What a sugar-cookie recipe taught me about quiet resistance

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What a sugar-cookie recipe taught me about quiet resistance
Sometimes you’ve got to lean on pettiness to get you through

By Andi Zeisler
Senior Writer
Published July 21, 2025 6:30AM (EDT)


(Salon) Let me tell you about the cookies I baked last weekend. They called for ½ cup softened butter, 1 cup of white sugar, 1 egg, ¼ cup milk. ½ teaspoon of vanilla, 2 and ¼ cups flour and 2 teaspoons of baking powder. If you’re reading this and thinking, “No brown sugar? No salt? A measly half-cup of butter? These cookies sound terrible,” well, you are correct. This was pure grudge baking, and even if the result tasted like sugary drywall, it felt great.

The recipe came from TikTok user Nick Ruyter, a painter and former pastry chef who resembles the Minnesotan cousin of Carmy and Richie from “The Bear,” and who posts deadpan video clips about funding abortion. A week or so back, he posted a yellowed, handwritten recipe with this explanation:

“I’ve been thinking about this for a while. My mom voted for Trump. I just know she did. So here is her most closely guarded secret recipe. She has only allowed two women, in the entirety of my life . . . to have this recipe . . . If she’s making cookies and this part is out, you’re not allowed in the house unless you’re family. They’re gonna look lighter than you think they should look, but they make the most delightful, soft, almost cakey cookie. Frost ‘em however you want.”

Two weeks later, the clip has more than 160 thousand shares and almost 22 thousand comments from appreciative fans of both cookies and democracy, many of them requesting that Ruyter pass along their compliments (“Tell her I’m buying all the ingredients with EBT right now”; “Let your mom know that the lesbians from Delaware said thanks so much”) In a follow-up post, he pretended to be talking to his aggrieved parent: “Ma. Ma! Calm down, it’s just a recipe. People are dying, all right? No, I don’t care about inheriting some modern [Nazi] memorabilia . . . fine, Precious Moments. Whatever you call ‘em.” He hangs up. “Anyway. Y’all want a frosting recipe?”

The purposeful degeneration of truth and progress that’s central to Trump 2.0 — the setbacks in science and research, the dismantling of education and critical thinking — is bleak. Organized resistance is crucial, but sometimes you’ve got to lean on pettiness to get you through. And finding ways to be petty without being cruel is an ongoing project for anyone who wants to fight back without fighting dirty. Loudly hoping that GOP voters get everything they voted for is one thing; celebrating when their children were swept away in floodwaters is quite another. Daily living has become stingier and meaner; how can it not when one political party’s entire legislative agenda is driven by owning the libs, and conservative culture warriors think caring about other people is weakness? It’s satisfying to be petty, but it’s even more satisfying to be specifically, constructively petty. Hitting back at a broadly inhumane agenda without replicating its inhumanity, as Ruyter demonstrates, is often a matter of going small. .....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/07/21/what-a-sugar-cookie-recipe-taught-me-about-quiet-resistance/