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Want to fight fascism? Join a knitting circle.

The resurgence of resistance crafting.

“Back in 2017, I made a ton of pussyhats,” Catherine Paul told me. “I just knitted pink hats like there was no tomorrow.”

At the time, Paul appreciated “the way that craft could be part of a demonstration of affiliation and belief,” the artist, writer, and longtime knitter told me.

Soon the pussyhat became a symbol of something else: a brand of feminism attuned to the concerns of a subset of middle-class, mostly white American women, and nobody else. By 2024, the hats, and the 2017 Women’s March at which many demonstrators wore them, were being held up as examples of ineffective protest. More than that, the hats came to be seen as cringe — not just exclusionary, but also kind of embarrassing.

Then came Trump 2.0. In the face of an administration whose agents have kidnapped and deported children and shot more than a dozen people in the span of a few months, craftivism is back in the spotlight, with knitters, quilters, nail artists, and more getting renewed public attention for their political designs.

Paul, for example, has been knitting red “Melt the ICE” hats, from a pattern sold by Minneapolis yarn shop Needle & Skein. Friends and acquaintances are begging her for the headwear, just as they did nearly 10 years ago.

Before I started reporting this story, I thought the rise of knitted and quilted protest under Trump 2.0 might be a sign of the left reembracing cringe — of a softening toward forms of political action once deemed uncool and annoying (and, not coincidentally, feminine). But in talking to artists and scholars about craftivism right now, I’ve come to think the explanation for its popularity is both more complicated and simpler.

“The news is so ugly all the time, you can’t really find peace,” Needle & Skein owner Gilah Mashaal told me. “So what do you do? You find people and you do things with those people. And since we’re crafters, that’s what we’re doing.”

As thousands of ICE agents swarmed Minneapolis earlier this year, “my regular knitters were all feeling kind of desperate and unsure of what we could do,” Mashaal said. Employee Paul Neary had the idea to create a pattern inspired by Norwegian anti-Nazi hats called “nisselue.”

Neary posted the pattern for the “Melt the ICE”........

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