The Book That Reframed How I Understand Resistance: Halik Kochanskis Resistance Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-09-21 | The Book That Reframed How I Understand Resistance: Halik Kochanskis Resistance
Making a Choice | Ordinary Men and Resistance History Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-08-15 | One day in Poland in 1942, ordinary German men were ordered to murder 1,500 people, and their commander told them they could step out of the ranks instead. Thirteen did. The rest stayed. What happened that day matters for how we understand those men, in that place, in that war. But it also opens a harder question, the one I'm chasing in my work on resistance: if doing the right thing requires an action — not declining to go along, but visibly, physically acting — and most people won't take that step even when it costs nothing, what does it take to act when it could cost everything? Standing still was never neutral; the killing went forward through the men who merely stayed put. The people who resisted did something more than refuse. They acted — with something real to lose and no promise it would work. And then they acted again the next day. That's the psychology I want to understand.#resistancehistory #publichistory #worldwar2 #holocausteducation
Youre Not in Casablanca | Simple vs. Complex Resistance Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-08-14 | Mentioned in this one:📽️ Casablanca (1942) — simple resistance, complete (here is the scene youtu.be/Tmey95lE-98?si=yT-PcdG4vlBTyS4H)📽️ The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) — simple resistance, and then it becomes complex📖 Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat — how France fell, written in 1940 by a historian who then joined the Resistance📖 Halik Kochanski, Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939–1945 — the thousand-page history that sets the standard for understanding simple resistance in occupied EuropeGoing deeper on the German resistance:📖 Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler — the complex context from the inside📖 Terry Parssinen, The Oster Conspiracy of 1938 — the year the warnings might have mattered📖 Peter Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 1933–1945 — the standard work📖 Inge Scholl, The White Rose — told by the Scholls' sister📽️ Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005) — what it cost📖 Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship — where the resistance/opposition/Resistenz fight gets foughtAnd for America, the eighty years of the First Republic, and the people who never needed the enemy explained:📖 Manisha Sinha, The Slave's Cause — how a resistance built a theory against its own nation and moved the middle📖 Kellie Carter Jackson, We Refuse — Black resistance on its own terms: the simple resistance inside the First American Republic📖 And the framework for my thinking: A Resistance History of the United States#resistancehistory #publichistory #casablanca #resistance #underground
Does Resistance End on Election Day? Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-08-12 | How do elections matter in American resistance? They matter — resistance has always needed them. But we've been taught they're where opposition ends: vote, hand your representatives your opposition, go home, and stay home until the next election day. The farmers of western Massachusetts refused that in 1786. They had voted. They had petitioned. When none of it worked, they did not accept that their political authority had been exhausted — they closed the courts that were taking their homes, and it cost four of them dead in the snow at Springfield before anyone listened. James Madison watched, and went to Philadelphia to build a government that would make sure the people never discovered "their own strength" again — his phrase, from Federalist 10. Then the storytellers spent two hundred years converting all of it into patriotic virtue: Shays's Rebellion becomes the healthy fright that gave us the Constitution, the Civil War is fought to preserve it, women got the vote because it was time. Nothing was ever done outside the channels. So if you care about democracy, sooner or later you're going to have to give up on the people who didn't. Elections are where opposition can go. The question is what resistance does when they're not enough. #resistancehistory #publichistory #democracy #shaysrebellion #jamesmadison
America is Maybe Just as Good as Were Ever Going to Be Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-08-10 | "The status quo is maybe just as good as we're ever going to be." A candidate for Rhode Island governor said that this week about what Americans believe, and she was more right than she knew. That belief isn't a modern failure of nerve. It has been the operating principle of American government since the founding, and Madison stated it plainly when the union's price was slavery: great as the evil was, breaking the union over it would be worse. Lincoln inherited the same reasoning and held it for as long as he could, refusing to touch slavery for fear of losing first the South, then the border states. "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it." The costs of the status quo were real, but someone else was paying them, so why risk change? This week, the editor of The New Yorker recited the same spirit on the radio, in softer words, to a guest who proposed structural change. #resistancehistory #publichistory
The Red Scare Reboot: Why the 2026 Remake Might Flop Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-08-06 | Refuse the lie. That’s the resistance history lesson, because this is how abuse of authority begins: those in power name an enemy, manufacture the fear, and use it to mark who can be silenced, purged, prosecuted. It worked during the Cold War because the fear was reinforced everywhere an American could look or listen — and refusing it got you rendered un-American. Now it’s reinforced nowhere. The fear has to be supplied by you, which means you can decline to supply it. Every refusal — every candidate who won’t answer the charge, every voter who won’t be frightened by it, every person who won’t repeat it as if it were real — leaves the weapon dead in their hands. That’s a defense of democracy this moment asks for: defending the place of socialists or communists in it not because you agree with them, but because no one in power gets to use fear to overrule the millions of voters who choose them.#resistancehistory #publichistory #coldwar #communism #americanhistory
RESISTANCE HISTORY IN ACTION | Sarah George, States Attorney in Chittenden County, Vermont Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-08-03 | I don't publicly support candidates. Or at least I didn't. I'm breaking that now because the moment we're in makes staying out of it a choice, too, and there's no better place to start than Sarah George.People ask me all the time where I see the real resistance today. She's it. One of the only people in this country holding actual power who is using it for the people she answers to. She's the elected prosecutor of Chittenden County, Vermont. In April she refused to charge six people who stood between ICE and their neighbors, and she grounded that refusal in the rights we all have and the American history of defiance to abusive authority. For that, she's being challenged for her office.We shared a stage at Old North Church in Boston during the tour, and I asked her for the next three things you can do right now. This video is her answer. Her primary is August 11. The link to her campaign is below.Find her at @SarahGeorge-r6l and sarahgeorgeforsa.com
Mike Johnson Says the Barbarians Are Inside the Gate. But Its Not About Hannibal. Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-07-30 | When House Speaker Mike Johnson warns that "the barbarians are inside the gate," he's altering a 2,000-year-old phrase in a way that inverts its meaning. Hannibal ad portas was a warning about an external enemy and a wall worth defending. Johnson's version announces that the wall has already failed — and a failed wall changes the task from defense to identification: sorting which Americans are the enemy.Let's trace the two traditions Johnson's phrase fuses. One is intellectual: Thomas Sowell's Barbarians Inside the Gates (1999), which relocated barbarism from the frontier to the faculty lounge, the courtroom, and the legislature — defining the barbarian as the American insider who uses politics to reach the economic arrangements democracy is supposed to leave alone. The other is visceral and much older: the racialized horde that white America spent two centuries imagining at civilization's edge, now recast with Mao caps and copies of Das Kapital. Fused, they produce a frame in which socialist candidates winning open primaries isn't politics — it's infiltration, with every victory deepening the breach.We need to also examine what that frame historically allows: a Supreme Court case that made membership in a named category effectively criminal and has never been overruled, and a congressional power — the House judging the elections of its own members — that was once used to exclude an elected socialist by redefining his politics as aid to an enemy. The argument isn't that history repeats. It's that the political work required before those tools can be used again is being done right now, in public, one repeated phrase at a time.#resistancehistory #publichistory #constitution #romanhistory #communism
A Resistance History of Impeachment Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-07-28 | Check out @CitizensImpeachment and @Flare_USA #resistancehistory #publichistory #constitution #impeachment #reconstruction #americanhistory
A Resistance History of Victor Berger and the American Socialists Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-07-24 | In 1919, the House of Representatives voted to refuse a seat to a man his voters had just elected. Then his voters elected him again, and the House refused him again. His name was Victor Berger — the first Socialist ever to serve in Congress — and what the political establishment did to him, and what he did to them first, is a resistance history lesson nobody teaching you civics ever mentioned.Two stories here, and they're really one story.The first is the 17th Amendment — the reason you vote for your Senators at all. In 1911, the Senate was still what the Framers built in 1787: a private club appointed by state legislatures, and every reform proposal since 1826 had died inside it. Then Berger introduced a constitutional amendment to abolish the Senate entirely. With extinction on the table in writing, and a constitutional convention of the people a credible threat, direct election of Senators suddenly became the moderate compromise — and the Senate yielded. It wasn't persuaded. It was compelled. The most forthright position is what makes the moderate position winnable.The second is the exclusion. When World War I gave the establishment its opening, it went after Berger with everything: the Postmaster General banned his newspaper from the mail, federal prosecutors indicted him for antiwar editorials, and a judge who said German-Americans' hearts were "reeking with disloyalty" sentenced him to twenty years. Milwaukee's answer was to re-elect him. So the House reached for Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — the disqualification clause written to protect Reconstruction — conceded in its own report that the amendment was "the child of the Civil War" made for "the political and civil rights of the African race," declared it "for all time," and aimed it at a socialist whose offense was opposing the industrialists' war. Opposition became obstruction, obstruction became aid to the enemy, and aid became disqualification. The Supreme Court has never disturbed that precedent. Recently it confirmed that enforcing Section 3 belongs to Congress. The weapon is still loaded — worth remembering as both parties tell us today's socialist candidates are a threat to the country.The Resistance History lesson: American resistance compels what it cannot persuade. The establishment answers by reclassifying resistance as treason and moving the fight to ground where voters don't get a say. And exclusion fails — against organization built bottom across, and against the program itself. The House kept Berger out of the building for one Congress. It couldn't keep out the pensions, the eight-hour day, workers' compensation, or unemployment insurance, which became the heart of the New Deal and the baseline of what Americans expect government to do. #resistancehistory #publichistory #constitution #socialism #socialists #americanhistory
A Resistance History PSA: Sorting Out Communism, Socialists, and Democracy Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-07-22 | #resistancehistory #publichistory #socialism #dsa
Resistance History Daybook (07.19.26): Getaway Day Reflections Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-07-19 | Join the community here on YouTube or on Patreon at patreon.com/cw/tadstoermerFollow my essays on Substack at substack.com/@tadstoermerConnect with my mentions at @GoodNeighborBooks @Krisgoldsmith85
Get your copy of The Reconstruction Amendments from the 14th Amendment Center Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-07-17 | @The14thCenter #14thamendment #resistancehistory #publichistory
Resistance History LIVE: Friday, 7pm, with Elizabeth Hanks. Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-07-16 | We will stream it live here in YouTube, if you can't make it.
“The 14th” coming to Netflix this fall. Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-07-16 | America’s argument has always been over who counts. We the people? Which people? All of them or just a chosen few?Ava’s voice in that argument is necessary today. Without flinching, she’s giving us the tools to force the fight we have long avoided — and finish it.#14th #publichistory #14thamendment
Biddeford, ICE, and America’s History of Waiting You Out Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-07-15 | This week's shooting in Maine is a case study in a recurring pattern that runs throughout American history.People demanded an end. Government answered with process.Body cameras. Investigations. Temporary pauses. Promises of accountability. The machinery of reform often functions not to end abusive authority, but to insulate it until public outrage subsides.In my work, I argue that this is one of the central obstacles every successful resistance movement has had to overcome. The American Revolution, the abolition movement, and the civil rights movement all reached moments when persuasion alone had exhausted itself. The question then became how to organize sustained pressure that interrupted business as usual.#resistancehistory #publichistory
ICE in Biddeford and Declaring Independence Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-07-14 | #resistance #resistancehistory
Forgiving and Forgetting Lindsey Graham: The Resistance History Read Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-07-12 | Two ways to answer the death of an old adversary. Lamar of Mississippi eulogized Sumner as a friend, papered over the differences the war had settled, and rode the praise into the Senate and onto the Supreme Court, where he helped gut everything Sumner stood for. Douglass refused the bargain. There was a right side and a wrong side, and no eulogy would confuse them — he held that line for the rest of his life. One of these men got a chapter in Profiles in Courage. It was not the one who showed any.#resistancehistory #publichistory
Resistance History Today: 4p at Book Soup in West Hollywood with Joely Fisher Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-07-11 | #resistancehistory #publichistory @booksoupofficial9713
Chasing the Haunted Man on Maiden Lane: The Fight for the Bill of Rights in Lower Manhattan Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-07-07 | Maiden Lane, lower Manhattan. If you scrape away the modern pavement, you’re standing on layers of overlapping ghosts.This is where James Madison holed up in a boarding house during the First Federal Congress, sleepless and half-mad, wrestling Patrick Henry from afar for the future of the Bill of Rights. It’s the setting for my chapter, *The Haunted Man on Maiden Lane*.But Madison isn't the only one haunting these streets. In 1780, Nancy Dixon arrived here from Williamsburg, Virginia, carrying her three-year-old daughter. She was a Black loyalist, surviving the chaotic reality of British-controlled New York for three years before a ship carried her to freedom in the Bahamas in 1783.History catalogs Madison’s every anxiety; it didn’t bother to record where Nancy slept at night. But her story, and the stories of hundreds like her, happened right here underfoot—even if the ledger skipped them.
Inside the New York Historical Societys New Tang Wing: What Democracy Actually Takes Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-07-06 | The Tang Wing opened June 18, 2026, and the inaugural exhibition, Democracy Matters, runs in the Klingenstein Family Gallery. Upstairs, the classrooms matter as much as the galleries: the Academy for American Democracy will bring 30,000 sixth graders a year through them. Public history doing civic work, not just talking about it.#resistancehistory #publichistory #americanhistory
Thank God Its July 5th Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-07-06 | The resistance that made the United States was excluded from what became the United States. And that story, one driven by an argument, is one we need to recover right now. The problem? There are a lot of people who aren't interested in you knowing it. @revspaces isn't the entire problem, but they are certainly part it, and reflect the bigger one.#resistancehistory #publichistory #america250 #americanrevolution #americanhistory
Domesticating the Revolution | Old South Meeting House Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-07-04 | @revspaces has a strange idea of revolutionary “ruckus.” But it’s a move we see everywhere. #resistancehistory #publichistory #america250 #americanrevolution #americanhistory
250 Years of the Declaration of Independences Right of Resistance Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-07-04 | #resistancehistory #publichistory #america250
Roberts v. Jackson: The Battle of History Over Citizenship Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-07-01 | ...
What to Read After A Resistance History Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-06-29 | Where might you go next after A Resistance History? @GoodNeighborBooks has some suggestions.#resistancehistory #resistancereads
Resistance, Clear and Present | Today at the Robert H. Jackson Center, 1p Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-06-28 | Jamestown this morning — almost within sight of Chautauqua Lake. We're at the @RobertHJacksonCenter at 1p to talk about what the book is after: not just a history, but a way of thinking about the work history's doing right now. Details: goodneighborbooks.com/eventsJustice Jackson lived here. He helped build the test for when protest goes too far — "clear and present danger." But he also warned, in Korematsu, that once the Court blessed the camps it had "validated the principle of racial discrimination," a principle left "lying about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need." Read the paper. Watch your feeds.Clear and present.Join us at 1p. And follow Good Neighbor Bookstore, down the road in Lakewood — they're hosting, and leading the conversation.#resistancehistory #publichistory
A National Reminder About Resistance Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-06-27 | #resistancehistory #publichistory #flight93
100 Years: The Brutal Resistance Reality of the Prairieland Sentences Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-06-25 | Eight people at a late-night noise demonstration outside a Texas ICE facility just received catastrophic, multi-decade prison sentences under domestic terrorism enhancements. One man was handed thirty years simply for moving a box of homemade zines.This isn't simple judicial overreach. This is state theater.In this video, we break down the cynical mechanics behind the Prairieland sentences and trace them back to a familiar historical script. From the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 to the federal courtrooms of Fort Worth today, authoritarians have always manufactured phantom enemies to legitimize raw state power.We look at the staggering double standard applied to the January 6th rioters versus left-wing protesters, why this institutional rot runs far deeper than Donald Trump, and how recent primary victories in New York prove that the establishment fears effective dissent—no matter the channel it takes.The threshold between "permitted protest" and "domestic terrorism" is being rewritten in real-time by lifetime-appointed judges. Brace for impact.#resistancehistory #publichistory #america250
Resistance History Daybook | Resistance in Williamsburg Meet-Up Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-06-22 | Join me tonight at 6p for a Resistance History meet-up in lounge of the Williamsburg Lodge. Let’s talk about resistance history at work in Williamsburg — and what happens when a Republican Fortune 50 CEO abruptly takes control of this place, which is what’s happened here.#publichistory #resistancehistory #howrevolutionary #colonialwilliamsburg
Resistance History Dispatch | Resisting the Narrative in Washington, DC Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-06-21 | I've reached the point where I separate everything in this city into what we're resisting against and what we're resisting for.Anderson House goes in the first pile, and it barely has to try. There's a statue of George Washington on the front lawn, and behind him sits the headquarters of the Society of the Cincinnati, the hereditary order his officers built in 1783, before the peace was even settled. Men who had just won a war that claimed to be against inherited rule turned around and incorporated themselves as an inherited aristocracy, with membership passing to the eldest son. Aedanus Burke saw it at the time and called it a race of hereditary patricians. Today the descendants of those officers run the place, and from it they offer to explain the Revolution to you.That is the "against" in miniature: inherited power dressed up as the Revolution it was built to fence in, with the great man planted out front so you keep your eyes on him and the war.The "for" is the part they can't hand you from inside that house. It's the resistance, the ones who kept challenging inherited power long after 1783 and got written out of the story for it. It's the version of this history you can use instead of the one you tour.#resistancehistory #publichistory #americanhistory #americanrevolution #america250
From Trumps Cage Match to Washingtons Sash: Hiding the American Revolution in its Celebration Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-06-15 | As the 250th anniversary approaches, this country is drowning in a coordinated season of historical amnesia. From the right, it’s a crude, birthday-centric UFC cage match on the White House lawn; from the liberal establishment, it’s a mournful, pious plea to return to a pristine "founding creed" that the record simply won't sustain. They look like opposites, but they’re pulling the same oar. Both camps want to turn a radical, messy, structural upheaval into a bloodless costume drama.They want you staring at George Washington’s inaugural suit, his commander's sash under glass at Harvard, or a 1757 near-beer recipe—the Gatorade of the Seven Years' War—specifically so you never ask the only material question that matters: who paid for the threads?Veneration is a mechanism designed to choke out an argument. In this talk, marking the Washington launch of the book tour, we look past the curated nostalgia, the commemorative lagers, and the establishment mythmaking to talk about resistance not as a performative posture, but as a gritty, ongoing historical practice.#resistancehistory #publichistory #america250 #americanrevolution #georgewashington
America’s Resistance History Has a Chapter in Rome Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-06-12 | The Keats-Shelley House sits at the bottom of the Spanish Steps, and it holds a piece of America’s resistance history. In 1819, English cavalry rode into a crowd of sixty thousand at Manchester demanding the vote. Shelley answered from Rome with “The Masque of Anarchy,” a poem so dangerous his own friend refused to print it for thirteen years. Thirty years later, Thoreau wrote “Resistance to Civil Government” in Concord, inspired by Shelley. Both arrived at the same conclusion: unjust power depends on the cooperation of the governed, and withdrawing that cooperation is itself an act of resistance.#publichistory #resistancehistory
Publication Day: A Resistance History of the United States Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-06-02 | If you have a sinking suspicion that the myths we are taught about American democracy don’t match the reality on the ground, you’re right.The myth buries the part that matters most: resistance works. Ordinary people slowed abusive power, forced through the Bill of Rights, freed themselves from under the most powerful men in the country, and once turned resistance into a revolution that built a multiracial democracy out of the wreckage of the old order.And every time, it got buried afterward, cut off at the same two points: when people had to step outside the channels they were told to use, and when they had to accept what real confrontation costs.That isn’t bad luck. The men who made their own revolution wrote that trap into the country on purpose, and their heirs turned them into demigods, so that doing what they did would feel like betraying America instead of defending it. The right of resistance got used once, in 1776, and sealed shut behind them.That’s our resistance problem, and it’s the whole subject of A Resistance History of the United States, out everywhere today. It won’t promise you a way out, but it will hand you the pattern, so the next time we see the trap before we walk into it.#resistancehistory #publichistory
The Physics of American Resistance at Delaney Hall Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-05-31 | We like our revolutionaries safely dead and confined to oil paintings. The minute they step out of the frame and put their bodies in the driveway of a federal detention center, the script flips.This week at Delaney Hall in Newark, three hundred detainees are starving themselves rather than eat the worms the private contractors serve them. Outside, people are getting in the way of the machinery. They aren't holding clever signs in a permitted pen. They are actually stopping the vans. The response from the state's Democratic governor? Tear gas, police lines, and the immediate deployment of the phrase "out-of-state agitators."It’s the oldest loyalist move in the American playbook. The "adult in the room" protecting the machine from the friction.A "First Amendment protest zone" is a contradiction in terms. It’s a quarantine. A municipal zoning ordinance applied to the human conscience, designed to ensure that the abusive authority can keep operating without inconvenience. The architects of the American order realized very quickly after 1776 that the physics of resistance—shutting down the courts, blocking the streets—was a threat to the real estate. So they made it treason. We’ve been pretending ever since that the men who threw the tea in the harbor would have stood quietly behind a chain-link fence while the state told them to lower the temperature.The only difference between a founding patriot and an outside agitator is whether their side has written the history books yet.#resistancehistory #publichistory #americanhistory
Resistance and the Leaning Tower #resistancehistory Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-05-28 | In the summer of 1944, the Pisani resistance alerted a twenty-one-year-old US Army scout named Leon Weckstein that the Nazis were using the tower to direct artillery fire. He was sent out with a radio to confirm it and call in a devastating strike to level the 800-year-old structure. Weckstein got close, looked through the haze at the gleaming marble architecture, and refused to give the order to fire.#publichistory #resistancehistory
Sublime Recklessness Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-05-26 | Everyone walks through Piazza Trieste e Trento looking at the fountain or checking their phones, completely oblivious to the fact they are standing on a slaughterhouse floor.On September 28, 1943, this bottleneck is where the German war machine met a thirteen-year-old street kid named Filippo Illuminato. He didn’t have a uniform, and he didn’t have a rifle. What he had was a pair of hand grenades and absolute, burning resentment. He walked straight into the teeth of an advancing armored column and the heavy machine-gun fire sweeping this exact pavement, chucked his explosives, and kept walking forward until they finally cut him down.The Italian government later pinned a medal on his ghost for "sublime recklessness"—a polite bureaucratic way of admitting that while the king fled, the generals vanished, and the state collapsed, the starved, forgotten children of this city had to step into the void and bleed for it.Naples isn't a museum. It's a crime scene that just happens to serve excellent coffee. Remember whose blood is under your boots the next time you're standing on the cobblestones.#resistancehistory #publichistory
When the Darkest Day was Every Day Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-05-24 | Every time the Roberts Court carves another pound of flesh out of the Voting Rights Act, the mainstream legal commentariat predictably weeps into their keyboards. They point to the post-Reconstruction era of Jim Crow and Plessy v. Ferguson, wringing their hands over a tragic return to the judiciary’s "darkest and most racist days."It is a comforting, desperate hallucination.In this essay, we look at the polite fiction that powers modern legal journalism—the idea that the gutting of the 14th Amendment is some inexplicable descent into darkness, a rogue hijacking of the "American experiment." Holding onto that fairy tale requires a profound, willful amnesia about the actual masonry of the First Republic.The first eighty years of this country weren’t a rough draft waiting for a moral polish. They were a bespoke, highly efficient white supremacist ethnostate. The machinery of 1789 did exactly what it was engineered to do: protect property—which, to eighteenth-century enslavers, was the only true measure of liberty and the literal bedrock of political independence—uphold entrenched hierarchies, and launder it all through the bloodless, respectable language of their version of republicanism.The darkest days of the Supreme Court were every single day. For almost eighty years.We examine the mechanics of how the Reconstruction Amendments actually came to exist. Multi-racial democracy didn't just blossom organically out of the blood at Gettysburg. It was a constitutional takeover, forced by a fiercely dedicated vanguard of Radical Republicans and backed by the bayonets of the United States Army. They installed a completely alien, egalitarian operating system onto a machine built explicitly to serve a specific establishment of propertied, Protestant white men.When the troops were withdrawn and the backroom deals struck, the Supreme Court didn’t suddenly go rogue. It just shook off a fever dream. The justices of the late nineteenth century took that radical text and smothered it using the original tools of the trade. We also break down the establishment's favorite misused quote — Justice Harlan’s "colorblind" dissent in Plessy — and how he actually made secure, permanent white supremacy the literal prerequisite for a colorblind Constitution.That is exactly the logic the Roberts Court relies on today. The line from Marshall to Story to Taney to Fuller to Roberts isn't a metaphor; it is the structural reality of the First Republic’s judiciary. The Warren Court was the anomaly. The Roberts Court isn’t breaking the American legal system. They are just the faithful, patient custodians of the original blueprint, calmly restoring the First Republic.And until we admit what the foundation of this house is actually made of, we are going to keep acting surprised every time the floor caves in.#resistancehistory #publichistory #americanhistory #america250 #constitution #americanrevolution
Disillusioned With America? Good. Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-05-21 | The word I keep hearing about the country is disillusioned, and the people whose job is to reassure you are treating it like a wound. The most useful thing that ever happened to the antislavery movement was a few thousand comfortable men feeling exactly that way.In the spring of 1854, the federal government deployed soldiers to march one man, Anthony Burns, out of Boston and back to slavery in Virginia, through streets packed with silent crowds and storefronts hung in black. Burns was the occasion. The point was to prove that the Fugitive Slave Act could be enforced in the most abolitionist city in the country, and it was enforced. It also broke something. Amos A. Lawrence, a textile magnate whose fortune ran on Southern cotton and who had spent years defending the Compromise of 1850, watched it happen and later said that men like him "went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists." Lawrence went on to pour his money into the antislavery fight in Kansas.Nobody argued him into it; he was converted by watching the government he trusted do, in daylight, exactly what it had been built to do. That is what disillusionment actually is. It is not a collapse to be managed or a mood to be talked out of before the next election, but a comfortable person losing the ability to un-see what the people without his protections always knew.The pundits and party leaders telling people to stay calm and trust the process are selling the product Daniel Webster sold in 1850, and they are selling it hardest now, while a president demonstrates there is nothing under it. They understand the danger in that disillusionment better than the people feeling it do, which is why they work so hard to sell a new illusion the moment the old one fails.#resistancehistory #publichistory #americanhistory
The Founding Fathers Want Their Country Back and the Supreme Court Is Giving It to Them Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-05-14 | “Win the House” is not an answer to Callais. That is the easy half of the argument. The harder half is admitting what an answer would actually require, and why Democratic leadership cannot say it out loud.A point I have been making across the books and the lectures: the Declaration gives us two verbs that the consensus school spent the better part of the twentieth century collapsing into one. When government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was created, the people have the right to alter or to abolish it. Abolish names revolution. Alter names resistance, which is something the founders’ inheritors had every reason to bury, because resistance is the work of forcing a captured constitutional order to become something it was not built to be, without the legitimating cover of starting over. Reconstruction is the largest example of alteration in American history. It is the people who had paid for the First Republic taking the constitutional order apart, rewriting the parts that protected enslaver power, and then forcing those rewrites into operation against state and judicial resistance for the better part of a decade.The reason DelBene cannot say “what we actually need is reconstruction” is that reconstruction is not a thing a House campaign committee can deliver. It means a serious fight about the Supreme Court that ends with the Court constrained. It means a Senate restructured enough that enforcement legislation can actually pass, which has its own implications for the filibuster and for the statehood questions Democratic leadership prefers to avoid. And it requires treating the Reconstruction Amendments as live commitments rather than vestigial decoration nobody intends to enforce. None of that fits on a fundraising email, and none of it can be promised in exchange for a marginal House seat in Iowa.So we get what we get: the gestural defense of democracy as a synonym for Democratic victory, while the actual structure (Section 2, preclearance, partisan gerrymandering, the franchise itself) keeps coming apart in the background.A Resistance History of the United States works through this in more detail. #resistancehistory #publichistory #americanhistory #americanrevolution #constitution
Hamilton’s Imperial Presidency: Did Americans Lose Our Constitutional Imagination? Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-05-12 | Alexander Hamilton’s case for a single executive in Federalist 70 was the fallback position of a man who, in June 1787 at the Constitutional Convention, had argued for an executive serving “during good behavior” — life tenure, openly modeled on the British monarch. The accountability mechanism is the consolation prize.The passage that sparked this video is from Arthur Schlesinger’s The Imperial Presidency, published in 1973. Schlesinger is worth saying a few things about. He had been an aide to John F. Kennedy and a friend of Robert Kennedy. He had served inside the administrations whose accretion of executive power he was now writing the autopsy on. The term “imperial presidency” was coined out of insider experience. And the book opens its case for the unitary executive by quoting Hamilton on how watched and suspected a single president would be — which tells you how deep liberal nationalism’s hold runs even on the diagnosticians.The same Schlesinger passage shows Jefferson arriving at the unitary executive from the other side. Jefferson had favored a plural executive under the Articles of Confederation, watched the French Directoire fail, served in Washington’s cabinet alongside Hamilton, and concluded — wrongly, by the lights of his own resistance tradition — that plurality produced “absolute inaction.” Charles Pinckney rounds out the consensus, defending executive discretion on the grounds that an able council would “thwart” the president while a weak one would let him “shelter himself under their sanction.” That is the founding consensus on the unitary executive in three voices.The 1973 reform moment named in the video had a longer tail than I had time for. Lloyd Cutler’s “To Form a Government” in Foreign Affairs proposed parliamentary-style reforms in 1980. Sanford Levinson’s Our Undemocratic Constitution (2006) tried to keep the structural conversation alive into the new century. These are reading recommendations for anyone who wants to spend time in the room I am describing — the room that thought the Constitution could be reassembled.#resistancehistory #publichistory
Donald Trump Is Not George III — and Saying He Is Is Hurting American Opposition Today Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-05-06 | If you're in a fight for democracy — and we are — the people standing in your way are not always the ones wearing red hats. Some of them have Pulitzer Prizes. Some of them write for the New York Times. Some of them won a Pulitzer this week.Three weeks ago, Clarence Thomas gave a speech at the University of Texas at Austin marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. He used it to attack progressivism, blame Wilsonian government for the worst crimes of the 20th century, and insist the Declaration's principles can only be defended by rejecting the modern administrative state. The liberal press lit him up. Bad history. Politically motivated. Misusing the founding to make a contemporary argument. All of which was correct.This week, Stacy Schiff — Pulitzer Prize winner for Vera, a book about Vladimir Nabokov's wife — has a piece in the New York Times running the Declaration's twenty-seven grievances against George III, one by one, against Donald Trump. The piece treats Jefferson's preamble as a "soaring aria" with a "libretto" of grievances, walks through the catalogue, and closes with Jefferson's line about a prince who is "unfit to be the ruler of a free people."Yesterday, Jill Lepore won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for History for We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution — a book the Pulitzer board describes as "a lively and engaging narrative that investigates why the Constitution is so difficult to amend, including a review of noteworthy failed amendments proposed by marginalized groups."Thomas misuses the Declaration. Schiff misuses the Declaration. Lepore misuses the history of the Constitution. Three weeks. Three venues. One news cycle. The same audience that lined up to attack Thomas just gave Lepore a Pulitzer and is currently sharing Schiff's piece as resistance reading.This isn't a coincidence. Liberal nationalism and conservative nationalism are doing the same operation on the same battlefield. They're fighting over who gets to claim the founding, not whether the founding should be the thing organizing our politics at all. They share the assumption that the American nation-state in the form created by 1790 is the greatest deliverer of freedom and liberty the world has ever seen, and that any challenge to that system is off the table.This video works through Schiff's piece. The match-ups against Trump. The opera framing. The implication. Then the actual history: George III did not do the things in the Declaration's grievances. Parliament did. The patriots knew it. They spent a decade fighting Parliament. The pivot to blaming the king came in the last twelve months before independence, when the patriots needed a story to raise an army at home and buy an alliance abroad with two absolute monarchies — France and Spain — who would never have funded a war against a constitutional system. So they wrote a tyrant.That choice worked. It also taught Americans, for two and a half centuries, that the way to fight tyranny is to find the next George III. The catalogue against George III hid Parliament. The catalogue against Trump hides Congress. Lepore's book hides what it actually took — the Bill of Rights fight, the Radical Republicans, four years of war, three constitutional amendments — to make the system she describes as resistant to change actually change. The Reconstruction Amendments were not failed amendments. They were successful ones, achieved by people the genre treats as embarrassments. The book's frame requires their disappearance to land where it lands.This is the load-bearing point: liberal nationalism is a chokepoint in the formation of American opposition right now. It tells the people who want to fight that the fight is to remove the prince and restore the system. The system you are being asked to restore is the system that produced this. And the people writing these stories are not going to write you out of it. They share the donors. They share the institutions. They share the credentialing apparatus that just gave Lepore a Pulitzer and gave Schiff one years ago.I'm Tad Stoermer. I'm a public historian and the author of A Resistance History of the United States. If you're interested in the actual history of American resistance — what people have done when working inside the system stopped working, who they had to become, what the founders built specifically to prevent the public from doing it again — that's what this channel is for.#resistancehistory #publichistory #declarationofindependence #georgeIII #americanrevolution
What Congress Did Another Time the Supreme Court Came for Civil Rights Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-04-30 | Thaddeus Stevens. Charles Sumner. Ben Wade. In the late 1860s, they led a faction inside the Republican Party that was outnumbered by its own moderates and won anyway, building the coalitions that drove three structural moves through Congress between 1866 and 1869, when a white supremacist president and a hostile Supreme Court were unmaking civil rights protections faster than they could be passed.The 1866 Judicial Circuits Act reduced the Supreme Court from ten justices to seven by attrition, denying Andrew Johnson a single appointment for the rest of his term. The same act redrew the federal circuits, breaking up the architecture of Southern dominance that had governed the appellate bench for a generation. The 1868 Repeal Act stripped the Supreme Court of jurisdiction over Ex Parte McCardle while the case was already argued and pending, removing a constitutional challenge to the Reconstruction Acts from the Court's docket. And the 1869 Judiciary Act, with Johnson out of the White House and Ulysses S. Grant in, restored the Court to nine seats — the size we still have.The Radicals were a minority. They had to pull moderates with them on every decisive vote. They did. And the structural authority they used — Congress's explicit Article III power over the size of the Supreme Court, the structure of the lower federal courts, and the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court itself — has not changed. The tools are still on the table.#resistancehistory #supremecourt #publichistory #votingrights
George III didn’t do the things the Declaration says he did. Most Americans think he did. Why? Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-04-29 | Most Americans think George III did the things the Declaration of Independence accuses him of. He didn’t. He couldn’t have. The Continental Congress knew that. So why did Jefferson write it that way — and what has two centuries of believing him done to American political culture? Tomorrow, live, at the Center.#resistancehistory #publichistory #declarationofindependence #america250 #americanhistory
We Rejected a King and Built an Imperial Presidency. They Kept the King and Built Democracies. Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-04-28 | Arthur Schlesinger wrote in 1973 that "Nixon's presidency is not an aberration but a culmination." Two centuries of war, empire, emergency, and nationalist mythmaking had grown the presidency into something the Anti-Federalists predicted in 1787, when they argued the proposed American executive would hold powers exceeding those of the actual British king. The Federalists waved them away. Schlesinger was telling us, two hundred years on, that the Anti-Federalists had been right.Fifty years later, Charles III is in Washington for the 250th. He cannot raise revenue. He cannot declare war. He cannot pass a law or block one. He cannot pardon, cannot appoint, cannot fire on his own. He is exactly the kind of head of state the Framers of the American Constitution swore they would never tolerate, and the Anti-Federalists said was the only real guarantee of the rights of the people.Meanwhile the office Schlesinger warned about has been turbocharged into something he didn't quite imagine. Beyond the imperial presidency. Something more like the personal rule of Charles I.The countries that came out of the American Revolution and kept the king — Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand — built democracies underneath the crown. The country that threw the king overboard built a republic that has been struggling since 1865 to become a democracy, and is now, by any honest measure, struggling just to remain a republic.We rejected a king and built an imperial president. They kept a king and built democracies.So what, we might ask, was that American experiment again?#resistancehistory #publichistory #americanhistory
The White House Correspondents Dinner Shooting: What the Political Violence Framing is Hiding Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-04-26 | In the immediate aftermath of the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, political leaders across the establishment adopted an identical, coordinated script: thank law enforcement, condemn "political violence," and defend democracy. This framing was deployed within minutes, long before the suspect's identity or motives were known. Why rush to define an event before the facts are in? Let's explore the dangerous work the phrase "political violence" is doing in our current political culture. Historically, high-profile lone shooters in the United States are rarely driven by coherent political ideology; their actions are typically rooted in pathology, fixation, and the delusional belief that removing a single figurehead will fix a systemic problem. This is not resistance—it is the collapse of politics. Real, organized resistance understands that abusive power is structural and must be challenged at the institutional level.By immediately labeling a chaotic, lone-wolf attack as an ideological threat to democracy, the political establishment creates a rhetorical trap. It allows them to preemptively sweep all forms of unsanctioned dissent—protest, disruption, and direct action—under the same dangerous umbrella. It forces legitimate opposition into a defensive posture, wasting energy to distance themselves from a lone gunman rather than articulating actual structural critiques. While the establishment tightly controls this narrative, the public reality remains entirely fractured. One side immediately leverages the crisis to justify massive security spending — like a proposed $300 (or $400 or $500) million ballroom — while the other side questions if the event even happened at all. The real danger isn't the condemnation of violence. The danger lies in who benefits when the establishment collapses all forms of resistance into the shadow of a lone shooter, using the fear of instability to police the boundaries of legitimate opposition.#resistancehistory #resistance #protest
Resistance History Principle #1 | Beware False Prophets Resistance History with Tad Stoermer 2026-04-25 | “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits.” — Matthew 7:15–16That is where Resistance Principle #1 begins.Not everyone wrapped in the language of “the people” is resisting power. Some are only bargaining for a larger share of it. Some know exactly how to sound like rebels while doing the work of the regime. They identify real anger, attach themselves to it, redirect it toward a scapegoat the system is already comfortable destroying, and then walk away with more authority than they had before.That is not resistance. That is grievance theater.This foundation video opens the resistance history toolkit with the first and most necessary diagnostic question: whose interests are actually being served by the defiance you are seeing?The test is not the costume. Not the slogans. Not the speeches. Not even the grievance, because the grievance may be real. The test is the fruit. Who is bleeding? Who is gaining power? Whose authority expands when the campaign succeeds?The historical anchor is 1676.Nathaniel Bacon has often been remembered as a rebel, a populist, an early symbol of American resistance. But that story is a lie. Bacon was not an outsider rising against abusive colonial power. He was a Cambridge-educated planter with land, status, a council seat, and proximity to Virginia’s governor. His complaint was not that the colonial regime was abusive. His complaint was that he was not allowed to direct enough of its violence.So he turned popular anger toward Indigenous people and called it liberty.In the same historical window, Metacomet, sachem of the Wampanoag, was leading the actual resistance in New England. He had tried the permitted channels. Courts. Hearings. Diplomacy. Formal complaints. But the English colonial system kept grinding his people off their land. When those channels failed, he organized a coalition. When attacked, he fought.Bacon performed on the regime’s behalf. Metacomet confronted the regime itself.That distinction still matters.False prophets survive because the story they offer is comfortable: the rugged individualist, the voice of the common man, the strong figure who finally tells it like it is. History then helps clean up the blood. The victims disappear. The scapegoats are forgotten. The man in sheep’s clothing becomes a hero.So the tool is simple, but not easy.Ask four questions:Whose interests are actually being served?What are they doing with their access to power?Who is the scapegoat?What is actually being risked, and by whom?Real resistance weakens abusive authority. False resistance feeds it.This is the first principle because every other principle depends on it. Truth-telling, underground networks, morally compromised allies, direct action, escalation — none of it matters if you cannot tell the difference between someone adopting the language of resistance and someone actually resisting.No shortcuts. No applause for wolves.Ye shall know them by their fruits.#resistancehistory #publichistory #nathanielbacon #metacomet #americanhistory
