Unicorns are supposed to be rare and mythical. But at Saturday’s No Kings protests I saw the largest outbreak in America outside a Lisa Frank store. They were everywhere, but I was surprised to see almost a dozen of them down in New Braunfels, Texas. As at many of the No Kings protests across the country, attendees embraced the example set by the taunting frog outside Portland’s ICE facility and came in outfits that you could find threatening in only the most silly and specific of contexts: Cookie Monster was there.
But you don’t pass up a chance to meet a unicorn. I got five of them together to pose around a sign one had brought: “Born to frolic, called to fight fascism.” What’s a group of unicorns called, I asked. One of them answered promptly: “A blessing!”
When I’d interviewed Latino participants at the Austin No Kings protest back in June, their voices were thick with emotion and one young man teared up. In New Braunfels, I also talked to a young Latino man who said he was worried about being deported (“though my family has been here since before it was Texas”)—but he was shouting at me from inside an inflatable dinosaur costume and holding a sign that said “No king, only T-Rex.” The dinosaur was no less passionate than the people I’d spoken to in Austin, but he laughed a lot and waved his short arms at passing cars honking their support, too.
New Braunfels is about halfway between Austin and San Antonio and between 2010 and 2020, its population doubled from 50,000 to almost 100,000 as the metro areas have swollen to meet each other. Contact with two of Texas’s bluest oases has not liberalized the area, however. Residents are currently represented in Congress by Freedom Caucus leader Chip Roy. It is most famous in the state as home to Schlitterbahn, the nation’s deadliest water park.
There was not a protest here during that first wave last summer. Yesterday, there were over a hundred people (as well as amphibians, reptiles, and cryptids) lining a long city block.
The turnout might have been goosed by the weather. It was just 92 degrees, positively autumnal for Texas in October. Senior citizens reclined in stadium chairs, holding in their laps large placards crowded with too many grievances to read from a distance. In the small park that backed the sidewalk, kids threaded between knots of people in the shade. Dogs wore bandanas. A woman in a neon yellow vest kept people from blocking the sidewalk. A single cop in shorts hovered at the edge. They sang the national anthem once and chanted “No kings!” A lot.
Throughout, passing cars bleated, mostly accompanied by raised fists or thumbs up. Occasionally, a middle finger.
The whole thing had the chaotic politeness of a church picnic or a band fundraiser.
The crowd was older and whiter than the one I’d been a part of in Austin. There were more handmade signs, fewer downloaded from the Indivisible website and no one handing out signs printed out en masse.
“No Kings” is an ingenious organizing frame that has allowed a larger political spectrum than the protesting left usually attracts. Still, I’ve never seen a crowd that seemed as comfortable being mid instead of radical. The American flag t-shirts I saw seemed more lived in; I don’t think anyone bought them on the way there. There were a fair number of signs reading “No King but Jesus.” Only one Palestinian flag, and just a handful of rainbow flourishes. I only saw two Andor-inspired “We have friends everywhere” signs and, to my sorrow, neither person brandishing them knew the reference.
If they had, the signs would have made less sense in the context. Among bubble machines and frogs in cowboy hats, the passphrase of Andor’s violent extremists cannot convey the same quiet threat that it does on the show. A sign that says “We have friends everywhere” at a festive park gathering is just stating the obvious.
Some might mistake the scarcity of intersectional issues as evidence of a lack of engagement with historic injustices. Invoking Americana at a progressive protest theme has its own absurdity. I mean—have you met us?
The white people with signs venerating the military (“Don’t politicize our troops!”), the guy dressed as Washington, a “Don’t tread on me” flag, the woman with a sign proclaiming her love of “God, church, the USA, the Constitution, family, neighbors, Texas, my dog! [her emphasis], Democracy”—you could pick them up and drop them at a Tea Party protest and no one would suspect a different agenda. There was no aesthetic difference between many of the protesters and the handful of pickups driving around the block yelling at them.
I talked to one regretful Republican in a “God bless America” shirt who told me “I just didn’t think Trump would be this bad.” She’d cast a third party vote in 2016 “because I couldn’t vote for him or for Hillary. I just didn’t know. It was a mistake.” Then there was the woman with a sign that read “America is Republicans AND Democrats;” she wants a return to “normal.”
One older gentleman held a simple sign: “I am anti-fascist” handwritten in large letters and “Not Antifa” in parentheses at the bottom. Another gracious senior told me, “I don’t even know what Antifa is.” His wife added, “We don’t belong to any organization. We’re just against what they’re doing. We’re anti-fascist.” Another guy wore a homemade frog get-up paired with an assertion I saw elsewhere on social media: “I don’t even have an “Aunt Tifa.”
I can almost hear folks who do identify as “Antifa” grinding their teeth at the naive rejection of the label; Antifa is shorthand for a point of view, not an organization, that’s the point. Yet these Red Americans’ naive distancing from an imagined terrorist group, the proud embrace of patriotic signifiers, the bouncing mythical woodland creatures are all of a piece. They are all evidence of a growing response from normies to creeping authoritarianism: What the fuck are you talking about?
The Trump administration has misfired in its own paranoid mythmaking—and people whose political experiences are more PTA than DSA are meeting the fantastical with the fanciful.
Others have pointed out the long tradition of silly costumes and street theater in radical movements; there is a direct line between the Dada stunts of the Situationists, pranks by the Yes Men and “zaps” by the Lavender Menace, culture hacking in the No Logo movement, and that original punk frog in Portland. There are forests of Ph.D. papers about how surrealism undermines the very structures of capitalism itself.
But around the country, we’re seeing a parallel evolution: Whimsy as the logical response to MAGA’s nonsense. What “trans ideology”? Eating the dogs, eating the cats? You’re talking about vicious immigrants, but you curb-stomped the ice cream man. “I don’t even know what Antifa is.”
For many of the new protesters, the cleanest response to such wild paranoia (even if those in power use it to justify horrible violence) isn’t a manifesto—it’s a snort-laugh and a unicorn horn. It’s “I don’t know what that means, but I do know you’re full of shit.” This is purposeful illogic in the exurban wild, no less revolutionary for lack of intellectual pedigree. True, the semi-pro situationists will likely never become card-carrying communists. No room in the wallet, what with the Kohl’s card and the Costco membership.
Cringe a little at the ideological timidity if you will—let he who has not enjoyed a Costco hot dog cast the first bomb. This isn’t Andor-style insurgency, and it sure isn’t John Brown’s raid. But not everything has to be. There’s room in the resistance for half-measures, even if it won’t overthrow the Empire on its own. Sometimes a frog in a cowboy hat is enough. A Kirkland-brand protest movement can go the distance.
I can’t forget that the Harris campaign’s biggest surge of energy came from Tim Walz calling the Republicans weird and delighting in the self-consciously ridiculous rumor that J.D. Vance fucked a couch. At No Kings, some delight in reclaiming a bit of the absurd for themselves, rather than out-argue it.
But there were also plenty of people without signs in street clothes just standing in the line and chatting. My Antifa purist friends should consider them the most powerful recruits: people who show up without any symbols at all, without a political project but just because they’re annoyed or angry. They’re vital to the movement; it’s the folks in cargo shorts and polos who make the unicorns stand out.
Besides, absurdity doesn’t always arrive by mischievous intention. The abundance of unicorns specifically in New Braunfels? The blessing I talked to decided on their costumes based on their connection to the area. The unicorn is the New Braunfels High School mascot, a delightfully bizarre choice for a rural Texas team made all the more nonsensical because the choice stemmed from a 1920s misreading of the town founder’s family crest. Years later, residents don’t care about historic accuracy; a muscle-bound version of the beast parades the sidelines with lightning in its eyes. Like a lot of symbols, it became meaningful, and even more dangerous, only after people decided it was.
The post How No Kings Embraced the Good Kind of Weird—and Won the Normies appeared first on New Republic.
