Protesters in Portland are fine-tuning their theater-of-the-absurd response to the deployment of military personnel in their city. While ICE personnel have been using chemical agents, rubber bullets, pepper balls, and other “non-lethal” ammunition on protesters, Portlanders have been donning dinosaur costumes, clown outfits, and pied-piper paraphernalia or have been shedding their clothes and cycling naked before the camo-wearing government thugs. Others have put on PJs and distributed doughnuts in the early mornings to the bemused defenders of the home front. Protest costumes are even being given away for free on the streets. And now the ideas from Portland are starting to spread: Similar scenes are playing out at the ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois.

Images of playful protest are going viral, along with taglines like, “From war-ravaged Portland…” Meanwhile, the Oregon Republican Party has taken to posting decades-old pictures from urban unrest in Latin America—a ham-handed effort to convince viewers that these apocalyptic images are scenes from contemporary Portland and that they merit martial responses.

By and large, the national media has ignored the emergence of this absurdist protest movement. It doesn’t fit the narrative of conflict, and it doesn’t easily compute with the notion that there is a raw struggle for power playing out in metropolises around the country. But a remarkable act of political jujitsu is emerging. If you can’t beat MAGA and a malignant federal administration at its own violent game, you can at least make the troops look foolish, and in so doing, you can bear moral witness to an unfolding calamity.

Last week, Greg Ewer, a 50-year-old violinist with the Oregon Symphony Orchestra, felt compelled to take his instrument to the ICE building, and while ICE agents peered down from their perches, he played the hauntingly beautiful soundtrack from the movie Schindler’s List. Ewer is Jewish, and his grandparents escaped Nazi Germany for the United States in the 1930s. Today, he says that he fears what sort of a country his 11-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter will grow up in.

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Ewer told me that he went to the ICE facility to play music and that he hoped it would encourage ICE agents to contemplate the violence of their actions. “I went there as an American,” he told me. “Not necessarily as someone with a Jewish background—though my grandparents came from Germany in the 1930s. It’s about people being taken off the streets, families ripped apart. I felt like I had to do something. Even if no one noticed, I had to try.”

The violinist, who has lived in the city for half his life, argues that Portlanders have a long history of creative, outside-the-box protest. “In Portland, there’s a gentleness. It’s silly and zany and ‘Portland.’ There’s an instinct here not to be belligerent and violent. It’s less in our DNA than humor and levity.”

The more the feds attack Portland and label it a “terrorist-infested war zone,” the more people like Ewer find ways to make that label look incongruous, and it has begun to get under the Republicans’ lizard skin. The federal government has been shut down for more than two weeks, with the GOP steadfast in its determination to defund ACA healthcare subsidies for tens of millions of Americans, but for the Republican Party leadership, wedded to Trump’s implausible narrative of Democratic cities in chaos, what is really exorcising them is displays of genitals at anti-ICE protests in Portland, as well as protesters exercising their First Amendment rights at No Kings rallies.

Over the past week, House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has been AWOL in efforts to reopen government, has let it be known how disturbed he is by the “very ugly” naked bike protests and has accused the No Kings organizers, and those planning to participate in Saturday’s nationwide protests, of being Hamas supporters and antifa terrorists. Given the new national security presidential memorandum and associated executive orders marshaling federal agencies to clamp down on so-called domestic terrorists on the left, and given Stephen Miller’s stated aim of using the full force of the federal government to bankrupt and to imprison those who oppose the government’s authoritarian crackdowns, this is a chilling development, suggesting the GOP’s congressional leadership is fully on board with a wholesale criminalization of dissent.

But it’s also indicative of how a new resistance movement is, finally, coming of age. Even as the administration savages the social compact and the Trumpified Supreme Court greenlights ever-more- outrageous actions, the pushback against authoritarianism is growing, both from grassroots activists such as those in costume in Portland and from eminently mainstream organizations.

This week, Kristi Noem’s Homeland Security propagandists rolled out a video to be screened to captive audiences in TSA security lines at airports, blaming Democrats for the government shutdown. The video, which brazenly violates the Hatch Act’s prohibition on civil servants using their positions to push political dogma, was promptly rejected by many of the country’s largest airports.

The administration announced that, as the shutdown continued, it would be firing hundreds of public health workers, including many working on containing the measles outbreak and readying the country for pandemic threats. In the face of an immediate public outcry, the administration backpedaled, reinstating more than half of the fired workers. Days later, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against the firings of any unionized government employees during the shutdown.

Meanwhile, media outlets ranging from The New York Times to Murdoch’s Fox News and the MAGA-oriented Newsmax refused to sign on to a new censorship regime being pushed by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s Trumpified Pentagon, with seasoned journalists instead handing in their Pentagon press credentials. In a week in which the administration blew up yet another civilian ship, allegedly being used by drug runners in the Caribbean, killing all on board, and in which the president and his Pentagon shills boasted of successfully carrying out what is, under international law, a war crime, that refusal to abide by Pentagon information-control rules is undoubtedly a good thing.

Similarly, the administration dangled a stick before a number of leading universities, promising easier access to government grants for institutions that molded their academic cultures to fit MAGA priorities. This week, MIT led the way in rejecting this Faustian bargain. Brown University followed suit, as did University of Pennsylvania, and it seems likely the other universities will do the same.

Add all of this up, and there’s evidence that, even if the Supreme Court and the Republicans in Congress won’t push back against authoritarianism, regular Americans with respect for the Constitution and civic institutions have stiffened their spines and are starting to find ways to gum up the works of this dystopian project.

“When you feel like you’re surrounded by moral failure,” Ewer explained to me, “the only thing you can hope is that someone in their quiet moments—an ICE agent who sees it [the video of Ewer playing his violin] online—would reflect quietly about the kind of intense personal suffering that, were it to happen to me would be absolutely, torturously bad. I want to inspire reflection on a human level: Is this behavior something we want done in our names, something we want to participate in and give political cover to?”