What Must Be Done? The Battle Against Fascism

overtaking the country. And then there's a Q and A with me afterwards where I sit down with Anne Burrows, who's the President and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum. She's also an internationally recognized leader in human rights and social justice. She's a chair on the board of directors for Amnesty International. She was jailed as a political prisoner for fighting apartheid in her native South Africa. She's a pretty cool person. So that is the episode you're about to listen to.

say some very strong things and it will be fantastic. So, without blabbering anymore, I am going to welcome Robert Evans, who is a journalist and author and the host of the enormously popular and influential podcasts Behind the Bastards and It Couldn't Happen Here. He's also the author of a

brief History of Vice and After the Revolution. He has that rare ability to connect history, power and lived experience, and he will certainly talk to you about his lived experience in the trenches of Portland, and he'll dir it in a way that's unsettling. As I've said, he's going to challenge us, He's going to be provocative. But that's why we've asked him to provide this keynote. So Robert, please come on up.

year old daughter. As was noted earlier, we live in Portland, Oregon, and while my friend wasn't planning to attend any protests, certainly not with her daughter in tow, she was keeping up with developments in Minnesota, where ice officers had just shot a man they described as Venezuelan in the leg

and then tear gased a neighborhood. One resident tried to get his family, which included small children and a newborn, out of the area, but they were gassed in their car, and then, for good measure, ice officers hurled flashbangs into the vehicle. His six month old infants stopped breeding, and he had to beg repeatedly before officers would let an

ambulance in to resuscitate his baby. The child was fine now, so my friend was right to fear that her little girl might get gassed for nothing more than existing in the wrong neighborhood. Questions like this aren't theoretical to thousands of American parents now, and they aren't theoretical to me.

I was tear gassed more than one hundred times in twenty twenty, and I spent a fair amount of time pulling children and other civilians out of cars that had the bad luck to exist on the same city block as a man with a badge and a grenade launcher. And so it bugs me just a little when I see Governor Walls tell protesters to stay peaceful and not take the bait. In fact, I'm left asking what do

we think the bait is here? As best as I can figure it, armed and armored police officers, blind firing chemical weapons that civilians is bait, while any response from those civilians beyond packing up and going home is taking said bait. Throwing back tear gas containers or anything else is somehow an escalation. So is standing against a riot line with a gas mask and a homemade shield to

stop your neighbor from getting deported. Any act of resistance, big or small, is all the justification federal agents need to deploy more of the violence they were already using. It's a neat little rhetorical game that liberals have let themselves become trapped inside. Playing that game lets them avoid answering one supremely ugly question. If your enemy controls the police and the military, and they've promised to destroy you,

what does fighting back even mean. Up until the present moment, the answer given by prominent liberals has generally been you fight by voting, or by making your voice heard, or something similar. I have a good friend who tried to make her voice heard in twenty twenty. She is now in early menopause in her twenties, after being rendered sterile by chronic tear gas exposure. None of the officers who poisoned her, or thousands of other Portlanders ever saw a

day behind bars. That would be wrong. They enjoy qualified immunity. They're doing an important job one every person can agree needs to be done. The year my friend was gassed repeatedly, the highest paid Portland police officer was a man who had been caught and briefly punished for maintaining a shrine to the dead men of the waffen Ss on city property.

The Portland Police Union, the first police union in the country, sued for him to be reinstated and to ensure that he faced no punishment for this and was brought back with full pay and benefits. So when you hear stories of Homeland Security hiding Nazi songs and the recruiting ads for ICE, remember it's not just an ICE problem. And yet some liberals and progresses will tell me state and

local police aren't the enemy. ICE is just an aberin agency, and surely there's some democratic cheat code we can use to get the good guys in blue to help us take them down. So much of the unchecked authoritarian nightmare currently rampaging through our streets is the product of a system that views policing as sacred, officers as infallible, and

protest as inherently suspicious and dangerous. This is the standard line, even within the halls of power in the Democratic Party, and it is part of why regular young people in this country hate elected Democrats. The people out, thank you, The people out in Minneapolis battling riot lines and sub zero weather. No, there's no help coming. The cavalry does not exist, and so they've had to build their own

architecture of resistance off and on the fly. Since immigrants and other people being targeted by ICE can't safely shop local businesses like Rectangle spelled like wreck is in a car wreck pizza, have raised tens of thousands of dollars to buy and distribute food and other necessities. Gathering and handing out donated groceries feel safe, peaceful, and legal, but

that's not how ICE treats it. Rectangle's fundraising campaign earned them a visit from armed ICE agents, who, for the account of co owner Brianna Evans no relation, stormed up on our door to try to get in. Thankfully, members of the neighborhood had been standing guard. They were able to raise a significant force of locals to swarm and chase off Ice who tried to guess the neighborhood as they were leaving, only to have their munitions kicked back

at them. This is one small example of the kind of networks of aid and resistance that are evolving on the ground right now as I speak. Another example that arose in the wake of Renee Goods murder is ice Watch, an informally organized network that activates members of the community

when ICE shows up in their area. The logic behind ice Watch is that these federal agents will be less likely to engage in extreme acts of violence while surrounded by crowds of citizens following them and trying to wear them down with shame. This is a good tactic, and we here might rightly consider it a non violent tactic. But the federal government does not remember Renee Good was shot and killed for participating in exactly this kind of activism.

Through mouthpieces like Stephen Miller, the Trump administration has made their stance their clear. Anyone impeding the actions of law enforcement is a terrorist. Waving a sign or filming an ICE agent makes you just as much a terrorist as someone who breaks a window or throws a rock. You cannot be so well behaved and appropriate in your resistance that this government will not consider you a valid target.

And yet again and again, I see no spine or backbone from the men setting themselves up as the future of resistance to Trump. Gavin Newsom can't even stick to his own guns. In his own podcast on whether or not ICE is terrorizing Americans, Senator Corey Booker's big recent suggestion was more training for ICE agents, as if the men brutalizing our neighbors aren't doing exactly what they trained

to do. About a year after Joe Biden's inauguration, I found myself up in the woods of rural Washington, an hour or so outside of Seattle, doing firearm training with a group of leftists side met during the twenty twenty protest. And I know that kind of thing makes a lo lot of people here uncomfortable, and I'm afraid a number of things about our shared future might make you uncomfortable.

During a break in the activity, I sat down for a smoke with a guy who'd spent the last several years teaching himself to be an armor or someone who repairs and maintains firearms. As he'd gained skill with this, he'd started to take his grade school aged daughter out shooting. He didn't like that, he felt like he had to do this, but as he informed me, I don't know that she won't have to fight for her right to

be treated like a human being. Hearing that, I thought back to a woman i'd met a few years earlier in the bad lands of rural Syria. She'd been held as a slave by ISIS militants for two years, forced into the kind of life that I hope is unimaginable to anyone sitting in this room. One night, as the Kurdish dominated militias of the SDF advanced on Isa's positions,

she managed to escape. After a harrowing journey on foot, she found her way to the sdf's lines, where the first person she saw was a fighter from an all female unit holding an AK forty seven. She made the decision to join up herself that very moment. She wanted training in a gun of her own, because then, she informed me, no man could ever own her again. Now, politics isn't supposed to work that way in the United States. People should not need to use weapons to defend their

most basic civil rights. But can you look at the mobs of armed men breaking into homes and businesses in Minneapolis and elsewhere, many sporting Nazi tattoos to go along with their badges, and tell me definitively that we're going

to get through this without a fight. At the end of the Second World War, as the dead were counted to cries of never again, an attempt was made to create a rules based international order built around the bones of the last failed attempt to do so at the end of the First World War, And as we stand here in twenty twenty six, potentially looking at a US invasion of Greenland, watching military helicopters circle American cities while secret police snatch victims from their families and haul them

off to camps and deffortation facilities. We must admit that this second attempt to create a rules based international order is failing as well. We and our predecessors failed at building and maintaining a system that would stop all of this from happening again. There are many answers to the

question of how this happened. The fact that the United States from the jump refused to be bound by the same rules we hoped lesser nations would follow was certainly part of the reason why our insistence that no foreign court ever judge American politicians or American soldiers was as

narcissistic as it was insane. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the ongoing militarization of the border and border patrol, the granting of qualified immunity to police across the country, these were all further steps on our national road to perdition Citizens United. Our refusal to punish Facebook executives over the Cambridge Analytica scannal, and our failure to charge the people responsible for January sixth with treason are

all further steps on that road. I could talk about what led us hear for hours, but all that matters is this, We the United States are not special. Our long democratic traditions, great wealth, and high opinion of ourselves have not protected us. The enemy is that the gates. Now. I don't mean to act as if all is lost, or as if the only path forward is bloody, internesting war, because I don't believe that the cause of rationality, of basic human decency still has a lot going for it.

The vast majority of Americans hate this president, just as they despise the Republican Party and the vicious, cruel and soulless monster. The Conservative project has proved to be pole after poll shows this. We also see it in videos of grandfathers kicking tear gas cands back at ICE agents in Minneapolis. The bad guys are outnumbered. We can't forget this, and they certainly won't. But the bad guys also have guns and the legal right to use them however they want,

whenever they want, on whoever they want. Just because they might lose an election doesn't mean they're handing in their badges or their weapons. So how do you plan to make them. One thing that gives me a sense of hope as I look around the country is that increasing numbers of liberals and progressives seem to be waking up

to the idea that this is an existential fight. Perhaps the most hopeful thing I've seen recently is that in Minneapolis, a coalition of labor unions and community organizations have come together to call for a limited general strike that just so happens to be today, January twenty third, twenty twenty six. That's right, for a single day. There will be no work, no school, no shopping. Now, this is a demonstrative act when you might compare to the flexing of a muscle.

No one involved thinks that one day of striking is going to be enough, But nothing less than a general strike has the potential to force concessions, even capitulation, from the regime, and you have to start somewhere. This is another example of an active, peaceful protest that will be considered anything but peaceful as soon as the regime feels threatened, and people on the ground in Minneapolis know this. Whenever I talk to activists, whether they live in Los Angeles

and Portland, a land of Minneapolis, Philadelphia. I see the same thing I saw in people in twenty twenty, a grim but very accurate assessment of what this fight is going to cost them. They are going to lose eyes and maybe limbs to riot munitions. They and their friends will be arrested, beaten, possibly tortured, and imprisoned. All of these things are happening right now to regular people who have done nothing more than speak up and lend aid

and comfort to their afflicted neighbors. They are willing to risk their lives because they know the hour is late. I have not seen anything that approaches this level of commitment from the liberal intelligencia, from most elects, to Democratic officials, or from the party itself. JB. Pritzker calls out accurately our present situation as being like the early years of the Third Reich, and yet, like every Democrat in power,

he falls short of elucidating absolution beyond peaceful protest. And if I can get only one point across to you, let it be this. As far as the regime is concerned, there is no such thing. All dissent is violent. You attending the symposium as an act of terrorism, and they will punish you for it once they get through the people they see as more immediate threats. There's a book I come back to again and again when trying to puzzle out my own path forward in these unsettling times.

It's titled They Thought They Were Free? And the author was a Jewish American progressive journalist and educator named Milton Meyer. Not long after World War Two in the early nineteen fifties, he moved to a small German village to get and know and interview a number of ordinary citizens about their involvement with the Nazi Party. Meyer call these men and women the little Nazis to contrast them from the big

Nazis like Himmler and Heydrich and Gerring. These were not people who had been movers and shakers and the party, nor had most of them been particularly active or early members. They were regular people who had latched onto Nazism late, but supported it enthusiastically because of the benefits it gave them. They Thought They Were Free is a chilling read for a number of reasons, but there's no competition for the most frightening passage in the whole work. For Meyer didn't

only interview little Nazis. He sat down with people we might call little anti fascists. These were Germans who never bought into Nazism. They hated it from the jump. They even fought it for a time, but they were never central organizers or members of the resistance. And when it became clear that the Third Reich had taken power, they

faded into the woodwork to try and stay alive. Meyer sat down with one of these people, a friend of his who worked as a chemical engineer, and asked him, one day, tell me, now, how was the world lost. Here's how his response started. The world was lost one day in nineteen thirty five here in Germany. It was I who lost it. And I will tell you how. I was employed in a defense plant, a war plant,

of course, but they were always called defense plants. That was the year of the National Defense Law, the law of total conscription. Under the law, I was required to take an oath of fidelity. I said I would not. I opposed it in conscience. I was given twenty four hours to think it over. In those twenty four hours, I lost the world. Now, this man, this friend of myers, knew that refusing to give the oath wouldn't cost him his freedom. But it would cost him his job and

make it impossible for him to get another. No one would hire a Bolshevik, and although he'd never been a Bolshevik, once the fascists take over, everyone who isn't a fascist becomes the worst thing they ever called their enemies. Today,

I guess it would be far left extremists or antifa terrorists. Anyway, Meyer's friend explained that he thought he couldn't risk being target with that brush, not because he wanted to escape with his family and get a job elsewhere, but because he genuinely wanted to stay in Germany and fight the

good fight. He had many German Jewish colleagues and other dissident friends he wanted to be able to help, and he calculated, quote, if I took the oath and held my job, I might be of help somehow as things went on. If I refused to take the oath, I would certainly be useless to my friends. Even if I remained in the country, I myself would be in their situation. And so he decided to take the pledge, making a

decision I think many of us would have made. Telling himself simply that by saying the words I swear to God he was ensuring no human being or government could override his conscience, and he was as good as his word. Through the war years, Meyer's friend helped save many lives, using his apartment as a safe house for people fleeing the Third Reich. That's incredibly admirable. I think we can all agree. But Meyer's friend felt nothing but shame for his actions. He said later of the day he took

the oath. That day the world was lost, and it was I who lost it. Now, Meyer was confused by this, saying what I'd imagine most of us would say in his position, Well, by taking the oath, you were able to save many lives. You were just one man, and the Third Reich was already in power. What more could you have done? Here was his friend's response. Of course, I must explain. First of all, there is the problem

of the lesser evil. Taking the oath was not so evil as being unable to help my friends later on would have been. But the evil of the oath was certain and immediate, and the helping of my friends was in the future and therefore uncertain. I had to commit a positive evil there and then, in the hope of a possible good later on, the good outweighed the evil, but the good was only a hope, the evil a fact. He went on to insist that if he had refused to take the oath of fidelity, he could have saved

the people later killed by the Nazi regime. And Meyer responded, logically, you don't truly believe that your lone refusal could have overthrown the Reich in nineteen thirty five, And his friend said, no, of course not, but then went on to elaborate, there I was, in nineteen thirty five a perfect example of the kind of person who, with all his advantages in birth and education and in position, rules or might easily

rule in any country. If I had refused to take the oath in nineteen thirty five, it would have meant that thousands and thousands like me all over Germany were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have heartened millions. Thus the regime would have been overthrown, or indeed would never have come to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist in nineteen thirty five meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands

like me in Germany were also unprepared. Each one of these hundreds of thousands, was like me, a man of great influence or of great potential influence. Thus the world was lost. Now Meyer still doesn't believe his friend because he's bogged down in the historical details, the nitty gritty of the rise of fascism. His friend, who lived through that, is instead focused on the greater moral and historic truths behind it. These hundred lives I saved, he told Meyer,

or a thousand or ten, as you will. What do they represent? A little something out of the whole terrible evil, When if my faith had been strong enough in nineteen thirty five, I could have prevented the whole evil. Now the faith he's expressing isn't a religious belief per se, but rather faith that right and wrong exist, and that when people step into our communities hell bent on harming others,

they should be stopped by any means necessary. So Meyer asks him, can you imagine anything your society might have done to sustain your faith, to ensure you and other Germans like you would have been prepared to resist. Meyer's friend realizes he's speaking about education, the very American idea that ideologies like fascism thrive in ignorance, and can be banished by the light, he insisted. Meyer was barking up

the wrong tree. My education did not help me, he said, And I had a broader and better education than most men have or ever will have. All it did, in the end was enable me to rationalize my failure of faith more easily that I might have done if I had been ignorant. And so it was. I think among educated men generally in that time in Germany, their resistance was no greater than other men's. And that's my challenge today to everyone at this symposium, and in fact to myself.

We all have the benefit of an education where all the kind of people who sit down in nice rooms to discuss the issues. It is incumbent on us to look out at the people struggling in Chicago and Minneapolis and Los Angeles and Portland and Philadelphia and everywhere else and ask ourselves, how can I support them, and how

can I go further? The answer to that question is going to be a little different for everyone here, But none of us can afford to hold on to our old ideas of what counts as acceptable and unacceptable protest. We're all going to have to become more comfortable with taking on risk, because the boundaries between what is legal and illegal are going to change on a daily basis

as we prepare for what comes next. We could all do a lot worse than to take the advice of New Hampshire Episcopal Bishop Rob Hirschfeld, who, during a vigil for renee Good, told his clergy get your affairs in order, make sure you have your wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us, with our bodies, to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.

And I think that when liberals today, all of us, you know, we tell ourselves that we're too using a lesser evil. We're staying quiet, or we're sort of staying within the bounds.

I think of my own, my own experience. You know, some people in the room know that I was a political prisoner in South Africa, and you know, I made a very conscious decision at a certain point, and it was a moral decision to get involved in the antipoteid struggle, knowing what the costs were. But I would love to hear from you about what it is you think that compels people, as I said earlier on.

just ran dry. And you see everybody in the crowd make a decision in that moment to kind of stay where they are, to not see what could come next, right, to not take a step forward, because they all have lives, because we have a functional enough society, because people have kids to get back to and jobs to get back to, and nobody wants to play act at an October revolution

in between the middle of their work week. And one of the things that is a potential moment of change is when that the certainty of well, I have a life, right, and my friends have lives, and we all have something to get back to. When you have a large enough chunk of the populace who doesn't feel that way, who feels like, well, they've taken what I would go back to,

they've taken any sense of security I have. There's no longer a point in me holding back because the state is not holding back, and I don't have anything to go back to. That's one of the things that causes mass and sudden flips. And you asked a little earlier, do I think the window is closing, and I think kind of somewhat paradoxically, the window starts closing as soon as it opens, but it can never close all the

way because there's not a lot of them. This is true in every country, with every state police force compared to the size of the populace. And so there's always a potential when enough people get angry and enough people get radicalized, that a system, even with the amount of

violence behind it that ours has, can be toppled. That said, the longer we let this go on, the more they have wrapped their fingers around every aspect of policing injustice in this country, the more ability they have given their officers to utilize violence, to utilize advanced weaponry, to utilize

drones and things like stingrays and whatnot against protesters. And so in that way, the window within which people can react and feel like they have a decent chance of getting away or of succeeding closes because the force deployed against them gets larger, which makes it a lot scarier and makes people less likely to take those risks.

what what is that resistance encompass? And we know that it can take many many forms. So I sort of want to push you a little bit more. You know, what does fighting back actually mean? But what for you feels morally defensible and what genuinely troubles you?

that I think actually has serious weight. The way to uproot a security state as powerful and established as ours is the way to uproot a regime that' says entrenched as ours is is a general strike, it's almost the only leverage that we have, which is why I'm happy

to see them starting to explore doing it. And as a real thing in Minneapolis, you get this thing online and Twitter, on Blue Sky whatever, where people will periodically be like, we're doing a general strike next week, nobody go to workers shop, and it's like, that's not how

it works. You've got to you have to have the backing of unions, you have to have you have to have a lot of infrastructure set up to try and figure out how are we going to feed people, How are we going to keep people's lights on as much as possible, How are we going to provide people with the necessities during what will probably be an extended period of time out of work and a time in which, if you're talking about a real general strike, a lot of the pillars that uphold daily life and our daily

comforts will start to fail if it's an actual, functional general strike, and so you have to have systems built up for that. And it's one of the things people don't often think about when they're hearing these kind of big hitch ideas for resistance campaigns. One of my favorite examples of this just in terms of like the difference between here's the idea and here's the things we have

to do to execute it. In Liberia, kind of at the end of the last really big period they had of like these kind of warring warlords, there was a massive protest campaign by women in Liberia that was I mean, it was basically pulled right out of Lisistrata. It was we are not going to have sex with our husbands, like, we're not going to do it, and it was a mass resistance campaign. This has been written about. I know it sounds like Lizistrata, but it's a real thing that happened.

And when they were considering how are we going to actually do this, they had to consider some really ugly realities, including the reality of rape, and so a factor behind the scenes and figuring out how to organize this was how are we going to create networks to smuggle women out of dangerous homes and keep them safe for the

length of this protest campaign? Right, and when you're talking about what's going to be necessary for a general strike, it's a ton of illegalism, right, you know, everything from people shoplifting food to stop people from starving, but to the very fact that carrying out and participating in a general strike, if one gains any momentum, will be declared illegal by the regime. They will try to crack down, They will arrest ring leaders, they will put people in

black sites. These are realities that have to be accounted for in the underlying planning, and I'm hopeful about the potential for something like that in twenty twenty eight. Now when it comes the stuff that really scares me. One of the things that scares me is what happens if we cross the point into which there is no longer

any hope or talk of peaceful resistance, right. And you have to consider this when you have a large number of armed men saying we just need to kill all of the people who are on the other side of this thing which we have in this country right now. There's a lot of them. They have weapons, many of them are in the police, some of them are in

the military. These are realities of our present situation. And that's scary to me because when you cross that line, there's no longer any question of like right or wrong. It's just a matter of like what can survive the onslaught? And that's I think the thing to try to avoid at all costs because any sort of mass internescing conflict in the United States among the Americans, it'll kill is many people outside of the country because global food systems

and global medicines supply systems will collapse. Right, So we're talking about having governors call out the National Guard against federal police forces. When I think about both the necessity of that, because you have to try to resist and you have to try to make it clear is there anyone backing up the people from this federal agency? Is there anyone at a state level? Is there any kind of resistance that the state is going to respect? You have to ask that question, but some of the answers

to it can take us to really terrifying places. And I don't think we can avoid asking the question anymore. I don't think we're going to avoid a point at which some governor tries something like that, because ICE is going to continue grabbing, right, They're going to continue pushing what they can do in blue cities. They're not going to This is not the extent of the shit they're going to try. Sorry, no, you know, and.

was on every level. It was consumer boycotts, it was mass marches, it was you know, marches specifically targeted at the aparthe eight laws that broke the back of the apartheight laws. And it was that aided by incredible pressure from outside, from outside sanctions. Of course, things are very different now. But you know, this does take me to another question something that I've thought a lot about is, you know, after this whole crisis, after this is over, you know, what are the consequences?

So what was the sort of transformational societal transformational aspect of that should we think about an American truth and reconciliation campaign? Is it something closer to Nuremberg? You know, who gain to be seen as the architects of this authoritarian movement? Who going to be seen as the architects of this anti authoritarian movement? You know, how do we as a democratic country or democratic society, how willing are we to go to pursue those consequences? I mean, we've

just seen how hollow that can be. You know, after January sixth, you know how Trump has pardoned the insurrectionists. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. And I know we've only got three minutes left before I get hold off the stage.

and killing people right now. I would say that's a likely possibility, just given the way in which this country has handled similar things in the past and the ways in which other countries have handled similar things in the past. Let's not forget the Nuremberg. For all of the things about it that were good, was also a failure in a lot of ways. Right The vast majority of the Nazis who participated directly physically in the Holocaust did not

see any kind of criminal consequences. So when it comes to what I think we should have, I think we do need something along the lines of in Nuremberg. And I think that if you want to talk about the people politically who are committing crimes right now and who should be on trial, I think we can all come up with a lot of very similar names, and I'm very supportive of trying and bringing this regime to justice

for its current illegal behavior and past illegal behavior. That said, I think it's going to be also a failure if we do not extend any attempt at criminal consequences, at

retribution at justice. I guess would be the better term to a group of people who have underlined all of the negative societal changes that are happening right now, which is the people who run all of the major social media corporations in the world, all of whom are deeply complicit and not just our authoritarian slide, but in direct violence.

Facebook knew for a fact that the military of Me ANDMAR was using their website to spread propaganda to help further in ethnic cleansing, and they made the choice basically to sit with that because it made the money, you know, And that sort of thing should be seen as just as illegal as a bunch of ice agents without a warrant busting into somebody's house with guns, you know. So

that's where I stand. I'm on a we didn't go nearly far enough after the Civil War either kind of kick right now out, but we don't need to go into that.

the hundred times that you've been to your guest. You know, I've been to your guest many many times in my life, but it's definitely not one hundred.