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Michael Anderson: Political Activism and the Performing Arts

20 Jun 2026

Political activism and the performing arts have been soulmates for centuries. Back in Boston
high octane US storyteller, performer and trade union lawyer Michael Anderson brings them
together to protect the rights of refugees. Here he writes about challenging the gun-wielding
masked paramilitaries of ICE with clowns and quotes from Tom Paine. You can catch him at the
Edinburgh Fringe where his critically acclaimed multimedia and alternative comedy show Elvis
in Chaos
is raising money for immigrant defence networks.

Fascism is like pizza delivery – it comes to you.


It’s a little embarrassing to be an American at Fringe now. We’re coming from a country turning
into the opposite of the Fringe: an increasingly degraded culture of ignorance and cruelty,
contempt for creative thought and erasure of the Other. 

Sure, fancy-pants performers from the States can pretend to be untouched by this, but that’s not
true. It’s not enough to say, well, we didn’t vote for him, and go on with our jokes and dances
and plays as if nothing is happening around us. Fascism is like pizza delivery – it comes to you. 
Like Churchill said, if we fail against this, we enter a Dark Age made more sinister by the lights
of perverted AI. Fear enforces passivity, which dries up our audiences. Sure, we can still rent
out black boxes in urban blue-states without getting arrested (yet). But it’s becoming harder to
get butts in seats, to get people to take off their VR gaming consoles, to turn off Netflix to go to a
show with live humans. 

A MAGA-run AI will never produce Shakespeare, but it doesn’t have to. It only needs to turn our
audience’s brains to mush, so that they can’t tell the difference between Shakespeare and AI
slop. This is happening at a frightening pace in the US: Fox News and social-media bots and
the oligarchs’ takeover of major media are doing their job. 

But maybe American refugees like me should come to Fringe with swagger instead of shame. If
we are now up against the Destroyers of Art, this can be our finest hour. The mere fact of
making art is now an act of resistance in America. I want to tell my British friends that we are
winning. 

The people of Portland and Minneapolis drove ICE out through acts of theater. Whistles blowing
like banshees around ICE raids, protestors in inflatable unicorn costumes facing down DHS riot
squads, enormous papier-mache puppets held aloft over marches of a hundred thousand. 

In Boston, I got a few actor friends to help me form No Fear Street Theater, a weekly protest
action in front of ICE Headquarters. We read from Shakespeare and Neruda, sing opera and
sea shanties, speechify from Tom Paine and Nemek’s Manifesto from Andor. We’ve grown into
a small army of clowns and unicorns and Elvis impersonators with signs like “Don’t Be Cruel!”.
The Anarchist Mime Troupe stands in front of ICE vans, trying to get arrested, just to force a cop
to say, “You have the right to remain silent.” God how we laughed. ("The play’s the thing, wherein
we catch the conscience of the King").

Last week, a tech bro rolled up in a BMW, sneering at me: “Dude, you are so happy right now.”
He meant it as an insult, like we don’t really care about the immigrants in cages inside, that this
is nothing but a woke street party. But that is what makes us dangerous. 

MAGA bosses like Stephen Miller want us to feel despair, defeat, victimhood. We have to figure
out what he doesn’t want us to feel: confident, tenacious, joyful. In my day job lawyering for
unions, I see two different types of picket line: one grim, dour and helpless, another with brass
bands and frog costumes and salsa dancing. Guess which kind holds a strike longer. Guess
which kind frightens the boss. 

So spare a thought for us American refugees at Fringe. This could be you after the next
election. For my part, I’m doing a hallucinatory PowerPoint rave Elvis in Chaos, rants about chaos theory, Multiverse physics and the things I used to love about America: Elvis, baseball,
Oreos. All proceeds go to LUCE, the immigrant-defence network in Boston. Come see it, and
come see what other Americans are doing to resist and reclaim. I promise you won’t be bored.
And you can help us make America great again.

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