Robert Evans (127:10)
Thank you so much for that and thank you all for being here. I'm gonna try to follow that up as best I can once the teleprompter's ready here. So a couple of days before I sat down to write the speech that I'm delivering now, a friend came to me and asked if I had advice on which kind of gas mask she should purchase for her four 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 gassed 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 infant stopped breathing 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 right now, and they aren't theoretical to me. I was tear gassed more than a hundred times in 2020, 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 Walz 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 at 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 2020. She is now in early menopause, in her 20s, 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 their recruiting ads for ice, remember it's not just an ICE problem. And yet some liberals and progressives will tell me state and local police aren't the enemy. ICE is just an aberrant 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 country hate elected Democrats. The people out thank you. The people out in Minneapolis battling riot lines in sub zero weather know 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 as 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, per 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 gas 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 Goode's 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 nonviolent tactic. But the federal government does not remember Renee Goode was shot and killed for participating in exactly this kind of activism. Through mouthpieces like Stephen Miller, the Trump administration has made their stance very 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 Cory 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 I'd met during the 2020 protest. And I know that kind of thing makes a 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 armorer. 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 badlands 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 ice'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 AK47. She made the decision to join up herself that very moment. She wanted training and 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 2026 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 deportation 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 scandal and our failure to charge the people responsible for January 6th with treason are all further steps on that road. I could talk about what led us here for hours, but all that matters is 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 at the gates. Now, I don't mean to act as if all is lost or as if the only path forward is bloody internecine 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. Poll after poll shows this, but we also see it in videos of grandfathers kicking tear gas cans 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 23, 2026. That's right. For a single day, there will be no work, no school, no shopping. Now, this is a demonstrative act, one 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 act of 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, in Portland, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, I see the same thing I saw in people in 2020, 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 intelligentsia, from most elected 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 a solution beyond peaceful protest. And if I can get only one point across to you, let it be. As far as the regime is concerned, there is no such thing. All dissent is violent. You attending the symposium is 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 II, in the early 1950s, he moved to a small German village to get to know and interview a number of ordinary citizens about their involvement with the Nazi Party. Meyer called these men and women the little Nazis, to contrast them from the big Nazis like Himmler and Heydrich and Goering. These were not people who had been movers and shakers in 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 1935 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 24 hours to think it over. In those 24 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 tarred 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 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 1935. And his friend said, no, of course not, but then went on to elaborate. There I was in 1935, 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 1935, 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 1935 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 1935, 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 than 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. We're all the kind of people who sit down in nice rooms to discuss, 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 risks, 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 Goode, 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.
