We met Amanda McGonigle inside a basketball arena that had been temporarily converted into a cathedral for secular rage, which felt like the correct habitat for her energy. If you only know her as CatsOnACouch, here’s the translation: Amanda runs one of the biggest and strangest political meme platforms in America, a digital hydra that started as a cat page, mutated into a JD Vance trolling operation, and evolved into a full-blown resistance brand with millions of followers and a feral sense of humor. Cute on the surface, knives underneath. Felines Against Fascism. Meme optimism as a delivery system for rage.
What makes her different from the usual influencer-political-industrial-complex creatures is that she doesn’t stop at posting. When Minneapolis started lighting up with ICE raids, federal violence, mass protests, and the killing of Renée Nicole Good, Amanda didn’t drop a thread and wait for dopamine. She bought a plane ticket. She launched a GoFundMe. She showed up. She treated the moment like a logistical problem instead of a branding opportunity, which in modern politics is borderline revolutionary.
TARGET CENTER, PEOPLE’S VERSION
The anti-ICE rally at the Target Center didn’t feel like a protest so much as a mass nervous system firing at once. Thousands of people packed into seats normally reserved for Timberwolves fans and overpriced beer, now repurposed for collective refusal. Signs everywhere. Chants bouncing off concrete. Strangers hugging each other like they’d just realized they weren’t alone in a nightmare they’d all been pretending was fine.
This wasn’t a hobbyist rally. This wasn’t content. This wasn’t a “let’s make a point and go home” moment. This was a we-are-done-pretending-this-is-normal moment.
Right in the middle of it was Amanda, moving through the crowd like a walking emotional megaphone, grounding people, absorbing stories, coordinating logistics on her phone, hugging people who had driven hours because a cat meme account told them something important was happening.
ENTER JEREMY MESSERSMITH, AGENT OF SOFT CHAOS
Then Jeremy Messersmith took the stage and did something unreasonably perfect. If you don’t know him, he’s a Minneapolis indie folk singer and professional emotional assassin. He doesn’t write background music. He writes songs that crawl inside your chest and start rearranging furniture.
So of course he ended his brief set with a song called Everybody Gets a Kitten.
I was walking the concourse when it started, and the opening chords drifted through the concrete like a prank pulled by a benevolent ghost. The song is an aggressively optimistic utopia fantasy where nobody is hungry, nobody is sick, nobody is poor, nobody is at war, factories burn rainbows, and everybody gets a kitten, a new one every single day. It’s not subtle. It’s not meant to be. It’s a Trojan horse of hope wrapped in absurdity.
I hustled back to my seat, and there was Amanda, smiling. Not influencer-smiling. Not content-smiling. Just a real, unguarded smile at the sheer audacity of playing a song about universal kittens before unleashing a night of righteous fury at the federal government. It was the emotional thesis of her entire project rendered live. Cute on the surface. Political underneath. Softness weaponized. Hope used as a delivery system for rage.
For about three minutes, a basketball arena full of political grief aligned into something dangerously close to joy.
THE ROOM TURNS SERIOUS AGAIN
Then the speakers took the stage, and the room changed temperature. People talked about ICE. About federal violence. About families torn apart. About the killing of Renée Nicole Good. About accountability. About the moral rot of a system that keeps insisting cages are compassion and bullets are policy. The energy wasn’t chaotic. It was focused and furious in a way that had somewhere to go. Outside, tens of thousands of protesters kept circling the building, chants echoing off the glass, police pretending they weren’t rattled by how many people were done cooperating with the fiction of order.
SUPPORT SOME GOOD TROUBLE IN MINNESOTA
Here’s what people still don’t fully get. CatsOnACouch isn’t a meme page that accidentally got serious. It’s a mobilization engine with a sense of humor sharp enough to cut through algorithm sludge and a politics serious enough to move people out of their houses. Amanda built a platform that can turn a meme into outrage, outrage into turnout, turnout into logistics, and logistics into material survival. Most political accounts stop at Step Two and congratulate themselves. Amanda went to Step Five and booked a hotel.
Her GoFundMe is called “Support some GOOD good trouble in Minnesota.” It sounds cute until you realize it’s not a slogan. It’s an operating system. It’s baby formula, cold-weather gear, gas cards, grocery cards, hotel rooms, and mutual aid that actually moves. It’s someone with a massive online audience deciding not to just post about injustice but to physically show up and hand people things they need to survive it.
This isn’t a polished nonprofit. This is mutual aid in its rawest form. It’s messy, imperfect, and deeply human, and it is infinitely more useful than a thousand think pieces about the optics of protest.
EVERYBODY DOESN’T GET A KITTEN (YET)
We didn’t leave Target Center feeling hopeful in the cheap Hallmark sense. We left feeling calibrated, re-aimed, reminded what all of this is actually for. The afternoon was a mass rally in a basketball arena, a protest song about kittens weaponized into a morale nuke, and a woman named Amanda turning memes into money and money into survival.
And if you’re reading this and you have any money you can spare, even a few dollars, go donate to Amanda’s GoFundMe, “Support some GOOD good trouble in Minnesota.” Not because it’s trendy. Not because it looks good on your conscience résumé. But because people on the ground right now need food, warmth, gas, and safe places to sleep while the federal government continues to brutalize families and lie about it.
Share it if you can’t donate. Donate if you can. Either way, stop pretending this is someone else’s problem.
Everybody doesn’t get a kitten yet.
But Amanda is trying to fix that.
This post has been syndicated from CLOSER TO THE EDGE, where it was published under this address.