Robert Evans (19:05)
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.
