Transcription
Hey folks, I'm Todd Sturmer and I'm the author of a resistance history of the United States. I promised you a more full walkthrough of the resistance principles in the book before it gets released on June 2nd. So here's resistance principle number one.
The banners of resistance are often stolen by those with no aim other than their own share of power. So beware false prophets. The phrase comes from the sermon on the mount, Matthew 7:15. "Beware false prophets which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves." Now, the line right after it is the one that actually does the work. "You shall know them by their fruits." 2,000 years on, that's still the test. Not the costume someone is wearing, not the language coming out of their mouth, not the people they claim to be fighting for. What do they actually produce? Who's bleeding because of them? Who's gaining power because of them? Whose share of the regime expands when they prevail?
Our toolkit starts here for a reason. If you can't tell the difference between someone channeling popular anger to expand his or her share of an abusive regime and a leader pushing back against power that's destroying their people, none of the other principles are going to save you. You'll spend the rest of your life applauding wolves. Why? Because false prophets set a psychological trap that works. It's comforting. Real resistance, as so many of you have been noting in my comment sections, is terrifying. It is isolating, slow. It is expensive. It costs people their livelihoods, their relationships, and sometimes their freedom.
But the false prophet arrives offering a brilliant substitute: resistance as consumption. They package the dopamine rush of defiance into a risk-free product. You can buy the merchandise, consume the media, chat the slogans, show up to the rally, and feel the righteous thrill of standing against the machine, all while your actual safety remains completely intact. The false prophet sells cheap grace. They tell their followers that they can be historical heroes without having to sacrifice a single thing and that the system itself doesn't need to be dismantled. It just needs to punish the right people. But we buy the lie because the alternative requires stepping into the dark and the sheep's clothing is just so damn warm.
So principle number one is the door. Every other principle in my book assumes you have already gotten through it. Truthtelling against a system of lies, building underground networks, working with morally compromised allies, escalating to direct action. None of it survives if you can't tell the difference between a man adopting the language of resistance and a person actually resisting. It's the most common failure in our political opposition. Not that resistance is too rare, but that false resistance is too easy to mistake for the real thing.
What false prophets do, and they have done it across four centuries of American history with depressing consistency, is identify a moment of real popular grievance, attach themselves to the front of it, redirect the energy at a target that doesn't threaten the existing power structure, key point, and then they walk out of the wreckage with a larger share of authority than they walked in with. Now, the grievance is real. The anger is real. The harm to the people they redirect the anger toward and use is real. What's fake is the claim that any of it was about challenging an abusive system. The pattern repeats because it works. It works on the followers who get the rush feeling like rebels while doing the regime's work for free. It works in the regime itself, which gets a useful pressure valve and a convenient enemy. And it works on history, which has shown an unbroken willingness to launder those men into heroes a generation or two after the bodies cool. Recognizing the pattern is the first job. And most people never do it.
The case that anchors the principle that I unpack in depth in the book comes from 1676. Nathaniel Bacon was a 30-something Cambridge educated planter who arrived to Virginia with a massive land grant, a seat already on the governing council and a cousin married to the royal governor. And he was handed a share of Virginia's rule, part of the establishment before he ever set foot in Virginia. What he wanted, bigger share. When Governor William Berkeley refused to give him a commission to unleash genocide on indigenous people, Bacon raised his own militia to do it. In May 1676, he used the Okanichi as allies to destroy a Susquehannock camp. Then he celebrated with them afterwards. And then he turned on them in the night, slaughtering every man, woman, and child and carrying off their beaver pelts as trophies. Then he issued his declaration in the name of the people, a laughable, starkly racist, mostly fictional document that painted Berkeley as a tyrant, even though he kind of was, and Bacon as the tribune of the people, which he most definitely wasn't. Over the summer of 1676, Bacon's militia conducted one of the most pronounced campaigns of genocide in colonial American history. And you know that's saying something. He erased a meaningful indigenous presence in Eastern Virginia. Dog, Susquehannock, Nottoway, names wiped from the map of the colony. He burned Jamestown in September and then he died of dysentery in October. His followers then scattered.
But met a comet in the same historical window, but up in New England was running the actual thing, a real resistance. Say the Wampanoag. He had spent a decade working sanctioned permitted channels to alter abusive authority. Courts, hearings, formal complaints, petitions within an English colonial system that was grinding his people off their land. He had told Plymouth authorities directly, "The English press upon us to soar. We have no more land to sell." And when the channels closed, he organized a coalition across Algonquian nations. When the coalition was attacked, he met force with force. The war was a fight for survival and he went down fighting in August 1676, the same month Bacon was marching on Jamestown. The English beheaded him, quartered him, stuck his head on a pole in Plymouth for decades, and sold his 9-year-old son into Caribbean slavery. 40 to 60% of southern New England's indigenous population died in that war. The English economy there was bankrupted. The Massachusetts Bay charter eventually revoked. Bacon performed on the regime's behalf, met a comet confronted the regime itself.
Now, a century later, Thomas Jefferson rediscovered Bacon and made him the herald of the spirit of 1776. And then 19th century writers picked up the project. 20th century historians kept it going, including a sophisticated academic version courtesy of Edmund Morgan. Now, Edmund was a brilliant historian. I knew him. He helped me with my work and his argument was somewhat more careful than what happens in a lot of classrooms and public history where his interpretation is often flattened into a tidy origin story about race, class, and elite control. One that kept Bacon at the center and left Metacom outside the resistance spirit. Metacom meanwhile got demonized as a satanic instigator, then patronized as a noble savage doomed by the inevitable march of freedom, and finally written out of the resistance history altogether because the new nation could not let an indigenous leader be what he actually was, which was a principled resistor against an abusive encroaching power. That's the case that grounds the principle. It's a foundational pattern. So that's the principle and that's the history that grounds it.
What does it look like in your hands as a tool? You're listening to someone or reading their strongly worded social media post, watching a clever TikTok video, and they're saying the right things. How do you tell what comes next? Try four questions in order every time you see someone wrapping themselves in the flag of the people and resistance.
First, whose interests are actually being served by the defiance you're seeking? That's a core question. Not what the speeches claim, not what the followers think, the product. Who has more power, more authority, more reach when that person prevails and whose lives are getting worse during the campaign, not after. The "during" matters. False prophets always promise relief later, after the enemy is destroyed. The cost in the present is paid by people the existing regime is already comfortable letting suffer. If the campaign you're watching produces tangible harm to those already vulnerable while expanding the personal authority of the men at the front, you're not watching resistance. You're watching grievance theater.
Second, what are they doing with their access to power? And what have they done with their access to power? Origin matters, but it's not destiny. Real resistance leadership often comes from the people the system has ground down. They have run the permitted channels until those channels closed. They have filed petitions. They have stood in courts. They have organized within the rules. They turned to resistance to alter or abolish governments destructive of their ends because they've gone the route of reform and it hasn't worked. But some genuine resistors do come from inside or near the room. The test is not pedigree. The test is direction. Are they spending their power to weaken abusive authority? Or are they using popular grievance to bargain for a larger place inside it? False prophets often come from power or close enough to smell it. Smell it enough that they want more. Their grievance is not that the system is destroying people. It's that the system has not given them the share they believe they deserve. So they're not fighting power, they're negotiating for a bigger seat at the table by using the people outside the room as leverage. When the negotiation is over, the people outside go back to where they started, except now with worse scapegoats and a stronger regime. This is one of the cleanest tests, but only if you apply it correctly. So instead of asking who they were, ask what they did with the access they had. Did they spend it weakening abusive authority for people without access, or did they use the access to bargain themselves a bigger share? Bacon had a council seat. He didn't use it to constrain Berkeley's regime. He used it to demand permission to expand the regime's violence on his terms.
Third, who's the scapegoat? The false prophet always has one. They have to. The actual goal is a larger share of existing power. So, the energy they've stirred up has to be redirected away from the system itself. It gets aimed at the people the system was already comfortable harming. Politically vulnerable, racially marginalized, religiously despised, economically crushed. Do they? I don't know. Except the regime's fictional framing that the country has a massive immigration problem and that abusive enforcers are legit enforcers of the law. The targeting often arises draped in the language of justice for the common people. But pay attention to who the people do not include. Bacon aimed it at indigenous people. The pattern is older than him and has not stopped. If the campaign you're watching is built around an enemy that the existing power structure is already comfortable with crushing, that's a signal.
Fourth, what's actually being risked? Real resistance carries real weight. The people who do it don't know how it's going to turn out for them, what it might cost them, but they do know there will be a cost, and people they love might have to pay it. False prophets carry a different risk profile. Their cost is marginal. The risk is theatrical. The persecution is media-friendly. The martyrdom is monetized. The system they claim to be opposing helps publish their books, sell their merchandise, fund their next campaign. The risk can be converted into leverage, mythology, office, money, power. The system they claim to oppose may punish them for the performance, but it often rewards the function. That's not how a system treats people who truly threaten it.
The trope of the false prophet works precisely because it's so seductive. The story is so comfortable. The rugged individual is standing alone against the corporate elite, the voice of the common man. A common man the storyteller is always quietly understood to be a particular kind of man challenging the entrenched powers. We want that story. We watch endless movies about that story. American identity was built on a demand for that story. But the historical record doesn't honor the demand. The people who actually challenged abuse of authority in this country were almost never the men in sheep's clothing. They were people doing the slow, costly, unglamorous work of trying every legal channel until the channels closed. Then building parallel networks when they did close, organizing in secret when secrecy is the only option, and finally accepting that ending the abuse would cost something they could not get back. They got demonized in their own time and erased afterward. The men in sheep's clothing, they got monuments.
The principle is older than this country and older than any country you're reading in. "Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. You shall know them by their fruits." Always look at the fruits. That's all I got, folks.