All posts tagged: resistance

Asian/American Women: Resistance against Invisibility

Asian/American Women: Resistance against Invisibility

Published by Jenni Sidey

In the collection Making More Waves (1997), Asian/American activist Helen Zia raises a question: “Where are the Asian women?” By reviewing violent crimes against Asian/American women between 1984 and 1992, Helen Zia demonstrates that despite being frequent targets of racist violence, including brutal sexual assaults and lynchings, Asian/American women (following David Palumbo-Liu’s resistant deconstruction of the obscured term “Asian American” with a “/”) remained largely invisible within dominant social discourse. Twenty-four years after 1997, the COVID-19 pandemic witnessed another surge in anti-Asian violence. According to NBC news, the research released by Stop AAPI Hate’s report shows that 68% anti-Asian hate incidents over roughly a pandemic year were reported by Asian/American women, including heinous incidents resulting in the victim’s death. Invisibility as History This disproportionate violence toward Asian women demonstrates the never-fading aftershocks of the Exclusion Acts in the last two centuries. While the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 restricted the entry of Chinese laborers and their spouses into the United States due to the rise of local protectionism, the earlier Page Act of 1875 legitimized …

Can Resistance Be Copied? | Rachel Nolan

Can Resistance Be Copied? | Rachel Nolan

Published by Jenni Sidey

From 2010 to 2020, more people crowded onto the streets around the world to protest than at any other time in known history. Starting with what is often called the Arab Spring and ending with the Black Lives Matter protests that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the demonstrations—dense, synchronized, and persistent—dwarfed older, briefer moments of global protest. More people participated in demonstrations than in 2003 (against the invasion of Iraq) or 1999 (against globalization) or 1968 (against the Vietnam War, for civil rights, and so on). There were, of course, more people protesting than in 1848, the first modern wave of uprisings, known as the Springtime of the Peoples. During what the journalist Vincent Bevins calls “the protest decade,” what was at issue varied considerably but converged on several widely held grievances: income inequality, which made even food and public transit too expensive for many people; the corruption and self-dealing of oligarchs; the overreach and violence of the police. Relatively small protests often ballooned to enormous size after televised or streamed police attacks brought …

The ‘Resistance’ Won

The ‘Resistance’ Won

Published by Daniella Wilson

Donald Trump celebrated the defeat of one of his first impeachment nemeses—retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Alex Vindman, who lost the Democratic Senate primary in Florida on Tuesday—in typical form. “SleazeBag Vindman loses tonight to a Radical Left Lunatic. How cool is that???” Trump exulted on Truth Social. Vindman served as a witness in Trump’s first impeachment. Whatever currency this once gave him with Democratic voters has long since expired. In this, he is not unique. Democrats such as Dan Goldman, George Conway, and Tom Steyer, all of whom pushed for or played prominent roles in Trump’s first impeachment, have discovered in primaries this year that this credential means little to their party’s voters. Diana DeGette, a House manager during Trump’s second impeachment trial, and Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer who battled insurrectionists, have also lost primaries. The rout of the Democratic Party’s impeachment stars has been interpreted, generally, as a sign of the end of resistance politics. “The string of losses for resistance candidates from the first Trump term illustrates a new era for …

The ‘Resistance’ Is Over

The ‘Resistance’ Is Over

Published by Daniella Wilson

Is Donald Trump over? Can we all now relax and move on to the next thing? That’s the message from a significant portion of Democratic primary voters. Just as Trump is bored with Iran and the economy and wants to play with monuments and gilding, so too are many Democratic primary voters in Florida and elsewhere bored with Trump and eager to play factional politics instead. The political statistician Nate Silver summed up the mood on X today: “It’s kind of been a rough set of primaries for Heroes of the Resistance 1.0.” Silver then listed stalwart anti-Trumpers who have lost their contests in 2026 and concluded, “People want to move on.” America is a fast-moving, dynamic country. It’s tough for Americans to stay focused on a single thing, even if that single thing is the threat to American democracy. As the celebrity spokesmodel Heidi Klum tells the audience on Project Runway: “In fashion, one day you’re in, and the next day, you’re out.” This law also apparently applies to Democratic candidates who took serious …

After 50 years of death row, resistance has never been stronger

After 50 years of death row, resistance has never been stronger

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — This week marks 50 years of the modern-era death penalty in the United States. In a 1972 landmark case, Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court called the death penalty “arbitrary and capricious.” But on July 2, 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court allowed executions to resume. It was clear then, and now, that what determines who dies in America is not the atrocity of the crime but the resources of the defendant and the race of the victim. We may say that we need the death penalty for the “worst of the worst” — but the truth is we execute the poorest of the poor, and disproportionately, people of color. Over the past 50 years, the U.S. has executed 1,670 people — by lethal injection, electrocution, gas, firing squad and hanging. We are one of only a handful of countries who still kills its own citizens to try to show that killing is wrong. And the death penalty is the descendent of racial terror and lynching. The states that held on to slavery …

Resistance Choirs | Nate Wooley

Resistance Choirs | Nate Wooley

Published by Jenni Sidey

For centuries the Lenape people had hunting grounds and fishing camps in an area they called Penadnic, in the rocky hills of upper Manhattan. Wrested away from its original inhabitants by Dutch and British settlers following the infamous “sale” of the island to the Dutch colonial governor Peter Minuit in 1626, the land passed through the ownership of multiple well-to-do New Yorkers until, in 1842, John James Audubon’s family bought it using proceeds from his field guide The Birds of America. In the early twentieth century Archer Huntington, heir to a California railroad fortune, funded the construction of several Beaux-Arts style buildings on the land. With the hunting grounds of the Lenape long buried, two of those structures, sitting just off of a large bricked terrace and perched on the hills around 158th Street, now house the galleries of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  In 2024 the academy made eloquent use of the site’s history by inviting the Diné composer, musician, and artist Raven Chacon to premiere a work in one of their …

The Warrior-Witches of Ukraine’s Resistance

The Warrior-Witches of Ukraine’s Resistance

Published by Daniella Wilson

For several months last year, a Ukrainian housewife, 35 and lonely in a marriage that had gone cold, traded WhatsApp messages with a Chechen commander, Achmad, stationed somewhere in Ukraine’s occupied south. They wrote about their days, their disappointments, what they hoped to do when the war ended. She asked about the front. He told her. “Send me a picture,” she said. “I want to see your life.” One afternoon, he obliged—a photograph taken inside the barracks, of himself and another soldier grinning for the camera. Behind them, pinned to the wall, was a map of the compound showing the unit’s position. The housewife did not exist. “She” was a middle-aged officer named Serhiy working for Ukraine’s military-intelligence directorate, part of a concerted effort to draw secrets from the men sent to occupy his country. “Serhiy was great at flirting,” his commander told me. “Guys in our team started asking him for dating advice.” Shortly after Achmad sent that photograph, the coordinates it revealed were struck by a Ukrainian drone. Anne Applebaum: Ukraine is not …

The Judicial Resistance Fails Again

The Judicial Resistance Fails Again

Published by Jenni Sidey

Authored by Mike McDaniel via AmericanThinker.com, Do you recall Hannah Dugan? She’s a former Milwaukee County Judge. “Former” because she, with the help of her staff, distracted ICE agents who were present to arrest and deport a violent illegal alien in her court on unrelated charges. They snuck the illegal out of the courthouse.  The agents didn’t disrupt her court. They were waiting until she was done with the illegal, who had been previously deported but reentered the country. They politely informed her of their authority and intentions and were waiting for her disposition of the illegal. Fortunately, the agents knew what she was doing and captured the illegal after a brief foot chase. Dugan was charged and convicted, though not without substantial support from equally corrupt members of the “judicial resistance” Bar: Graphic: X Post Amazingly, that view of judicial immunity didn’t hold up and she was removed from the bench, which, considering she was facing a federal felony, seems reasonable. Dugan appealed, and her appeal was recently denied, which opens the way for her sentencing, which has …

When Unfairness Is Systemic, The Consequences Are Flight, Resistance, Revolt

When Unfairness Is Systemic, The Consequences Are Flight, Resistance, Revolt

Published by Jenni Sidey

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog, Now that we’ve drained the aquifers of a stable society, the replacement form of “wealth” is a delusional credit-asset bubble that generates the illusion of “wealth.” Let’s weave together two threads that look different: systemic unfairness and civilizational psychosis. As I often note, social species that organize themselves into hierarchies (i.e. primates, including humans) have an innate sensitivity to fairness, as this trait is essential to maintaining social stability, and therefore it has been selected as advantageous. This sensitivity applies both to individual instances of unfairness / injustice and to systemic unfairness / injustice. If there is no redress when an individual is treated unfairly or abused, the social order is weakened. This is why early civilizations instituted legal codes and systems of redress as they expanded into nations / empires that needed bureaucracies to organize, manage and enforce the rules and responsibilities of every class. If the mechanisms of redress have become empty shams, then the unfairness is systemic: it isn’t just some individuals who have been treated unfairly–everyone is being …

8 Nonfiction Books on Resistance

8 Nonfiction Books on Resistance

Published by Jenni Sidey

For certain groups, reading is implicitly resistant. I have written before about how the book-banning efforts we see today are directly linked to slavery, and started a content series showing how reading, books, and literature have always had a place in resisting oppression. Now, with everything going on, there seems to be this thought that the country is regressing, or even starting to resemble 1940s Germany. Of course, if you’re a racial minority, you know that’s not true. The US has, since its inception, been a land of white supremacy attained through violence and degradation. On the flip side, though? It’s also always been a land of resistance, and the books below show just how much good trouble our forebears got into in the fight against colonialism. Complete task #5 of our 2026 Read Harder Challenge and read a nonfiction book about resistance, and may the examples set be guiding lights. A Protest History of the United States by Gloria J. Browne-Marshall Law professor Gloria J. Browne-Marshall lays out 400 years’ worth of resistance in …