Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: 'Oftentimes the most righteous thing you can do is shake the table', Women's March - 2019

19 January 2019, New York City, New York, USA

Thank you New York City!

Are you ready to make a ruckus? Are you al l ready to fight for our rights. Are you all ready to say that in the United States of America, everyone deserves love, everyone deserves justice, and everyone deserves equal protection and prosperity in our county.

It is such an honour to be here and I don't think it's a coincidence that we're gathering here today, the weekend before Martin Luther King Day. Because I believe that this moment, and where we are right now, is a resurgence from where the civil rights movement left off. And we are here to carry the torch forward because when we talked about racial and economic justice, racial and social justice, we started to really extend those issues to the issues of economic justice, environmental justice, and the intersectionality of interconnectedness of all our fights.

Justice is not a concept we read about in a book. Justice is about the water we drink. Justice is about the air we breathe. Justice about is about how easy it is to vote. Justice is about how much ladies get paid. Justice is about if we can stay with our children after we have them for a just amount of time, mothers, fathers and all parents. Justice is about making sure that being polite is not the same thing as being quiet. In fact, oftentimes the most righteous thing you can do is shake the table.

Last year we took the power to the polls, and this year we're taking power to the policy because we have taken back the House of Representatives. And that's just step one. This year we're going to organise. This year we're going to fight for voting rights. This year we're going to keep pushing because 2020, in 2018 we took the House of Representatives and through 2020 we're going to take the White House and the Senate too. That's what we're going to do because we need to advance and fight for an America where all people are welcome and no people are left behind.

And I know that while this year has been historic, there's a lot more Congresswoman left here in this audience right now. There's a lot more city council women. There's a lot more workers that will be building businesses. And I know that there's a future president out here too. Let us remember that a fight means no person left behind.

So when people want to stop talking about the issues that black women face, when people want to stop talking about the issues that trans women or immigrant women face, we've got to ask them, "Why does that make you so uncomfortable?" Because now this is the time when we're going to address poverty. This is the time we're going to address Flint. This is the time we're going to talk about Baltimore and the Bronx and wildfires and Puerto Rico. Because this is not just about identity, this is about justice. And this is about the America that we are going to bring into this world. Thank you all very, very much. I'm so proud of you all.

Bruce Springsteen: 'We are the new American resistance!' Perth concert - 2017

21 January 2017, Perth, Australia​​

​The E Street Band is glad to be here in Western Australia. But we're a long way from home, and our hearts and spirits are with the hundreds of thousands of women and men that marched yesterday in every city in America and in Melbourne who rallied against hate and division and in support of tolerance, inclusion, reproductive rights, civil rights, racial justice, LGBTQ rights, the environment, wage equality, gender equality, healthcare, and immigrant rights. We stand with you. We are the new American resistance.

Ashley Judd: 'Our pussies ain't for grabbing', Women's March - 2017

 21 January 2017, Women's March, Washington DC, USA

 The '#NastyWoman' poem was written in 2016 by Tennessee teenager Nina Mariah Donovan, then working at Dunkin' Donuts. 

My name is Ashley Judd and I am a feminist. And I want to say hello to Independence Avenue in the back, all the way down to 17th Street, and I bring you words from Nina Donovan, a 19-year-old in Middle, Tennessee. She has given me the privilege of telling you what she has to say:

"I am a nasty woman. I'm as nasty as a man who looks like he bathes in Cheetos dust. A man whose words are a distract to America. Electoral college-sanctioned, hate-speech contaminating this national anthem. I'm not as nasty as Confederate flags being tattooed across my city. Maybe the South actually is going to rise again. Maybe for some it never really fell. Blacks are still in shackles and graves, just for being black. Slavery has been reinterpreted as the prison system in front of people who see melanin as animal skin. I am not as nasty as a swastika painted on a pride flag, and I didn't know devils could be resurrected but I feel Hitler in these streets. A mustache traded for a toupee. Nazis renamed the Cabinet Electoral Conversion Therapy, the new gas chambers shaming the gay out of America, turning rainbows into suicide. I am not as nasty as racism, fraud, conflict of interest, homophobia, sexual assault, transphobia, white supremacy, misogyny, ignorance, white privilege ... your daughter being your favorite sex symbol, like your wet dreams infused with your own genes. Yeah, I'm a nasty woman — a loud, vulgar, proud woman.

"I am not nasty like the combo of Trump and Pence being served up to me in my voting booths. I'm nasty like the battles my grandmothers fought to get me into that voting booth. I'm nasty like the fight for wage equality. Scarlett Johansson, why were the female actors paid less than half of what the male actors earned last year. See, even when we do go into higher paying jobs our wages are still cut with blades sharpened by testosterone. Why is the work of a black woman and a hispanic woman worth only 63 and 54 cents of a white man's privileged daughter? This is not a feminist myth. This is inequality. So we are not here to be debunked. We are here to be respected. We are here to be nasty.

I am nasty like my bloodstains on my bed sheets. We don't actually choose if and when to have our periods. Believe me if we could some of us would. We do not like throwing away our favorite pairs of underpants. Tell me, why are pads and tampons still taxed when Viagra and Rogaine are not? Is your erection really more than protecting the sacred messy part of my womanhood? Is the bloodstain on my jeans more embarrassing than the thinning of your hair?

I know it is hard to look at your own entitlement and privilege. You may be afraid of the truth. I am unafraid to be honest. It may sound petty bringing up a few extra cents. It adds up to the pile of change I have yet to see in my country. I can't see. My eyes are too busy praying to my feet hoping you don't mistake eye contact for wanting physical contact. Half my life I have been zipping up my smile hoping you don't think I want to unzip your jeans. I am unafraid to be nasty because I am nasty like Susan, Elizabeth, Eleanor, Amelia, Rosa, Gloria, Condoleezza, Sonia, Malala, Michelle, Hillary!

And our pussies ain’t for grabbing. There for reminding you that our walls are stronger than America's ever will be. Our pussies are for our pleasure. They are for birthing new generations of filthy, vulgar, nasty, proud, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, you name it, for new generations of nasty women. So if you a nasty woman, or you love one who is, let me hear you say, hell yeah."

Angela Davis: "History cannot be deleted like web pages", Women's march - 2017

21 January 2017, Washington DC, USA 

At a challenging moment in our history, let us remind ourselves that we the hundreds of thousands, the millions of women, trans-people, men and youth who are here at the Women's March, we represent the powerful forces of change that are determined to prevent the dying cultures of racism, hetero-patriarchy from rising again.

We recognize that we are collective agents of history and that history cannot be deleted like web pages. We know that we gather this afternoon on indigenous land and we follow the lead of the first peoples who despite massive genocidal violence have never relinquished the struggle for land, water, culture, their people. We especially salute today the Standing Rock Sioux.

The freedom struggles of black people that have shaped the very nature of this country's history cannot be deleted with the sweep of a hand. We cannot be made to forget that black lives do matter. This is a country anchored in slavery and colonialism, which means for better or for worse the very history of the United States is a history of immigration and enslavement. Spreading xenophobia, hurling accusations of murder and rape and building walls will not erase history.

No human being is illegal.

The struggle to save the planet, to stop climate change, to guarantee the accessibility of water from the lands of the Standing Rock Sioux, to Flint, Michigan, to the West Bank and Gaza. The struggle to save our flora and fauna, to save the air—this is ground zero of the struggle for social justice.

This is a women's march and this women's march represents the promise of feminism as against the pernicious powers of state violence. And inclusive and intersectional feminism that calls upon all of us to join the resistance to racism, to Islamophobia, to anti-Semitism, to misogyny, to capitalist exploitation.

Yes, we salute the fight for 15. We dedicate ourselves to collective resistance. Resistance to the billionaire mortgage profiteers and gentrifiers. Resistance to the health care privateers. Resistance to the attacks on Muslims and on immigrants. Resistance to attacks on disabled people. Resistance to state violence perpetrated by the police and through the prison industrial complex. Resistance to institutional and intimate gender violence, especially against trans women of color.

Women's rights are human rights all over the planet and that is why we say freedom and justice for Palestine. We celebrate the impending release of Chelsea Manning. And Oscar López Rivera. But we also say free Leonard Peltier. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. Free Assata Shakur.

Over the next months and years we will be called upon to intensify our demands for social justice to become more militant in our defense of vulnerable populations. Those who still defend the supremacy of white male hetero-patriarchy had better watch out.

The next 1,459 days of the Trump administration will be 1,459 days of resistance: Resistance on the ground, resistance in the classrooms, resistance on the job, resistance in our art and in our music.

This is just the beginning and in the words of the inimitable Ella Baker, 'We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.' Thank you."