The act of resistance requires joy.
This isn't a nice idea. This isn't aspirational wellness culture repackaged for dark times. This is strategic. This is survival. This is the work. Joy — in the context of rising authoritarianism — becomes a refusal to be psychologically occupied.
Because fascism requires despair to function. It needs people to believe alternatives are impossible. It needs the public to collapse inward. It needs numbness and isolation to spread like a virus through the body politic. Cruelty isn’t incidental — cruelty is the point. Cruelty is the mechanism. Cruelty is how they break you.
So joy becomes defiance. Joy becomes an insurgent act.
Joy says: “We will not surrender our humanity. We will not be made small.” Joy becomes a weapon against the apparatus that seeks to break the imagination of the people. Joy is the refusal to let the regime colonize the inner terrain of the mind. And make no mistake — that is the battlefield they want most: not just your vote, not just your compliance, but your interior life. Your capacity to imagine differently. Your ability to feel anything other than fear.
In fascist conditions, joy is not cute. Joy is counter-fascist strategy. Joy is resistance — and it is commitment. Commitment to staying human. Commitment to staying connected. Commitment to keeping the flame alive when the system wants it smothered.
To insist on meaning — to insist on truth not being erased or distorted — is resistance. To stay alive in feeling, to refuse numbness, is resistance. Authoritarianism requires despair to function. It requires the dimming of the human interior. The presence of feeling, the presence of aliveness, the presence of love — real love for people, for possibility, for the world we refuse to give up on — are proof their project has not succeeded.
Joy is the gathering that happens anyway. Joy is the meal shared when there is no occasion but refusal. Joy is the messy, imperfect sound of people refusing to disappear. Joy is not the absence of grief. This is not toxic positivity. This is not pretending everything is fine. Joy is what we do with the grief — the insistence that grief will not be the only story, that we will not let this moment erase our capacity to love what we love.
Authoritarianism wants to sever us from each other. It wants us isolated, scrolling alone, convinced that no one else feels what we feel, that resistance is futile, that we are powerless. Joy reconnects. Joy rebuilds. Joy reaffirms our commitment to one another. That is why it terrifies them.
When you show up, when you gather, when you refuse to be disappeared, when you insist on your own aliveness and the aliveness of those around you, you are doing the work of resistance. You are proving their project of breaking us has limits. You are creating the conditions for what comes next.
If you’ve ever laughed at a march, shared food at a meeting, or worn something that made a stranger nod in recognition, you’ve felt this. That small jolt of “Oh. It’s not just me.” That is joy as insurgency. That is a crack in the story they’re trying to write about isolation, inevitability, and defeat.
You are the interruption.
This is the work. This is why we exist. We craft the designs. You do the resisting. And sometimes — often — that resistance looks like joy, anchored by love, driven by commitment, alive in the face of everything that wants us quiet.
In solidarity,
Jude Cohen
Founder, Resistance Gear Co.