The History of Resistance We Aren't Taught

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They want you to be passive and quiet. But history tells a different story. We’re joined by award-winning comic creator Ben Passmore, author of Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance, to dig into the stories that history books, and Hollywood, whitewash:

  • De-sanitizing Resistance: We discuss how films and media often strip away the political intellect of figures like the Black Liberation Army, reducing revolutionary struggle to nihilism.

  • Community as Armor: Ben puts the focus on true resistance as mutual aid. From the Jane Collective organizing healthcare, to prisoners organizing even from solitary confinement, the most radical act is building a culture of care.

  • The Trap of Online Activism: In an age of surveillance capitalism, Ben warns that we must move beyond the "power fantasy" of social media. Real solidarity happens offline, face-to-face, building trust that algorithms can't suppress.

As MAGA’s Supreme Leader expands the surveillance state through Peter Thiel’s Big Brother Palantir and unleashes a KKK gestapo through ICE, we must learn from unfiltered history and understand what it actually takes to survive.

January 15th is the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. The Civil Rights movement ushered in the Third American Revolution, defeating the authoritarianism of Jim Crow, which John Roberts’ Supreme Court is bringing back. Listen to our episode on Stride Toward Freedom, the memoir by a young MLK Jr. after he captured the world’s attention leading the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott. For more on resistance strategies, listen to our episode on Gene Sharp, author of From Dictatorship to Democracy, and our interview with his protege Jamila Raqib, the executive director of the Albert Einstein Institution: Fire in Our Peace: The Power of Nonviolent Resistance. 

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Andrea Chalupa (00:00:10):

Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of Mr. Jones, the film the Kremlin doesn't want you to see, so be sure to watch it. And this is Gaslit Nation, a show about corruption in America and rising autocracy worldwide.

(00:00:26):

America is going to be saved by everyday heroes. I want to talk about that video that went viral. If you haven't seen it, go to the show notes and watch it. It was taken by a young Native American woman, a mother with a baby and her husband trapped in their house by ICE. She's not in tactical gear. She's not holding a weapon. She has a baby in her arms and she is standing between a terrified DoorDash delivery driver and a swarm of ICE agents in Minneapolis the day after ICE murdered Renee Good. ICE is trying to snatch the DoorDash driver, a woman whose husband has been taken by ICE.

(00:01:14):

So if they get her too, there'll be no one to take care of their baby girl. Who will be left to take care of their daughter? What will happen to her daughter? You hear throughout the video. The DoorDash driver pleading for someone to save her so that she won't be separated from her baby. A deliberate policy of cruelty engineered by Steven Miller. So what does the mother who simply ordered DoorDash do? She takes her phone and starts streaming the encounter to TikTok. She calls 911, who then tells her that the police have said that she needs to give up the DoorDash driver to ICE. At first, in her fear, the mother starts to comply. She's being told by the police to obey. She has half a dozen ICE agents on her lawn and driveway with their hands on their guns. They had just killed a mother like her the day before.

(00:02:08):

But then something extraordinary happens as the video goes on. The mother starts to find her courage, especially because her neighbors are coming out of their houses with whistles blaring. Her neighbors are coming closer and closer, blowing their whistles like the trumpets of angels, and that's when the mother finds her courage. I will play that clip.

Minnesota Resident (00:02:35):

I called the police, but I don't know what to do. A woman was just killed in Minnesota yesterday from you guys and you guys think that we're going to just take the shit lightly? Literally you just shot and killed someone yesterday and you can put on your shit and go to work and that shit just sits right with you. What the fuck is wrong with you guys? You guys are modern day Nazis. My fucking family got killed. Native Americans got killed for you guys to put on that fucking shit. Bullshit. Fucking bullshit. So nowadays we can't order DoorDash without ICE showing up to our house, right? I have a baby. A baby. Get out. Until you guys have a warrant. Signed. Get off my fucking property now. Now. I want judge papers.

(00:03:37):

I want a signed paper. You don't come near my house because you're the one that has your hand on the gun the whole time. I have it all on video. I have 11,000 TikTokers right now. 11,000 TikTok followers that I have. 11,000 followers I have on fucking TikTok.

(00:03:59):

You guys aren't wanted here.Get the fuck off my yard until you have a judge's signature. Off my property. I hope you guys sleep real good at fucking night. Don't ever come back to my fucking house because I will show you. I will sue the fuck out of every one of you. You don't know who the fuck I am. Remember that. You even deserve a police mess, motherfucker. Where's your badge? You ain't got one. Where's your papers? Where's your badge? You guys are illegal on stolen land. You guys are illegal on stolen fucking land. Illegal.

(00:04:47):

I mean it. Fucking land. I am Mickey Walker to Dakota. Miss Walkerson Dakota. Do you know what that means? I am not illegal. Get the fuck out of here. Get out.

Andrea Chalupa (00:05:06):

That is what community defense looks like. We talk a lot on this show about resistance and strategy. Everyone needs to watch and study that video. That mother protected the DoorDash driver who was able to get away. Her neighbors helped her because they prepared for this exact moment. All of us need to prepare now to be brave. All of us need to know what to do, the simple acts we can take like that mother's neighbors who came closer instead of being scared away. Again, this is the day after Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Good in front of her wife and dog when they have a child. Now, this can happen to any of us. That is the message MAGA is sending us deliberately. That lawlessness, that Nazi fever dream. And the only way to cast out that darkness is prepare now to be brave. Learn the basic steps, the things we can and must do.

(00:06:09):

They're expecting us to shrink, choose courage and defiance, especially in the simplest acts. And that is how we win. That is the lesson of Euromaidan. Ukraine's revolution of dignity. Ukraine's Trumpian dictator was overthrown because more and more people rushed to Maidan Square. Every time the state terrorized and brutalized protestors, more and more people showed up. More and more of us are needed now to show up and keep showing up. We can't back down now or we will become just as caged as the Russian opposition and the MAGA dictatorship will be emboldened to carry out greater violence against us and the world. We must keep showing up to learn how head to the show notes where we put together resources for all of us to prepare to be brave. Thanks to Gaslit Nation listeners at Monday's Salon. We can all be brave, be those everyday heroes who are going to liberate our country and the world from the MAGA threat.

(00:07:09):

This week, we are having a necessary and difficult conversation about what resistance actually requires. We're joined by the brilliant award-winning comic creator, Ben Passmore. Ben is the author of the comic, Your Black Friend, and his new compelling work, Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance. Ben is here to force us to confront an uncomfortable reality. Deeply oppressed groups in America don't have the luxury of debating civility. For them, and increasingly for all of us, what the state calls the radical left is just an act of self-defense and survival. We are living in a time where MAGA is trying to criminalize resistance, and they're doing it with tools that the Gestapo could only dream of. In the show notes, we link to an investigation by the ACLU about flock safety. You've probably seen these cameras. They're everywhere now. They're license plate readers that police departments are installing in neighborhoods across America to build a searchable, AI-driven database of your movements.

(00:08:16):

Combine that with Peter Thiel's Palantir, building a real life big brother for the US government right now working to take over every federal government agency to be able to map every American. Under Trump's first term, Palantir became embedded in the DOJ and one DOJ prosecutor at the time told me that they were becoming increasingly dependent on Palantir to map criminal networks. So now they are mapping us, the American people, and we know how they will use that to try to control, suppress, and kill us and blame us for it. I will link to reporting on the show notes about Palantir's big brother. So this surveillance state that MAGA's supreme leader is expanding. Obviously, they have Project 2025 that we here at Gaslit Nation warned about really early on. I want you all to know, according to one tracking system that I'll link to in the show notes, they have completed 50% of their 900 page blueprint of Project 2025.

(00:09:24):

It's only been a year and they're already at the 50% mark. So when you see a woman standing on her lawn, screaming at ice, we have to understand that is the new frontline. That is a new reality for us, just trying to go about your business and then suddenly you are forced to save a life in the moment, in the moment. I know this is all very heavy and people would love to just go into the matrix and live some illusion that none of this is happening. And I know people are probably choosing that. I have people in my life who are completely blissfully checked out and have no idea what's going on. I remember the day I had explained the Venezuelan invasion to someone that had happened a week prior. That is the level of hedonism and escape people are choosing instead of engaging in order to stop this.

(00:10:15):

And if we do not stop it, no level of hedonism and escape will become enough. I promise you. The general German population learned that. So we see the tech, we see the 75 billion ICE ward chest. And yes, I know people doomscroll and then they just dissociate, but we cannot afford to look away. And we must also, especially learn from liberation movements in our nation's long history of authoritarianism that built this country with the Holocaust, of course, of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans that was so massive that it literally changed the temperature of the planet. I will link to that reporting in the show notes. Now this week, on January 15th, we celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. And every year like clockwork, the establishment tries to sanitize him. They try to turn King into a teddy bear. They quote, "I have a dream." And forget that the man was considered the most dangerous leader in America by the FBI.

(00:11:19):

The Civil Rights Movement was the third American Revolution. It defeated the authoritarianism of the Jim Crow South, a system that John Roberts Supreme Court is working hard to bring back. On that front, brace yourself for several rulings coming out in June that may further expand the new Jim Crow. The Civil Rights Movement defeated all that through smart strategy. They won because people were willing to take educated risks. They prepared to be brave. They practiced being brave. They visualized being brave and they were committed to showing up for one another. That is how they won. If you want to understand the real Martin Luther King Jr. Listen to our episode on his memoir, which was part of our read and resist book club from 2025, Stride Toward Freedom. He wrote that as a young man who had just come on the scene launching and leading the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott.

(00:12:16):

He grappled with the same questions we do today on self-defense. How do you deal with organizing people that hate each other? People were tired, tempers were flaring up, but they marched and they organized an economic boycott, and that took on the Klansmen in power and finally won their rights. Now, also, in that spirit, be sure to read a piece in the nation that I'll link to in the show notes on the corporation's funding ICE because MAGA, Trump, Stephen Miller, they are just the narcissistic faces of a larger, greedy, corporate machine that thinks that they're safe hiding in the shadows. And if you can bring those people into the light, make those corporate bosses famous, that is how we confront what's happening in our country and begin to dismantle it. Now, in our show notes, we also have a link to the singing revolution, the incredible true story of how the Baltic states, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, used culture and music to break free from Soviet occupation.

(00:13:27):

That story is extraordinary. It is a reminder that joy is also resistance. So to all of our beautiful artists out there, get your mind's thinking and dreaming about ways that culture and music, whatever your drug of choice is for your higher mind, to feel at home in this exile in hell that we're all in. Whatever your spirit calling is, find how you can bring that culture, that song into this moment because that has brought down dictatorships in the past. That is all very real. Now, go check that out in the show notes, the singing revolution. And so in terms of the larger focus for all of us, and again, we're going to go into this with my interview with Ben Passmore. It all comes down to this, and that is solidarity, real solidarity. That is what saved that terrified DoorDash driver. That is what that woman, that mother who just was ordering food chose.

(00:14:22):

She chose solidarity. So for that, I want you to also check out in the show notes, the Prairie Land Defendants. It's a movement providing legal support for activists who are being targeted by the state of Texas in a crackdown that ... So basically Texas is using the recent shooting last September in Dallas at the ICE Detention Center. So they're using that shooting as an excuse to crack down on activism generally in the state of Texas. So please check out Prairie Land Defendants in the show notes and support innocent people in Texas who are being targeted in an authoritarian crackdown. It is that kind of solidarity that will help us overcome the gaslighting that is trying to divide us. And finally, we have in the show notes a police accountability and reform checklist on how to demand transparency from your local police department. Do not let them buy those flop cameras without a fight at your local city council meeting.

(00:15:20):

Things are going to get worse before they get better. And obviously, as always, Gaslit Nation is here for you throughout this time. We're going to work together to build a better, freer country. And thank you so much to all of our listeners at Monday Salon. It is thanks to you. It's thanks to you that I was able to share these resources with our broader audience. You brought so many incredible ideas and so much beautiful energy. Thank you. Thank you all. And it is an important reminder that none of us are alone in this. Okay? We have each other and we're absolutely going to overcome because we have no other choice. It is for our own sake and our own safety and the safety of the world. And we will win. We will win in acts large and small. We're going to be so tired of winning.

(00:16:09):

We are absolutely going to win. And remember, prepare now to be brave and go to the show notes on resources on how to do that. We're only as free as we are brave. Now, here's my discussion with author and artist, Ben Passmore on the history of resistance you weren't taught and the future we have to fight for.

(00:16:30):

Welcome to a very special episode of Gaslit Nation. I am joined by Ben Passmore, an award-winning comic book creator. His collection, Your Black Friend, was nominated for an Eisner Award and won the Ignatz Award. Passmore is also the author of the ongoing series, Dayglo Ayhole. His latest comic is Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance. So my first question for you, Ben, have you seen the film One Battle After Another?

Ben Passmore (00:17:03):

Oh, I have. Yeah, I was avoiding it, but I saw it more recently.

Andrea Chalupa (00:17:07):

And what did you think of it?

Ben Passmore (00:17:09):

Well, I went in thinking that it would be the kind of movie for me. And I even had seen some creators that I like whose politics don't necessarily align, said that they disliked it. So I was like, oh, okay, so I might really like this. I unfortunately thought it was pretty disgusting, but not because of the political violence so much, but because of how it treated Black women in the movie. But I do enjoy a movie that seems to be inspired more or less by groups like the BLA or the George Jackson Brigade.

Andrea Chalupa (00:17:48):

No, I hear you on that. And I can link to some analysis on how Black women were portrayed in the film and there's an oversexualization, but at the same time, there are also strong Black women characters.

Ben Passmore (00:17:59):

Well, I don't think that they have much character at all. The one the daughter I think sort of gets the most, and I'm not sure if this is a bridge question or if this is what you're trying to get into, but there's so many parts of the movie in which we don't really get much of an idea of Tiana Taylor makes some hard choices and some wide swings, and we have no real idea about why she makes those decisions.

Andrea Chalupa (00:18:26):

True, true.

Ben Passmore (00:18:28):

And this has been pointed out by other people, and my analysis is going to be limited. Her story, I think, seems to be cribbed specifically from Assata Shakur who recently passed. And it's such a, in my opinion, sort of hateful and dishonest sort of mutation of her story, this hyper-sexualized Black woman who seems to just be reflexively and narcissistically engaging in violence, which doesn't really have anything to do with the Black women who are in the BLA really, really at all. Even that she makes a selfish decision and turns to the Feds famously or maybe not so famously be considering how they approached it in this movie. Members like the BLA rarely snitched and often tried to break out of prison, Asada being a really great emblematic example of that. So the movie, I really had hoped that the movie was going to be much more subversive, but I feel like I walked away being like, it's a really good looking movie and there was a lot of action that was exciting, but it ultimately felt like a really reactionary movie.

(00:19:38):

And if I wasn't particularly politically inclined in the way that I was, I would end up feeling like it was pretty nihilistic. I would walk away feeling pretty nihilistically about revolution.

Andrea Chalupa (00:19:49):

I think one of the reasons why it had such a zeitgeist moment on social media where everyone was talking about it is because it came out obviously at a time where it's very much of the moment. It looked like it was made last week, but at the same time, it was coming out when no one felt like we had any opposition to what Trump and Elon Musk in Project 2025 were doing to us. And so I feel like on some level, the chatter that exploded online was sort of this power fantasy of having any type of resistance with a call center and code words and safe houses and just the fact that there was a resistance that was even seemed organized and willing to go there in some respect. I think that really struck a nerve with people.

Ben Passmore (00:20:43):

Yeah, I really hear that. I think the current conversation that's happening about Antifa an idea, which we saw that maybe come to prominence during the Biden administration, he said that himself. Something that comes up for me a lot is this sort of complication in the United States when it comes to resistance, that most of that kind of resistance, which my opinion is really structured or positioned really perfectly to nip fascism in the bud to the degree that one could do that in the United States. Someone like me would argue that it's an inherently fascist country and it's construction in a lot of ways, but this kind of fascism that we're seeing now, Antifa is the living, breathing movement filled with different kinds of formations. And there are a lot of people, I would say around my age who started off as teenagers, I'm not saying this is me, but there's members of Antifa who've been fighting Nazis since the early 2000s that dedicated their life to it and they get really, really invisibilized often by the same people who now are really hand wringing about what should we do.

(00:21:52):

And it's this dynamic that I often find frustrating where these sorts of groups or this sort of action becomes romantic, but only as something we can't do. You know what I mean? It's top down, we sort of don't really learn about, say the George Jackson Brigade, we don't learn about how these groups come out of protest organizations, reformist organizations that fall short and really passionate people, not just sort of hedonists, really passionate, sincere people join formations like this. And I understand the catharsis, but I feel like it comes out of such, for some people, like a willful repression of these real movements and that almost the fantasy serves people more than the actual resistance people themselves.

Andrea Chalupa (00:22:40):

Right, exactly. Mona Eltahawy on the show was saying, women especially need to stop cosplaying Handmaid's Tale and get into the streets and build a real revolution.

Ben Passmore (00:22:50):

Man, it's so tough because I love that book.

Andrea Chalupa (00:22:56):

So I want to ask you, so obviously the United States of America, 250 years old, it was founded with Native American genocide that was so sweeping that it literally changed the temperature, the global temperature on this planet. And then of course, slavery, which lasted for hundreds of years, the founding fathers had a lot of lofty ideas and then obviously cut out non-white people and women. And it's been Christian nationalists and repressive ever since. I looked it up. The two worst presidents, largely considered the two worst presidents were the guy right before the Civil War and the guy right after who basically sabotaged Reconstruction and ushered in Jim Crow. So as somebody who has spent decades studying authoritarianism and dictatorship, I look at the history of the United States and I'm like, this is what authoritarianism autocracy looks like, but it's just for non-white people, including especially non-Christians.

(00:24:00):

And we've only really had democracy just for a generation around 40 years. And in response to finally getting the Civil Rights Act and then women's liberation as well, we're now seeing this massive white rage backlash. And if you go through history, if you look at American history, as you know, because all your work focuses on this, but I'm just speaking to the general listener, if you look at American history, all progress made by the oppressed groups is met with a white rage backlash. And I want to ask you obviously to zero in on some of the historical voices, the stories that you highlight in your book. Tell us, for instance, about Robert Charles. Who was he and what was his reaction to this American authoritarianism?

Ben Passmore (00:24:53):

Yeah, I appreciate the question and also the nature of the reaction to Robert Charles, of which I could only focus on a bit of speaks to the nature of the backlash. Robert Charles was a manual laborer who grew up in Mississippi and Copia County and moved to New Orleans for a couple reasons, but one of them being that his gun was stolen by a white worker and he went and got it back, not peacefully, and he escaped to New Orleans. And while he was there, he distributed magazines that were made by the Immigration Society, which was a society with its own complicated history, but more or less was promising a way for Black people to immigrate back to Africa amongst other places. So he was just saving money to try to immigrate to Africa while sharing information with people. He was really invested in outlets like the Voice of Missions, which was a Negro newspaper that advocated both legal equality and armed self-defense, two ideas that we sort of think of as being separate during the civil rights era, which is all pretty blended together.

(00:26:03):

But anyway, one night in July, he was out with his younger roommate and they were waiting for his girlfriend and her roommate to come out so they could go do stuff. He was in sort of a mixed part of town, but it was more white than Black. And someone decided him and his roommate weren't supposed to be there. It's a very modern story. The police go and harass them and start beating Robert Charles and attempt to shoot him, and he shoots them first. And that leads into a basically weekend long conflict between Robert Charles who was wounded in the leg and about 10,000 police officers, soldiers, and racist farmers who come into the city to try to hunt him down. And ultimately, it's one man against 10,000. The odds were not in his favor and he doesn't make it. But I start the book because I feel like in a lot of ways it sort of illustrates the stakes for us when we try to just fight for our own lives.

(00:27:04):

Robert Charles, he became a hero immediately. This mob went out and they started looking for him in the Black community. They were beating people, they were killing people, and the Black population didn't snitch on him. They harbored him even after he died. And this has happened in a couple instances where there's a Black shooter, rumors that there are more than one spread immediately and they go hunting for them. There were several Black men who similarly advocated for themselves through armed self-defense in Louisiana and Mississippi for years after that, and papers at the time described them as a Robert Charles type.

Andrea Chalupa (00:27:44):

Yeah. And to translate that for the white people listening and who are horrified to hear a Black cop killer, imagine this guy sounds like Robert Charles sounds like the Luigi Mangione of his day.

(00:27:56):

We're all suffering from fighting our health insurance and people are going bankrupt because of health insurance. I mean, I'm not ... Gosh, how do I say this? But there was this massive upswell, massive upswell on the internet where people, women were like, "Luigi Mangione, let me cook you dinner. Luigi Mangione, will you marry me? " And it's just this feeling of the system is trying to kill us. They're trying to starve us to death by denying our health coverage. They're taking away our jobs or ways of supporting ourselves, and nothing is stopping it. Voting is not stopping it. Protesting is not stopping it. And then when you have someone like Luigi Mangione emerge or like a Robert Charles emerge, it's like the system suddenly is forced to contend with the fact that they've pushed people too far. It's like the riots are the language of the unheard.

(00:28:43):

And I want to ask you about that larger question because we're living in a time of a political violence crisis. All the documentation for years has been tracking how the crisis is largely coming from the far right. In the decade of Trump's rise through his birtherism movement, putting a target in the head of the first Black president and his family, the FBI was publishing warnings and saying that white supremacy, domestic terrorism is a greater threat to our country than ISIS. And now you have political violence with these mass shooters leaving manifestos citing Trump and MAGA and Hitler and egging each other on, performing for each other in these online groups. And then of course you have in Minnesota, a superstar Democrat state leader who really made Minnesota into a sanctuary state a strong progressive model of what good laws, good governance could look like. Melissa Hortman, she and her husband and their dog are gunned down by a far right MAGA supporter.

(00:29:49):

And then you have Charlie Kirk who was just killed on campus by a gun after having harassed academics and other experts who called for gun bans on campuses, it's a very strange time that we're living in and people are very squeamish of talking about anything like armed resistance or these subjects. And they want to basically hold hands and sing John Lennon's Imagine. And the reality is that throughout the progress that we have built across this country, it required people laying down their lives. Women had to do it to fight for the right to vote. Certainly in the civil rights movement, they marched into violence. They were beaten. But there are also episodes of people that were so cornered they had no choice but to physically fight back or they would be killed. Could you comment about that larger sort of political violence crisis we have in America right now and people who might be listening to this and thinking, "This is a bridge too far for me." How can you be advocating for something like militant Resistance?"

Ben Passmore (00:31:02):

Yeah. I mean, you said a lot of things, and I think my head is going in a couple different directions. I think the Luigi comparison, I think is apt in certain ways and not in others. I think that the irony for me, and I'm certainly not the first person to point this out, but a more apt comparison is John Wayne or any 90s action star that people really rah-rah for, who's one person against a whole group of people. Taken. People are really into the movie Taken because it's someone who's just trying to get his daughter and he's fighting a bunch of assistants.

Andrea Chalupa (00:31:39):

Oh, Liam Neeson, I have a special set of skills.

Ben Passmore (00:31:41):

Right, exactly.

Andrea Chalupa (00:31:42):

My dad loves that movie because he's got two daughters. Yeah, go on.

Ben Passmore (00:31:45):

And I think some of what makes it easy for people is that they imagine themselves in the position of the person who's fighting the system. That's obvious. I think something I like to try and point out is everyone who's featured in my book, and by and large, this is true, that Black political shooters are not hunting random white people. In the long history of Black political shooters, and I like to think that I'm pretty aware of all of the ones, there's a really small percentage who just shoot random people. They usually shoot cops. They usually shoot people that are trying to kill them. And I think in this way, something that's been really successful to try and destroy the solidarity that's necessarily across races in a country like this, is that we've sort of flattened out everything and called it violence. In a lot of ways, I think also this sort of conversation around, oh, should we do violence or not do violence really ignores the fact that violence is here.

(00:32:49):

Robert Williams, who's a civil rights era figure, a contemporary of Martin Luther King who sort of clashed with King and a lot of the Christian nonviolence movement. He says, violence is as American as apple pie. Violence is how white society, that's how they got their wealth. There was no point in which they asked nicely for all the riches that they have. So to me, it's not really a question of whether or not to do violence. The conversation around the civil rights movement, even among people like Akwami Turrey who went on to advocate for anti-colonial violence more or less, it was about strategy. What makes sense for the Black population we're a minority of the population. So certain sort of concepts like insurrectionary violence are not that common. People often don't think that it's really going to work for the Black population to fight the United States government to a standstill.

(00:33:47):

Usually the focus is on self-defense, just trying to stay alive. And if you look at the history of, you talked about reconstruction, a time in which the Black population was abandoned by the US government to the Confederates who went on and tried to conduct in myriad ways like the reestablishment of slave society, the slave economy. It turned from chattel slavery to sharecropping. And there's a lot of Black death that happened in that time in response to Black people trying to participate in the government. So armed self-defense, among other things, is the only reason, in my opinion, that there are still so many Black people just walking the earth. So for me, that's the conversation. I think in these more recent things, in some ways the conversation is like, oh, the left and right, who's doing the most violence? I think that binary feels a bit inaccurate.

(00:34:40):

For myself, I'm an anarchist. So if you're asking who is the left? Democrats are not the left. Not even in an insulting way. There's center left. They're much more conservative than leftists anywhere else on the planet. So in that way, it's like our tally system is all off. I think a lot of the hand ringing around Charlie Kirk dying, his death is as political as a Breonna Taylor death in a lot of ways. But people die all the time and we sort of act like, oh, we're in some sort of crisis when there's a prominent death when it's like we've been at crisis. It brings up questions that have been unanswered since the beginning, in my opinion. I hope this was a response to what he said.

Andrea Chalupa (00:35:25):

Yeah, no, I mean, he was murdered. It was just the shock of that from what the reporting is saying so far by a white man.

Ben Passmore (00:35:32):

Yes.

Andrea Chalupa (00:35:34):

Wide on white violence. I would just like to say that in my fascination about studying all this, because I study the history of Ukraine. When I study the history of Ukraine, I'm studying the history of violence. And just to sort of make a comparison to everything that you just went down, in Euromaidan, Ukraine's popular uprising, that started off as a peaceful protest. And from the jump, the riot police unleashed violence and the people pushed back by flooding the streets, peacefully protesting, building camps, building libraries in the square where they're living for months in the bitter bitter cold. And it wasn't until the regime got violent and they brought in snipers and they started just shooting people and Ukrainians were armed and they shot back. And there were fiery battles in the street and European leaders had to come, did not want to deal with this mess.

(00:36:35):

And they had a broker a peace deal and they were able to compromise and get early elections. And then a young man in his 20s jumped up on stage in the middle of the sea of protestors, grabbed the microphone from Vitale Klitchko, the heavyweight champion of the world, who's delivering the message to protestors, grabs the mic from him and says, "The president has to get out or will make him get out." And then president ran off to Russia where he's been to this day and the country got new elections, new government, and then Russia retaliated by invading them. And now those protestors went off to war and fought the war and then the war has been raging ever since for 10 years. And I remember during Euromaidan, this people- powered movement and all the disinformation around it, part of the disinformation was focusing on how violent these protestors were.

(00:37:22):

I remember, including among the left, because during that time, Russia Today, RT, a lot of my friends in the left were going on RT because RT, unlike CNN, would give them a TV spot. And so they would go on RT and they would talk and talk. And I remember RT and a lot of these leftists were saying, "Look how violent the Ukrainians are. Look at them throwing these Molotov cocktails." And there's even a documentary that was made that was just montages of Ukrainian protestors violently fighting back. And so as a Ukrainian American who has watched all this unfold, I think the larger thing is you and I are not advocating like get out in the street and start shooting people. And the larger conversation is very simply a matter of self-defense. If they are coming at you with riot police and snipers, and if you don't win this battle, their corruption will just overtake you and they'll kill you slowly in other ways by robbing you and your children of a future.

(00:38:22):

So you have no choice but to fight back. And it's a matter of self-defense. And so I wanted just to get your thoughts on why do you think people are squeamish when it comes to this topic? And I think personally, why part of me is squeamish when it comes to this topic is because when violence does happen, you lose control. There's no guarantee that Ukraine's revolution was going to succeed, for instance. I did write a piece at that time warning it was going to head towards a war because things were just at a boiling point. But there is a feeling of when violence is unleashed in some way, shape or form, we're going to ultimately lose control.

Ben Passmore (00:39:04):

I think one thing for me personally, but I think also goes for political traditions that I have affinity with, but maybe are not exactly my own in my opinion. When it comes to concepts of self-defense, the original violence was chattel slavery. That violence has continued. Things that might even be perceived as non-retaliatory violence or non-defensive violence to me is still self-defense. We're a colonized people. How other people want to, other communities with a different history want to think about violence, so to speak, maybe it's going to be different. So I can only speak to the tradition I'm a part of. I think something, and thinking about Euromaidan from my perspective is interesting because the anarchist community, sort of similar to when Russia invaded, there is affinity across borders for us because we don't believe in borders like that. But also there's a recognition as a Black political person, solidarity is very important to me.

(00:40:06):

So Euromaidan was happening and anarchists were, we were sharing the information that people were learning about how to make catapults, how to do armor and stuff. We recognized that a culture to defend yourself is really, really necessary because we're already out of control. Our safety is only measured by our ability to defend ourselves or whatever sort of pseudo ethics that the state has. I've been thinking a lot about Myanmar and the arc there. And it's something that I understand is that a lot of students, once the Army started shooting at them, they went to where a lot of these ethnic areas are, where people have been fighting the dictator for a long time. And because those communities had built a culture of advocating for themselves in that way, they were able to share information with people. And I think people really are, and this is written about in things like This Nonviolence Will Get You Killed or Pacifism is Pathology.

(00:41:10):

This sort of veneration of nonviolence, a lot of the squeamishness comes from a place that's understandable. Being part of large scale organized violence is not good for your brain. It produces a lot of things amongst communities that become for very harmful inward. But I don't think that that's the conversation usually. It's just sort of this moralizing around having some capacity to defend yourself, having some culture of conflict. There was so much repression coming from Democrats, liberals around the antifascist movement, and a lot of it had to do with just not liking to see people hit people. But now we see it might've been better if we were able to dissuade a lot of fascists early on. There's certain people who aren't around anymore who admitted that they got punched in the face too many times. Richard Spencer is a non-factor in part in my belief because of all the conflict that was happening in the street against his organizing.

(00:42:10):

Matthew Heimbach is nowhere for that reason as well. But what I would hope is that people understand the necessity to build a culture around defending yourself outside of these sort of do- nothing government structures who really just want to control the conversation. A lot of things that we sort of venerate and take for granted that are reactions to groups like the Panthers, something I think about a lot is the nonprofit industrial complex. This is something that did not exist during the Black Power Movement is specifically in response to create an off-ramp to revolutionary organizations like that from building up.

Andrea Chalupa (00:42:48):

How can Americans today, especially non-white Americans, how can they defend themselves when ICE just got a $75 billion war chest from Trump's big ugly bill in Congress? What are some strategies that you've seen from studying history that you think would be beneficial for groups to be aware of today?

Ben Passmore (00:43:11):

Yeah, and you brought up the movie One Battle After The Other, and the only part I liked really was the ways in which Benicio del Toro. And the Latino community in the background in the set piece was able to marshal this plan that they had to keep people safe. And I think that's exactly what I'm talking about. We have a lot of models, even outside of the BLA or outside of groups like the George Jackson Brigade, we have groups like The Janes, the Jane Collective who was sort of a decentralized group of women who empowered themselves through organizing abortions and information around abortions. We have a model for these things. It is true that we're dealing with federal agents with a lot of money and a lot of infrastructure, and that there's no real safe way to deal with that. I think some of it is just that people need to accept that no one is coming to save us, that we're the ones that we're waiting for.

(00:44:13):

If you talk with Panthers who are still around, for instance, I have a relationship with Ashanti Alston and he has conversations with younger people who are constantly looking to him to give them answers. And he's like, it's you. You have as many resources as past generations had, and the stakes have always been dire. So I think it's really just about taking initiative, accepting that you can't wait around and do the first best thing. I think we're unfortunately in for a really long, hard period and they're really banking on our fear and our inactivity because we're not really sure what to do. I think something that's really encouraging is seeing how many people who don't think of themselves as political actors going out and confronting ICE. Someone was telling me recently, I think I was in Chicago and they were joking about how dads came out and started chasing ICE around on scooters and stuff.

(00:45:15):

It's nice to see that people are willing to be uncompromising, but I think we have to make sure that we don't let anyone take it away from us this time.

Andrea Chalupa (00:45:25):

A hundred percent. And in the whole history that you focus on throughout your book, what are some of the strategies that stuck with you that you feel could be inspiration for us today?

Ben Passmore (00:45:38):

Well, there's one section that's about Sanyika Shakur, who was a Crip who went to prison for a long time. And while in prison, he was part of a brief history of these consolidated Crip organizations. There was a few of them. Overall, they were trying to solve a problem that happened in prison, which crips of all different sets would be put together and there was a lot of violence between sets. So they were trying to stop the violence within the prison because there was other people to fight. So the CCO that's neat, Shakur was a part of, according to him, organized study groups, exercise. There was a kind of free store for impoverished people, and this is all prisoners organizing this stuff within the wall that is initiated by people who are in solitary confinement. So the hardest, in my opinion, the hardest possible environment to organize anything.

(00:46:37):

The big thing that I came away with that is that culture is really important. Creating a culture that people can live inside of and resist, recognizing each other as people that we need to be in solidarity with and have that be material. I think unfortunately we came away with this idea that these significant periods of struggle were mostly characterized by a lot of really cool speeches and a lot of cute marches when in fact a lot of this stuff seems to have been built by a lot of really intentional material support, struggle and conflict that happened largely in silence outside the camera.

Andrea Chalupa (00:47:17):

So did these episodes of self-defense throughout America's history by Black people, did these episodes of self-defense actually bring progress or did they bring greater repression in some cases?

Ben Passmore (00:47:33):

I think it's both. This idea, and I've been thinking a lot about the conversation between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein. And one thing that I think a lot about is Ezra Klein's lack of understanding that he's not entitled to win. It felt like a very white misunderstanding about how things go. And Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose politics are not exactly my own, he expressed something that I really came away with really strongly while studying the book and something that I think is noble, but really, really difficult is that more likely than not, you are going to dedicate your whole life to something that you're not going to see in the end. It's not Lord of the Rings. You don't have a big fight, and at the end you walk into the sunset and everything is good. This stuff happens brick by brick little by little, and there is really strong repression, particularly when they're at their weakest.

(00:48:27):

People will be like, "Oh, don't do this, don't do that, because they'll come back harder." You're contributing to your own repression when you do that. You should expect resistance and still sort of believe in whatever dreams that are driving you despite that.

Andrea Chalupa (00:48:42):

Yeah. During Euromaidan, I saw it in all of our organizing pages online. I don't know if these were Kremlin trolls, saboteurs trying to invade the movement, but people were saying, "Everyone needs to stop, stop protesting because the regime is going to turn off the internet and then Ukraine will be isolated from the world." There were messages posted by people who maybe were Ukrainians or pretending to be saying, "Stop fighting back, everyone, or we're going to be punished." That attitude can be contagious, but when a critical mass happens, it's impossible. People lose control. And one thing I've been watching, this ICE war chest of $75 billion, and then big tech, Silicon Valley rising up with Peter Thiels and Curtis Yarvin saying, "We got to go back to dictatorship fiefdoms. We need to basically establish a dictatorship to regain control." All of these forces that are unleashing violence on us, openly talking about it, openly planning it.

(00:49:50):

Project 2025 was a 900-page blueprint for violence. And I know the whole history, the violence has always been here. We've got the largest prison population, all of that. But it very much seems like the writing is on the wall where AI is coming in. It's getting harder for entry level people to get any job. Kids are having to live at home longer. Parents are being told by financial experts in the media, get ready to support your children at least until they're 30 years old. And it seems like the powers that be, the anxiety is growing, that America's income inequality crisis is just going to get so increasingly worse over the years that this ICE war chest and all the cop cities throughout this country are really for all of us. And it's sort of their answer isn't, let's do a basic universal income, let's clean up our healthcare system, let's invest in the people.

(00:50:55):

So it seems like their solution is just to put the police state on steroids with this $75 billion war chest in the cop cities throughout the land and get ready for the unrest that is inevitably going to come when no one has jobs anymore.

Ben Passmore (00:51:15):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's interesting too. For my community, there's pretty early on when Trump was elected, people said, "Stay inside. They're looking for any excuse to start a riot or whatever." Which I'd spoke to that before, it's kind of illogical thinking. But also as you said, many people said early on ICE is not going to stop at whoever they're starting with. And this is going to bleed over. I feel like people really started to understand that in Chicago when they raided that whole apartment building. And also early on around the time of the Black Codes when they're sweeping up Black people for just standing around, which is a dynamic we still have, but that was to help man a prison system, the continuation of slavery that built up, I said in the comic, companies like Coca-Cola. So to think that they won't do that again is incredibly naive.

(00:52:13):

They weren't really soured off it in the first place. There's been some marginal conflicts that people lost their life for to make them feel like they're afraid to be as open about it, but it seems like they've got that energy back where they are willing to be very blatant about it. So I certainly agree with what you're saying. This ICE stuff, it should have been enough, in my opinion, for people to be angry at ICE long before this. You know what I mean? Both Biden, Obama, right waging horrible, horrible systems of capture on the same population. You know what I mean? People should have already been angry about this, but its cruelty has never been more obvious. And I think anyone that doesn't think that it's coming for them also, whatever sort of disaffected suburbanite, they should also understand that it will come for them as well.

(00:53:07):

That's the thing with white supremacists. It's really just about this very small cluster of people. They'll come for you too.

Andrea Chalupa (00:53:15):

Absolutely. And we're entering an age, we're already in it, but it's only going to accelerate of mass disruption. Look at how technology is advancing and people are rolling their eyes like, oh, AI is bullshit and there's a bubble and all that. We're just at the very beginning. You and I are old enough to see how social media came on the scene and just decimated newsrooms. I started off working in a magazine at Conde Nast where we had an entire fact-checking department, an entire research department, an entire production department, an entire photo department. This was a hugely resourced magazine. And then the internet came along and just killed all of those jobs. And now one person at whatever outlets are left do all those things that used to be fully staffed departments. And so if people are underestimating what AI is going to do, especially to white collar jobs and the massive disruption that's going to rot on people's lives, including in suburbia, I think it's fair to say we're in for very interesting times, especially the next 10 years.

(00:54:24):

And I want people to understand they need to wake up that, as you said, it's not just about one leader, it's a system. Just getting rid of Trump isn't going to make this all go away. The Trump movement is information. They will worship his AI hologram, you know what I mean? After he's long dead, his cult will continue on long after he's gone. And so I think all of us need to get real about the history of resistance and understand that the history of resistance very much included self-defense.

Ben Passmore (00:55:02):

Yeah, I appreciate that. I think also we've said this, so much of his kind of white supremacy is nostalgic. He's pointing towards things that existed before. And I think that people that right now, people are very excited that Marjorie Taylor Green is coming for him or whatever. It is very likely either through old age or something else that he will not be around anymore. But like you said, this sickness is going to stay.

Andrea Chalupa (00:55:30):

It built America.

Ben Passmore (00:55:32):

Exactly. Something about the technology stuff that a lot of my career working with the NIB, and I was first published by Vice Magazine and stuff, very new media era stuff.

Andrea Chalupa (00:55:44):

Vice is gone. The nib is gone. Yeah.

Ben Passmore (00:55:47):

Right. It's all gone. Yeah. So for me, I'm like, yeah, I will maybe sometimes focus too much on the effects of things like AI on my industry. But more broadly for most people, people be like, "Oh, you don't get to work for Nice no more, boo hoo." I'm like, "Yeah, absolutely. You don't need to worry about that." But I just think about the scale of isolation that we see amongst younger and younger people that just social skills is going through the toilet. And when I think about a lot of the advantages of why a lot of past movements were possible is because people were meeting people in real life. The fact that people don't want to leave their cell phones at home, even though it attracts you, it listens you. And through AI, it's only going to be even easier for them to monitor you.

(00:56:37):

People don't want to leave that at home to go meet with people. Even though we know the bar for who is going to get repressed is going to get lower and lower. It's not just going to be some weirdo militants, you know what I mean? It easily could be anybody. We're seeing everyday people confront ICE because they're just snatching people off the street and any one of those people can get tracked and then you a liability with whoever you met with. And that's more when I think about the inequities created, the devastation created by technology, sure, it's like ruining the ability for a lot of good media, a lot of good ways that I find information, a lot of good jobs for creative people. But more than that, it's locking us up in these isolated prison cells that we think is better. It's really wild how much technology has enabled this fascism to come in just uncontested.

Andrea Chalupa (00:57:32):

It's the surveillance state of corporate tech. They know more on us than the Stasi in East Berlin.

(00:57:41):

I wanted just to share this and I'll just throw this out. I am obsessed with Albert Camus because he's so handsome and he was just absolutely brilliant in the French resistance. And one of the things ... So I had this uncle who was born in Ukraine when he got to the refugee camp in Germany, he had to be in a hospital because he was, as a child who's so traumatized from what he saw in World War II, a story of a headless soldier whose head had been blown off. The body was still moving. Almost like it was like dancing, creepy things and that really traumatized him as a child and he had to go through a lot of healing. And through that, he turned to literature and he would go on and become a professor of literature at Rutgers University. And he had the most beautiful library in his Catskills Farmhouse.

(00:58:30):

And he said I could take whatever book I wanted. And I just gravitated towards Albert Camus' book. I think the title was Resistance and Death. I'll link to it in the show notes. But in that book that I gravitated towards, my soul was like, this is the book. There was a chapter called Letter to a German Friend, and I love this essay so much. It was Albert Camus in the French Resistance. And this was a time when France, under Nazi occupation, people were getting rounded up, not just the Jews, like anybody that was daring to fight back against the Nazis, raided at dawn, put up against the wall shot, and the deep shame and trauma and terror of living under occupation. And here was Albert Camus publishing in the French resistance newspapers, keeping the morale of the spirit of his people up. And as part of that, he wrote this brilliant essay, letter to a German friend where he was writing to an imaginary German friend based on these conversations.

(00:59:29):

And he says to them, this German, the advantage that you Germans had over us French is that you were eager to kill. You were drawn to the violence for the sake of violence, that nihilism. We did not have that. We could not bring ourselves to that because we were fighting for a higher civilization. But then when we understood that the only way to fight for truth is to fight for truth, we ended up getting information and resististing you. And so I want to just read from that letter and then just get your thoughts on this. And this is what he writes. And he's talking about the occupation. "We paid for it with humiliations and silences, with bitter experiences, with prison sentences, with executions at dawn, with desertions, with separations, with daily pings of hunger, with emaciated children, and above all, with forced repentance. But that's the way things go. It took us all that time to find out if we had the right to kill men, if we are allowed to add to the atrocious misery of this world. And it is this time lost and recaptured, this defeat accepted and surmounted, these scruples paid for with blood that give us the right, we the French, to think today that we entered this war with hands clean, washed with the purity of victims and the condemned and that we will come out of this with hands clean, but this time washed with the purity of a great victory won against injustice and over ourselves."

(01:00:58):

So I'm sharing that because the larger conversation we're having is one that resistance groups have struggled with throughout history. And people see self-defense as violence. In reality, it is self-defense. And as you said at the start of our conversation, the violence itself is nihilistic.

(01:01:23):

The nihilists, the fascists, the Nazis, the oligarchs, that's nihilism. The people that think nothing can be done, there is no future, there's no hope. The hope police, that's nihilism. But it's the people that believe in the future, that believe that a future is worth fighting for, that it's there, that hope is real. That to me is self-defense.

Ben Passmore (01:01:44):

Yeah. I wouldn't be a good Pan-Africanist if I didn't point out some hesitancy and fully taking on as inspiration the words of French people who colonized Haiti and Africa.

Andrea Chalupa (01:02:00):

Well, he was Algerian.

Ben Passmore (01:02:01):

Oh yeah, yeah. No, I hear it. But I was going to say, I know Camus would agree with me. I also am thinking about that movie, The Spook Who Sat By The Door, and something that the main character pointed out is that you can't fight for hatred. You got to love something. That's sort of like a point of unity, if I could say something. The fixation on whether or not violence is good or bad to me, and I think most of the people that I find inspiration in some ways is irrelevant. It will have an effect on you, but it's something you have to do right to stay alive. I do have some hope that we will see the end of this because we do have a really inspiring history. I hope that we can remember on the other side of it what it took to win.

(01:02:47):

A friend of mine, one of their ancestors was part of the French Resistance and they grew up with their mother telling them that one reflection that they had was that afterwards, everyone claimed they were part of the French resistance.

Andrea Chalupa (01:03:06):

Our discussion continues, and you can get access to that by signing up at the truth teller level or higher on Patreon. Discounted annual memberships are available and you can give the gift of membership. Get bonus shows, invites to exclusive events, all our shows at free, and more at patreon.com/gaslit. That's patreon.com/gaslit. Thank you to everyone who supports the show.

(01:03:29):

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(01:03:58):

Gaslit Nation is produced by Andrea Chalupa. Our associate producer is Karlyn Daigle. Our founding production manager is a Nicholas Torres. If you like what we do, please leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners.

(01:04:12):

Original Music in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Bissenberg, Nick Barr, Damien Arriaga, and Karlyn Daigle. Our logo design was generously donated by Hamish Smyth of the New York-based firm Order. Thank you so much, Hamish.

(01:04:28):

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Andrea Chalupa