What Must Be Done? The Battle Against Fascism

Summary

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It Could Happen Here

Episode: "What Must Be Done? The Battle Against Fascism"

Podcast by: Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts
Date: February 5, 2026
Host/Speaker: Robert Evans (Keynote), Anne Burroughs (Moderator/Q&A)
Context: Keynote speech by Robert Evans at the Japanese American National Museum Symposium on Combating Authoritarianism, followed by a Q&A with human rights leader Anne Burroughs.

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Episode Overview

This powerful episode features journalist and author Robert Evans delivering a keynote speech chronicling the realities of rising authoritarianism, systemic police violence, and the collapse of American democratic norms. Evans interrogates the inadequacy of current forms of resistance, challenges listeners to reconsider what effective opposition entails, and draws sobering parallels to historical fascist regimes. The episode includes a candid and urgent Q&A with Anne Burroughs, emphasizing personal and collective responsibility, the escalation of risk, and the critical choices for resistance and accountability.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Escalating Authoritarian Threat (05:24–19:05)

• Personal Testimony: Evans recounts advising a friend on buying a gas mask for her daughter in light of ICE violence against civilians, including tear gas and flashbangs used against families and infants.

  "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..." (05:47)

• The Bait Rhetoric: Criticism of liberal leaders' calls for “peaceful protest” despite police escalation.

  “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.” (07:15)

• Police, ICE, and State Violence: Evans highlights systemic issues:

  • Qualified immunity for abusive officers
  • Police unions protecting extremists
  • ICE and Homeland Security propagating far-right violence
  • Community organizing met with federal crackdowns

• Grassroots Resistance: Examples of mutual aid and direct action:

  "Local businesses like Rectangle... raised tens of thousands of dollars to buy and distribute food... Rectangle's fundraising campaign earned them a visit from armed ICE agents..." (10:14)

• ICE Watch Networks: Informal community groups monitor and shame ICE, but activists face fatal risks and official demonization.

  “Anyone impeding the actions of law enforcement is a terrorist... You cannot be so well behaved and appropriate in your resistance that this government will not consider you a valid target.” (12:32)

• Liberal Leadership Critiqued: Politicians like Newsom and Booker are condemned for half-measures (“more training for ICE”).

• Historical Parallels & International Context:

  • Misguided American exceptionalism
  • Erosion of a "rules-based international order"
  • The current crisis likened to global failures to check fascism

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2. The Moral Choice & Cost of Resistance (19:05–29:55)

• Hope Amid Crisis: Evans notes the mass hatred of the regime by ordinary Americans and points to collective action as the best hope.

  "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..." (19:25)

• The General Strike:

  • Evans lauds the Minneapolis coalition for organizing a one-day general strike—seen as essential leverage for meaningful resistance.
  • Warns that any demonstration effective enough to threaten the regime will be criminalized and punished.

• The Lesson of "They Thought They Were Free":

  • Evans recounts Milton Mayer’s post-WWII interviews with “little Nazis” and “little anti-fascists.”

  "The world was lost. One day in 1935, here in Germany, it was I who lost it. And I will tell you how..." (22:33)

• "Lesser Evil" Rationalization:

  • The moral quandary of participating in evil for a possible greater good
  • The failure of educated elites to stand up early and en masse

• Evans' Challenge:

  "It is incumbent on us to look out at the people struggling in Chicago and Minneapolis and Los Angeles and ... ask ourselves, how can I support them? And how can I go further?" (28:44)

• Accepting Risk:

  • Calls on listeners to abandon old boundaries of “acceptable protest” and “become more comfortable with risk.”
  • Cites Bishop Rob Hirschfeld:

    “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.” (29:51)

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3. Q&A with Anne Burroughs: Moral Risk, Mass Action, and Accountability (33:02–46:44)

What Compels the Leap to Moral Risk? (34:37)

• Evans on Mass Tipping Points:

  "One of the things that is a potential moment of change is when... a large enough chunk of the populace... 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...” (35:25)

• Window of Opportunity:

  • The window for mass action "starts closing as soon as it opens," but “never closes all the way” due to population numbers versus police capacity.
  • Delay makes future resistance more dangerous due to increased state power.

What Does Fighting Back Actually Mean? (37:02)

• Evans: General Strike as Primary Leverage

  “It's almost the only leverage that we have, which is why I'm happy to see them starting to explore doing it as a real thing. In Minneapolis...” (37:56)

• Organizational Realities:

  • True general strike requires union/infrastructure support
  • Necessitates "a ton of illegalism,” mutual aid, food networks
  • The regime will criminalize leaders, use black sites, and escalate repression

• Fear of Violent Escalation:

  “What happens if we cross the point into which there is no longer any hope or talk of peaceful resistance? ... When you cross that line, there's no longer any question of right or wrong. It's just a matter of what can survive the onslaught...” (40:44)

• State Fragmentation Risk:

  • National Guard vs. Federal forces—could emerge
  • Avert internecine conflict to prevent devastating international consequences (food, medicine systems)

Building Toward Transformation and Accountability (42:22)

• Anne Burroughs’ South African Context:
  • General strike and international pressure broke apartheid’s back, but post-crisis reconciliation lacked restitution and deep justice.
• Evans on American Accountability:
  • Predicts any Truth and Reconciliation Commission will be "half-assed" and insufficient.
  • Nuremberg cited as partial failure: most perpetrators unpunished.

  “We do need something along the lines of a Nuremberg... But it’s also a failure if we do not extend any attempt at... justice... to the people who run all of the major social media corporations in the world, all of whom are deeply complicit in not just our authoritarian slide, but in direct violence.” (45:25)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "If your enemy controls the police and the military and they've promised to destroy you, what does fighting back even mean?" — Robert Evans (08:36)
• "You cannot be so well behaved and appropriate in your resistance that this government will not consider you a valid target." — Robert Evans (12:32)
• “The world was lost one day in 1935 here in Germany. It was I who lost it. And I will tell you how..." — Milton Mayer’s interviewee, as recounted by Evans (22:33)
• “We all have the benefit of an education... It is incumbent on us…ask ourselves, how can I support them? And how can I go further?” — Robert Evans (28:44)
• “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.” — Bishop Rob Hirschfeld, via Evans (29:51)
• "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." — Robert Evans (36:27)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 05:24 – Evans’ speech begins: ICE violence, police impunity, breakdown of “liberal” resistance
• 10:14 – Community resistance, Rectangle pizza, mutual aid
• 12:32 – How the regime labels all dissent as terrorism
• 19:05 – General strike in Minneapolis; reassessing peaceful protest
• 22:33 – “They Thought They Were Free” and the importance of moral action
• 28:44 – Evans’ direct challenge to the privileged
• 29:51 – Quoting Bishop Hirschfeld on ultimate commitment
• 33:02 – Q&A starts: mass action, tipping points, and the closing window
• 37:56 – What can really shift power: the general strike and its demands
• 40:44 – Dangers of violent escalation and state fragmentation
• 45:25 – On justice, Nuremberg, and holding tech elites accountable
• 46:44 – Closing thanks and thoughts

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Conclusion

Robert Evans’ keynote and the following discussion survey the bleak frontlines of the fight against fascism and authoritarianism in contemporary America. The conversation scrutinizes current liberal strategies as inadequate, challenges comfortable boundaries of dissent, and warns that “all dissent is violent” in the eyes of the regime. It situates the potential for mass action and general strikes as both urgent necessity and massive risk, demanding organizational seriousness and willingness to accept legal and physical dangers. The session closes with a frank reckoning on post-crisis accountability, drawing hard lessons from international history and calling out the complicity of corporate tech.

Evans’ tone is direct, urgent, and unapologetically challenging:

“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..." (28:54)

Listeners are left with a call to confront their own complicity, reassess what they are willing to risk, and to refuse comfortable illusions about the effectiveness of traditional protest in the face of resurgent fascism.

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Transcript

[Anne Burroughs]

This is an iHeart podcast guaranteed human.

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[Robert Evans]

Wasn't that delicious?

[Anne Burroughs]

So good.

[Robert Evans]

Your bill ladies. I got it. No, I got it.

[Anne Burroughs]

Seriously, I insist. I insisted first.

[Robert Evans]

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[Anne Burroughs]

Shoot.

[Robert Evans]

No. The Wells Fargo Active Cash credit card. Visit wells Fargo.com ActiveCash Terms apply. Call Zone Media hey everyone. Robert here. The episode you're about to listen to is a keynote speech. I gave at a symposium on combating authoritarianism and preserving democracy for the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, California. So you'll get to hear the speech that I gave them about what's necessary in order to deal with this new authoritarian way of overtaking the country. And then there's a Q and A with me afterwards, where I sit down with Anne Burroughs, 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.

[Anne Burroughs]

Our next keynote is going to ask us some difficult truths. Authoritarianism, as has so often been said, rarely announces itself all at once. It takes root quietly in policies that silence dissent, in narratives that divide, and in systems that normalize repression until it feels ordinary. And when we get to that ordinary point, its complicity. So I know that our next keynote is going to challenge us. We can trust that he will be provocative. We can trust that he will 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 be talk to you about his lived experience in the trenches of Portland. And he'll do 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. It's your moment.

[Robert Evans]

Thank you so much for that and thank you all for being here. I am going to try to follow that up as best I can once the teleprompter is 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 in 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 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, often 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 age 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 ISIS 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 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.

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[Robert Evans]

Ilya Melanie redefining this sport Friday at.

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[Robert Evans]

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. 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 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 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 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 imposition, 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 so 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 Meier 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 Meier, 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 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 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.

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[Robert Evans]

Ilya Malady redefining this Sport Friday at.

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[Anne Burroughs]

Thank you, Robert, for that amazing speech inside. Inspiring, sobering, challenging, confronting all of those things. It sort of almost feels, I don't want to describe it because in describing it I feel that it may reduce it to anecdote. It was so powerful. But you know, I was so struck by your reference to Milton Mayer's account of the man who took the oath and who later said that day the world was lost and it was I who lost it. And I think that when liberals today, all of us, you know, we tell ourselves that we're choosing a lesser evil, we're staying quiet, or we're sort of staying within the bounds of, you know, a particular reaction. I often ask myself the question, you know, what are we giving away in the process? You know, what compels people to cross from accommodation into moral risk? And is there a moment ahead where mass refusal could alter that trajectory? Or has that window already begun to close? You know, 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 anti apartheid 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, to cross from accommodation into moral risk.

[Robert Evans]

I think that's a fascinating and an incredibly important question, and it's one I don't have a perfect answer to because there's a degree of mystery. I've been a number of times with a crowd who you've seen it kind of come across their eyes in confrontations with local police or with federal agents, that we have them outnumbered. And sometimes we have them outnumbered and their ammo 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 weeks. 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. And 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.

[Anne Burroughs]

So what does fighting back actually mean? I mean, that's really, you know, that's a really. I think that that's a really important question because, you know, as you spoke about in Your. In your remarks. And we know so well that when the government or whatever controls the police, they control the military. And if that has identified you as being, quote, unquote, a terrorist, regardless of what the circumstances might be, what does fighting back actually mean? What does 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?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I guess, to start with, if the question is, what does fighting back look like in terms of what is an escalation from the ways in which we're currently fighting back, that is still within the bounds of what most people on our side of the aisle would call, like, peaceful and morally justified, even if it's not legal. Right. Well, one thing that comes to mind is a general strike. And in fact, the only thing that comes to mind that I think actually has serious weight. The weight to uproot a security state as powerful and established as ours is the weight to uproot a regime that says entrenched as ours 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 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 work or shop. It's like, that's not how it works. 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 pitch 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 Lisa Strada. 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 Liz Estrada, 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 in 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 ringleaders, 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 2028. Now, when it comes to 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 right or wrong. It's just a matter of what can survive the onslaught. And that's, I think, the thing to try to avoid at all costs, because any sort of mass internecine 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 now 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 gonna try. Sorry.

[Anne Burroughs]

No. You know, and I think it's also particularly terrifying when we think of what the budgets are behind, you know, that enables this. And, you know, the budgets that are now about to be voted, I mean, we're not just. We're talking about billions and billions, and it's just extraordinary. So, you know, I mean, again, going back to my experience in South Africa and, you know, this idea of a general strike, you know, what was ultimately the most effective weapon against the apartheid regime was mass mobilizing, mass organizing across the country, mass marches that actually, that quite literally made. It was a specific campaign to make the country ungovernable. And it was on every level. It was consumer boycotts, it was mass marches. It was, you know, marches specifically targeted at the apartheid laws that broke the back of the apartheid 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? What about accountability? You know, when we get to the other side of this, which we will, we will get to the other side of this, you know, what should that accountability look like? Is it an American truth and reconciliation campaign? You know, we had a truth and reconciliation campaign in South Africa and it was extraordinarily healing, but there was no restitution and at the end of the day, there was no justice. 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? Who going to be seen as the architects of this authoritarian movement? Who going to be seen as the architects of this anti authoritarian movement? 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 after January 6, 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 hauled off the stage.

[Robert Evans]

Well, I guess I have two answers to that. The first would be what do I think is likely to happen and then what should happen in terms of what's likely to happen? I guess the likeliest thing is that if we have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it's something that we kind of half ass and it falls way too short. And there's not any kind of criminal restitution for the people who are breaking laws and hurting 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 that 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 a 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. 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 in not just our authoritarian slide, but in direct violence. Facebook knew for a fact that the military of Myanmar was using their website to spread propaganda to help further an ethnic cleansing. And they made the choice basically to sit with that because it made them 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, but we don't need to go into that.

[Anne Burroughs]

We've come to the end of our time, unfortunately, you know, I could continue. I've got, you know, seven, seven questions that I would have loved to have asked you, but we don't have time. But you know, Robert, I can't thank you enough for coming, for being with us, for, for sharing your thoughts and, you know, traveling all the way from Portland. And you know, I'm so sorry about the hundred times that you've been tear gassed. You know, I've been tear gassed many, many times in my life. But it's definite.

[Robert Evans]

There's a lot of people who got to your gas more than me in Portland, well, and elsewhere.

[Anne Burroughs]

Thank you. Thank you so much and thank you all for bearing with us.

[Robert Evans]

It Could Happen Here is a production.

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[Robert Evans]

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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[Anne Burroughs]

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