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Rebels & Rights

The Dispatch

Dispatches from the movement. Stories, strategy, and the occasional screed.

3 dispatches & counting

Protesters holding signs at a demonstration
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What 'No Kings' Actually Means: A Short History of Anti-Authoritarian Resistance

The phrase shows up on protest signs and t-shirts. Here's the history it's invoking — and why it still matters. Before Democracy For most of human history, the default political arrangement was monarchy: one person, by birth or conquest, had absolute power over everyone else. The idea that this was unacceptable — that ordinary people had a right to govern themselves, that rulers derived their authority from the consent of the governed — is historically recent and still far from universal. Anti-authoritarian thought didn't begin with the American Revolution. You can find strains of it in ancient Athens, in the peasant revolts of medieval Europe, in the religious dissent movements that preceded the Reformation. But the Enlightenment — the intellectual revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries — is where the modern language of democratic rights took shape. The American Founding as Anti-Authoritarian Act Whatever its profound contradictions — and they were profound, enslaved people excluded from the rights being proclaimed, Indigenous nations erased from the founding narrative — the American Revolution was, at its core, an act of resistance to inherited authority. The Declaration of Independence is a remarkably radical document for its time: the explicit assertion that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed," that when a government becomes destructive of the rights it exists to protect, "it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it." Thomas Paine's Common Sense, published in 1776, was even more direct. Paine argued that monarchy was not only a bad system but an absurd one — that the idea of one person having hereditary dominion over everyone else was a relic of barbarism that reason and common sense should have long since rejected. It was the most widely read pamphlet in American colonial history. "No kings" — that phrase — shows up in various forms throughout this period as the simplest possible articulation of the underlying principle: that no one person should have unchecked power over others. The History Since American democracy has spent most of its history fighting over whether that founding principle would actually apply to everyone. The abolitionist movement was fundamentally anti-authoritarian — asserting the humanity and freedom of people being held in bondage by the authority of slaveholders and the state. The labor movement was anti-authoritarian — challenging the unchecked power of industrial capitalists over workers' lives. The civil rights movement was anti-authoritarian — challenging the systematic use of state power to deny Black Americans their constitutional rights. Each of these movements invoked founding principles to challenge their betrayal. Each was called radical, dangerous, disruptive. Each was, by most historical accounts, right. Why It's Back Now "No Kings" as a protest phrase has reemerged in a moment when the architecture of democratic accountability — the norms, institutions, and laws that constrain executive power — is under significant strain. When politicians claim authority not derived from democratic legitimacy, when the rule of law is applied selectively, when checks and balances are treated as obstacles rather than essential features of governance, the old language becomes newly relevant. The phrase isn't about any single person or party. It's about the principle: that power in a democracy flows from the people, is accountable to the people, and is legitimately constrained by law and democratic process. When that principle is threatened, the appropriate response has always been — historically — to name the threat and resist it. The Tradition You're Standing In When you wear a "No Kings" shirt, you're placing yourself in a tradition that runs from Thomas Paine to Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony to John Lewis. A tradition that has always been called extreme in its moment and vindicated by history. A tradition of saying, clearly and publicly, that unchecked power is unacceptable regardless of who holds it. That's a tradition worth wearing.

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Marchers at the 1963 Civil Rights march on Washington
The Dispatch 4 min read

The History of Dissent: From Suffragettes to Standing Rock

Every generation inherits the movements of the last one. Here's the line that runs from 19th century suffrage to today's frontline fights. Why History Matters for Organizers Social movements often behave as if they invented themselves. They develop their tactics, language, and theories of change in relative isolation from the movements that preceded them, sometimes rediscovering what earlier generations already knew, sometimes avoiding the mistakes that earlier generations made by not knowing they made them. Understanding the history of dissent isn't just useful for trivia. It's useful for strategy. The tactics that worked — and the ones that didn't — can tell you something about what you're up against and what you can do about it. The Suffrage Movement: Fifty Years of Everything The women's suffrage movement in the United States is one of the most instructive case studies in sustained political organizing ever documented. It ran from the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 — 72 years. Nearly everyone who started the movement died before it ended. The women who finally celebrated the amendment's passage were the daughters and granddaughters of the founders. What sustained it? Institutional structure. The movement built organizations — the National Woman Suffrage Association, the American Woman Suffrage Association, eventually NAWSA — that persisted through leadership transitions, strategic disagreements, and decades of failure. Individual charisma mattered (Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells), but what made the movement durable was the infrastructure around those individuals. The movement also demonstrates the importance of tactical diversity. For decades, suffragists pursued purely electoral and legal strategies — trying to win state-by-state, lobbying Congress, pursuing constitutional amendments. In the 1910s, a new generation influenced by British suffragettes introduced more confrontational tactics: demonstrations, picketing the White House, hunger strikes. The tension between these factions was real and sometimes bitter. Looking back, it seems clear that both were necessary. The Labor Movement: Power through Organization The American labor movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries built power through a simple insight: individual workers have almost no leverage, but organized workers do. The eight-hour workday, the weekend, workplace safety regulations, the minimum wage — these are not gifts from benevolent employers or enlightened legislators. They are the products of decades of organizing, strikes, and sustained political pressure. The tactics were sometimes radical and sometimes moderate, sometimes legal and sometimes not. The Pullman Strike of 1894. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, which turned public opinion dramatically toward workplace safety regulation. The sit-down strikes of the 1930s, which produced the National Labor Relations Act and the legal framework for modern collective bargaining. What made it work: broad coalitions, strategic use of disruption, legislative and electoral engagement, and an economic analysis that made clear who benefited from the status quo. The Civil Rights Movement: Theory and Practice of Nonviolence The mid-20th century civil rights movement is probably the most studied movement in American history, and for good reason: its strategic sophistication produced extraordinary results in a compressed period under conditions of enormous danger. The movement's theory of change was explicit: nonviolent direct action would expose the violence of the system being protested, creating crises that forced political response. Bull Connor's fire hoses and police dogs in Birmingham were not a failure of the movement — they were, horribly, the point. Forcing the violence of segregation into public view made it politically untenable in a way that decades of legal challenges had not. This doesn't mean the movement was unified or simple. There were deep disagreements about pace, tactics, and goals — between integrationists and Black nationalists, between those who prioritized legislation and those who prioritized economic power, between SCLC and SNCC and CORE. The movement that produced the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act was a coalition held together with enormous effort and constant negotiation. Standing Rock: The Indigenous-Led Environmental Justice Moment The 2016 Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline represents a different kind of movement — Indigenous-led, explicitly spiritual as well as political, international in its coalition while rooted in a specific place and a specific people's relationship to that place. Standing Rock drew on Indigenous traditions of land protection and treaty rights while building unprecedented alliances with veterans' groups, environmental organizations, and solidarity movements from around the world. It introduced the water protector framing — not protesting pipeline construction but actively protecting water and land — which has been influential in subsequent Indigenous-led environmental justice organizing. The pipeline was eventually built. By the narrow measure of immediate outcome, Standing Rock lost. By the broader measure of movement building, coalition development, and long-term political impact — particularly on Indigenous sovereignty issues and pipeline politics — the story is more complicated and ongoing. What These Movements Have in Common Looking across this history, a few themes emerge: Movements take longer than anyone wants. The ones that succeed are the ones that build infrastructure capable of outlasting individual leaders and cycles of energy. Tactical diversity is a feature, not a bug. Movements that combine confrontational and institutional tactics tend to outperform those that commit to only one. Broad coalitions are essential and hard. Every successful movement has had to build alliances across difference — across race, class, geography, strategy. This is the hardest work and the most important. And: the movement you're in right now is part of a line that runs through all of this. You are not starting from scratch. The people who came before you built the ground you're standing on. Build more of it for the people who come after.

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Crowd of protesters with signs at a rally
The Dispatch 3 min read

Why Graphic Tees Are a Form of Political Speech

The long, strange history of clothing as protest — from the suffragettes to today. The Body as Billboard Before there was Instagram, before there was cable news, before there was the printing press, humans used their bodies and their clothing to communicate. Tribal markings, mourning dress, religious habit, military uniform — clothing has always been a language. The question isn't whether your clothing communicates. It's what it says, and to whom, and why. Political clothing in the modern sense — clothing designed to make a specific, legible statement about power and justice — has a history at least as old as the organized labor movement. Union members wore pins and ribbons. Abolitionists wore anti-slavery medallions. The tradition of using what you wear as a form of speech is older than most of the rights we're currently fighting to protect. The Suffragettes and the Politics of White One of the most sophisticated uses of clothing as political speech in American history was the suffragette movement's adoption of the color white. White dresses weren't an accident or a fashion choice — they were a deliberate visual strategy. The suffragettes were attacking a specific charge: that women who wanted the vote were unfeminine, radical, dangerous. White dresses communicated femininity, respectability, purity — all the things that the anti-suffrage movement said suffragettes weren't. It was rhetorical judo, using the visual language of conventional femininity to undermine the argument that women who wanted rights were somehow monstrous. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and dozens of other Democratic congresswomen wore white to Trump's 2019 State of the Union address, they were invoking that exact tradition, deliberately and effectively. The New York Times ran a full piece explaining the symbolism. That's what good visual communication does: it makes people ask questions. Protest T-Shirts: A Short History The graphic t-shirt as political medium emerged in the 1960s and hasn't stopped evolving since. Early political tees were often homemade — iron-on letters, screen printing in someone's garage. The technology limited the sophistication of the message but not its effectiveness. Some political t-shirts have become iconic cultural artifacts. The "I Am a Man" shirts worn by sanitation workers during the 1968 Memphis strike were simple and devastating — a direct rebuttal to the dehumanizing conditions they were protesting. The "This Is What a Feminist Looks Like" shirt, popularized in the early 2000s, did exactly what good protest fashion does: challenged an assumption by making the challenger visible. The "I Can't Breathe" shirts worn after Eric Garner's death in 2014 spread from protest marches to NBA arenas to high school gymnasiums within weeks. When LeBron James wore one during warmups, it was the front page of every newspaper in the country. That's the reach that protest fashion has now — not despite its simplicity, but because of it. What Makes a Good Political Shirt Not all political clothing is equally effective. The best activist apparel does a few things: It starts a conversation. The goal isn't to preach to people who already agree — it's to make people who don't agree yet ask a question. "What does that mean?" "Why does that matter?" That's the entry point. It's specific enough to mean something but broad enough to be personal. "Women's Rights Are Human Rights" works because it's specific about what's at stake but legible to a huge range of people. Overly insider language plays well at the march but confuses everyone else. It belongs to the person wearing it. The most effective political fashion connects to genuine belief. Wearing a shirt about a cause you don't actually care about reads as hollow. Wearing one about something that genuinely matters to you — that anger or commitment shows, somehow, even through fabric. It looks good. This isn't trivial. Good design signals that the movement takes itself seriously. It commands a second look. It makes people think the cause might be worth taking seriously too. The Limits, Too Wearing the shirt is not the same as doing the work. Fashion activism can become a substitute for organizing rather than a complement to it — a way to feel like you're doing something without actually doing anything. The shirt matters when it starts conversations that turn into donations, phone calls, volunteer hours, and votes. When it's part of a broader practice of engagement, it does real work. When it's the only thing, it's cosplay. We started Rebels & Rights because we believe in both: the political power of making your values visible, and the necessity of backing up what you wear with what you do. The shirt matters. So does everything else.

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