on and not be able to see as well.
Miller: After you were held by some of the agents, you were then arrested?
L. Lybeck: Well, I guess, detained. They held me there and then they released me with failure to comply as the only charge.
Miller: Let me take some steps back, because we jumped straight into what happened this weekend, but the two of you have been at this for months now.
J. Lybeck: Since early October.
Miller: How did you end up wearing inflatable animal costumes? Jordy, how did this start for you?
J. Lybeck: Well, we were watching what was happening anxiously when it came to Trump’s threats of sending the National Guard, and there was a lot of talk about “don’t take the bait” and stuff like this. And one thing that we saw, of course, everybody saw, the Portland toad, getting pepper sprayed in the vent hole on the fan of his inflatable. And that caused a huge uproar and it got people questioning the validity of the authority of DHS. And it was happening in such a way that was just piercing the Trump propaganda that Portland is a war zone, that Portland is so dangerous that we have to send the National Guard to control it.
And when we saw that, the idea was, well, if we just drop off a ton of inflatables, and we just help hit the gas on the obvious inspiration that’s there, then the more that you have there, the harder it is to justify saying that it’s a war zone. How are you going to have people that the Trump administration says are terrorists, if they’re really terrorists, why are you seeing them next to inflatable cartoon animals? That’s strange. It’s strange to justify that. To try and justify that, it causes even cognitive dissonance in people that would otherwise follow along with that propaganda.
And because it was so piercing and also because it was so versatile in its ability to pierce that narrative, we just thought it was a good idea to throw some more in there. We made a website because I had the idea this could go viral, this could actually get legs of its own, so we made a website, made a little name for it. We dropped off a ton of inflatables, and it did its thing and we just keep giving them out there because we believe in the strategy.
Miller: Lacy, just to be clear, you’re separate from the Frog Brigade, which, at a glance, it seems like it’s all the same thing. Seth Todd, who is…
L. Lybeck: It would, right?
Miller: …known as Toad, with the frog costume… and Frog League, a legion of inflatable frogs, and you do have some inflatable frog costumes. So what’s the connection between all these different groups?
L. Lybeck: Isn’t it hilarious the questions that inflatables bring up about identity and identity politics and how those actually play a part in the resistance, the movement that we’re all going to need to be a part of to win here? Because on the surface, it would look like all of the inflatables must be affiliated with each other.
But no, there’s different things that led people to having the same idea. It was honestly Toad’s pepper spraying that led people to having the same idea at the same time.
J. Lybeck: But with different ways of doing it and different focuses on how to do it.
Miller: What are the differences that seem to you to be most important?
L. Lybeck: Well, I wanted to make sure that you said the thing about… before you got away from why we started, is how important it was that we saw that line of cameras. That we realized it was propaganda.
J. Lybeck: Exactly, what was happening at that period is that we saw that DHS and BORTAC was coming through, and they had these drones that were making this 4K footage that they could really bolster their morale with, and the thing that we were explicitly trying to do was to poison their footage.
The thing that we weren’t trying to do, we weren’t trying to tell people how to protest, we weren’t trying to force people to protest in a particular way. What we were trying to do was to just create a way for people to be creative and think differently about the way that they protest and what it does.
The Frog Brigade has a separate approach where they see it as a way to inspire people towards peaceful protesting and giving people an avenue for something to identify with and trying to mobilize people on that aspect; where our focus is more explicit on the cameras and really focusing on, where is the propaganda going to be filmed?
Miller: When you say, “poison the footage,” what do you mean?
L. Lybeck: Well they were also at the time using footage from 2020 in Portland on the news and stating that it was today, so if we got the inflatables going no one would ever mistake 2020 Portland for 2025 Portland in the news and in that cultural moment.
J. Lybeck: It’s also the fact that you never know when that footage is going to happen. Sometimes that footage comes not just from federal cameras, sometimes it comes from content creators that will show up at protests and they’ll film what’s going on and look for a moment that seems the scariest and say, “This is what Portland is like.”
Miller: Whether it’s counter protesters or the federal government, if that’s their desire right now, to create incendiary moments that can go viral, what are your goals? What, to you, is a successful protest?
J. Lybeck: To us, a successful protest is one in which people take the next step of developing what we try to highlight, social infrastructure and community, so that people are getting together with a common understanding of the problem.
And when you get together and you start connecting with your neighbors, you start finding out all of these different resources and abilities that people have; that if they were to put their minds together or their resources together, then they start developing these connections with people that can and would, necessarily, have to be the building blocks of actual defense of their communities.
What we saw in Minneapolis when they sent thousands of these ICE agents and escalated dramatically, ended up killing community members, when that happened there was this reactive response to develop social infrastructure. And it happened in this situation of panic, not to say that there weren’t already people that were trying to put in that work, but it blew up into this
neighborhood-by-neighborhood way of organizing their community to create that social infrastructure as a defense to help protect their neighbors.
And that’s the kind of thing that people need to be prepared to deal with. They need to understand that what’s happening with ICE and DHS and the consolidation of the executive branch and the weaponization of DHS is that these situations are going to get worse and you have to be prepared for what happens when it gets worse.
Miller: What strikes me… what you’ve just described seems like the bigger picture goal of community organizing, but the costumes and the… what happens at a protest is more in the moment, and also, in your description, more performative. So I’m wondering, more specifically, in the hours of a protest, what you want to accomplish?
L. Lybeck: What Jordy was describing, in my view, that’s more of a successful resistance. He was describing that it comes from a sustained practice of these protest moments, and these protest moments that I would say I think are the most effective, my favorites are the ones that are sort of… a protest is a demonstration, so it has some sort of lesson. It’s educational in a way, both for the people you’re protesting against, but also the people you’re protesting with.
And in a media society, all of the thousands of people that are watching on the cameras that are following the scene. So an effective form of protest is one that leaves each character within this audience with a particular lesson that they need to walk away with. I was arrested and I’m OK with it because I feel like there was a message behind it.
J. Lybeck: Yeah, and just to that point, to really crystallize it, is that when you see protests that are happening, especially down at the ICE facility, especially prior to October, the average person would think, this is a place for the capital P “Protester.” This is a place for people that are dressing in all black, covering their faces, and people that may be up to no good or whatever.
And since October, since we’ve been maintaining a daily presence there, and making sure that we have medical supplies, food, water, and of course inflatables for free to give to people, the dynamics of the people that are there has shifted dramatically. There’s this elderly couple that drives twice a week, a long drive, like 40 minutes. They have their own frog suit. They show up and they just exist in the space because they feel like it’s important to do that.
But the inflatable became a way that they felt like they could do it comfortably and a way that they could feel powerful and they are some of the most powerful people that I’ve ever seen.
Miller: Lacy, just in the minute or so we have left, what do you think that DHS is – you talked about people learning before. What do you think they’re learning from you?
L. Lybeck: I think that the lesson that I want to teach them is that their egos are actually their Achilles’ heel in this scenario, in any scenario, actually. That when you’re on the clock and you sign up to work for a federal organization, you are not a person when you put on that uniform. You don’t get to have thoughts, feelings, opinions. You would just embody the thoughts, feelings and opinions of the supervisor that’s moving through you.
And if that’s what they’re signing up to do, then they should be able to do that and not be reactive. They should have discipline or whatever. Not that they should exist at all, but that’s the lesson I try to leave them with is that it doesn’t feel good or powerful to point your gun in people’s face. I try really hard not to flinch.
And I was just going to say the teaching and education on this is a little bit of my background that makes it all click and make sense. I was in behavior analysis before this and I was a high school mascot. So I knew what the inflatable and having a shell of a character around you does, not only for the audience but for the person inside the suit, because I’ve done it before. There’s a reason there’s a mascot for every box of cookies and every stadium out there. There’s a lot happening psychologically.
Miller: Jordy Lybeck and Lacy, thank you very much.
J. Lybeck: Thanks for having us.
L. Lybeck: Thank you.
Miller: Jordy and Lacy are the co-founders of Operation Inflation, which started last fall.
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