U.S. News

I may have a new favourite protester. Now, if someone puts on an inflatable frog suit and plays the Imperial March, we may have hit peak trolling.

To say the irony was lost on them would be to assume they ever thought some irony might exist. DC resident Sam O’Hara came across a bunch of out-of-state National Guard troops and put his own spin on their Trump-enabled interloping. As he followed the troops through the neighborhood, O’Hara engaged in protected expression — that being the recording of government employees… with a little musical accompaniment.

This is from O’Hara’s lawsuit [PDF] filed against the DC Metro police officers who eventually arrested him, as written by the ACLU lawyers (Michael Perloff, Scott Michelman) representing him:

In the Star Wars franchise, The Imperial March is the music that plays when Darth Vader or other dark forces enter a scene or succeed in their dastardly plans. It is also the soundtrack of Sam O’Hara’s protest against the National Guard deployment in D.C.

Those troops arrived in the District in August 2025, after President Trump decided to flood D.C. neighborhoods with National Guard members from around the country. A few weeks passed, and yet the troops remained. Given the roughly 200-year-old tradition of civilian law enforcement in the United States, Mr. O’Hara was deeply concerned about the normalization of troops patrolling D.C. neighborhoods. And so, he began protesting the Guard members’ presence by walking several feet behind them when he saw them in the community. Using his phone and sometimes a small speaker, he played The Imperial March as he walked, keeping the music at a volume that was audible but not blaring. Mr. O’Hara recorded the encounters and posted the videos on his TikTok account, where millions of people have viewed them.