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You're listening to. Next comes what from Degenerate Art. Each week we'll look at one aspect of authoritarianism to figure out how we got where we are and how to fight back. This is Andrea Pitzer. With the next Trump administration looming, the US is faced with the dilemma of the trolley problem. What the trolley problem examines is whether moral decisions are simply about outcomes or about the manner in which you achieve them. In the classic form of that thought experiment, wheel death is barreling toward a bunch of people who are tied down in its path. By diverting it to another track, you might kill a smaller group of people who are in similar danger. Some utilitarians argue that the two cases are not importantly different from each other. But in our case, the groups of people are tied to tracks all over the country, and at this point, we can't be sure of the location of the starting point for the mayhem, which is less likely to be a trolley and far more likely to be a runaway train. And we can argue over whether it's going to hit immigrants or trans people first, or maybe the homeless or teachers who share banned books where I have the right to do whatever I want as president. But there's little doubt that the train is out there and that it's ready to do some harm. But I don't even talk about that. You might have imagined that a different train was coming, one that might be a useful train, one that could be a ride to a better place. This is not a time to throw up our hands. But we've ended up with something else, and we are where we are. This is a time to roll up our sleeves. For some reason, a lot of the people who aren't tied down are. Are shouting lamentations while standing on the tracks and waiting for the train. Should you do that? Most people say, no. I don't want to be needlessly critical. Yelling can be helpful if you shout at the right people to throw the brakes on the train. So go ahead and shout where it might be useful. Here we are today. Republicans who have voted against, consistently against the Violence Against Women act, who have taken away the right of all women to choose and have control over their own body, who, as women are bleeding out in parking lots across the country, standing there, allowing us to die, now want to pretend today that they care about women and why, to open up gender and, yes, genital examinations into little girls in this country. But in the meantime, don't just stand there waiting for the train. We need to get ourselves and as many people as possible off the tracks. A lot of them have been working to get loose already and just need a little backup. Others are still in very deep danger or have fewer options. And in each case, we need to act now. So what is a nation to do? We're going to have to realize that we might have to get where we're going on foot for a while, which means progress is going to be slower. And now that I'm done torturing the whole train metaphor. But why not? I want to talk today about how countries have tried to save themselves in more recent years, the newer dangers that the 21st century presents to those who are facing authoritarianism, and what I think will be some of the most effective ways to confront the threat barreling down on us. There are previous times when the world has been led by incompetence or worse. In 1905, when Russia faced revolutionary instability and the Grand Duke Sergei had just been assassinated, Tsar Nicholas II spent the evening in a contest with his brother in law in which they were trying to shove each other off a couch in the royal lodgings. We are looking at a legion of people in the new administration who will be trying to push one another off White House couches with no concern for the welfare of anyone but themselves. He will be like any other person, quote, he is a truly evil guy. This is Bannon saying this about Elon Musk, quote, unquote, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down. The leaders who reigned in the first decades of the 20th century wound up miring it in the first global conflict. Steve Bannon also said about Musk that he should, quote, go back to South Africa. They were just really not up to the challenges of their era and a whole generation paid a price for it. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth? White South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States. We should definitely make demands of our leaders. But we can't leave it up to those who rule over us to make sure that it's all going to work out. This is a time to organize, to mobilize, and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together. So I want to consider some stories from the opposite end of the spectrum times when the train of authoritarianism was pulling out of the station and got derailed or got halted. Look, you have done enough. Have you no stance of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency? Every country is bound by its own history, and the current politics of other places are often very different than those in the US So it's not a one to one analogy in any case, but I want to look at some cases in which stability was restored, the possibilities for a better future were preserved, or at least the lineage of public resistance was established. We sat down on a stool and asked for a cup of coffee, and Starvanger told us that he wasn't on service. Local establishment grossly underestimated our anger and the ability to get in there. I want to talk about these actions to show how things done by everyday people to go against aspiring dictators or repressive parties, how it really is possible. We had our first sit in in Nashville on February 13th. I'm really amused sometimes because people say, oh, you were so brave. And the truth is I was afraid the whole time. But the choice was to do what was necessary to end segregation or to tolerate segregation. And that just was not acceptable. In each of these examples, the majority of the US population has as much or sometimes even more freedom and more resources with which to respond than the people. In the anecdotes that I'm relating, Greensboro became the message it was if they can do it in Greensboro, we too can do it. Sometimes I come on here and I show up with history from 100 years ago that maybe you didn't know anything about. Tell me about that. So when people think of concentration camps, they tend to think of Auschwitz and the death camps, because looking back from today, it looms so much larger than everything else that's happened in history. As it should. But today I want to discuss some very recent examples. Two weeks after the February 2021 military coup in Myanmar, a new law made it a crime to publish anything that spread fear or promoted fake News. At least 98 journalists have been arrested since a February 1, 2021 coup, while 46 remain in detention. Nearly a year later, a university literary journal called OA Magazine published what it listed as Volume 1, Issue 1 to cover the effects of the military regime and resistance to it. A year after the coup, the junta brutalized journalists through detention, torture and outright murder, competing with Iran and China that year for the global title in the most reporters and editors detained, those wanted by the junta are announced on state media, meaning independent journalists are on the run. But those writing for little Owe magazine kept at it. They were some of the last journalists standing at a really brutal moment. If they were not to arrest someone, if they don't find that person, they arrest the family members. Though they listed their August 2021 edition as volume one, issue one, they were standing on the shoulders of a prior Away magazine, one founded a century ago by students at their university to fight for Burmese independence from the British. Myanmar used to be known as Burma and was a British colony until 1948, but from 1962 it was largely ruled by a military junta which crushed any opposition. In an interview not that long ago, an editor with the magazine back then said that in 1962, more than a decade after independence had been gained from Britain. When the military staged a coup in March of that year, all the political parties in the country were silent. Only the student unions spoke out. Students did not organize to take political power. We only demanded peace, fundamental human rights and democracy. In 2010, as the military began loosening its grip on power, Aung San SUU Kyi was finally released. Five years later, her party stormed to victory in the country's first democratic election in decades. That century long fight is still underway in Myanmar after this latest coup, with countless people trying to secure basic rights and self determination. But she saw her popularity plunge overseas as she refused to stand up for Myanmar's Rohingya Muslim minority. Her supporters said she was just trying to appease the military and in 2020 her party won re election by a landslide, almost wiping out the pro military opposition. The army immediately began to allege voter fraud without offering any proof. Other places around the globe were fortunate enough to halt the march toward authoritarianism or prevent a coup. But as in Myanmar, even those countries are still struggling to keep the authoritarian threat at bay. In Polish elections last year, a collaboration of the center and the left built a governing coalition, checking the eight year run of the nationalist Law and Justice Party. Poland's election saw the highest voter turnout in more than three decades. In Warsaw, many residents were happy with the exit polls indicating that the incumbent Law and Justice Party is unlikely to secure a third term. I'm very happy and I think that Poland will now finally move a bit closer to Europe, that we'll be respected there, that good times will return and will put an end to the Middle Ages. Those eight years have done tremendous damage to Polish law and to the judiciary there as a whole, some of which it will be very difficult to undo. That civic coalition that opposed the ruling party managed to put out a call to uphold the ideals of liberalism and they won. Though the Law and Justice Party still gained more voters than any single party, elections lie ahead in 2025 that are likely to either spell the end of this authoritarian Streak or its return to power. And it's not yet clear which that will be, but this was a huge victory along the way. Everyone says that it's always the most important election and there's a huge amount at stake. But I think this time it's when people say that there's a lot of truth in that, as a lot more people are probably aware. In Brazil, Bolsonaro's January 2023 coup attempt, the extent of which became even more apparent in a report published just last week. These details just continue to shock. Bolsonaro plotted a coup to overturn the election results. He allegedly called a meeting with top military officials in December 2022 and then presented them with plans for a couple. The investigation revealed plots to use the country's elite military units to assassinate a former leader and a Supreme Court justice prone to investigating the far right. Brazil's President Lula da Silva spoke publicly about the alleged coup and attempt on his life for the first time last week. I'd like to say something important. You remember that when I was running in the elections, I said that one of my wishes was to bring Brazil back to normality, to democratic civility. The machinery of democracy there responded far more quickly than it did than the parallel mechanisms did here in the U.S. but the danger in Brazil is also not over. He's accused of staging a coup, as we've been saying, faces legal jeopardy, but he still wants to run again. The parallels obviously to Donald Trump in the US are striking. Is Bolsonaro hoping for a similar outcome, do you think? Certainly, he and his allies were heartened by the US election result and expect or hope that the Trump administration could use its influence to try to help Bolsonaro's case. Even more recently in South Korea, an attempt to improperly launch martial law in order to intimidate and eliminate political opposition threat failed. Legislators faced down guns, the public took to the streets. The judiciary moved into action very, very quickly. We start in Seoul, where the suspended president, South Korean President Yoon Sung Yeol, has finally been arrested over his short lived martial law declaration in December. With a much shorter history of democracy and much younger institutions on which they could rely, South Korea too has so far dealt more quickly and more effectively with illegitimate acts and corruption than we have managed to in the us so what's going to happen next? Suspended President Yoon Sung Yeol will now head to the government complex. As I said, you'll now get received questioning about his charges against insurrection. None of these gains are permanent, and though they do represent progress, none of These stories has a clear happy ending. Yet the president himself released a video saying that, calling the investigation illegal, but he submitted to the arrest in order to prevent bloodshed. What happens in the US obviously will affect them, and I'm hoping that by paying attention to what's happening there, we can also take on part of their example. Here in the US too, there are examples of effective resistance to inhuman governance, some offering public challenges to unjust power and others doing so quietly, even illegally, but with profound results. Because being American is more than a pride we inherit. It's the past we step into and how we repair it. I'll offer just a couple of those from pretty far apart in time, for there is always light. If only we're brave enough to see it. If only we're were brave enough to be it. Most people have heard about the Korematsu case during World War II, in which the U.S. supreme Court Rubber stamped Japanese American detention. When Executive Order 9066 was issued. My father couldn't believe that he would be imprisoned as an American citizen. So why should he go to a prison camp when he had done nothing wrong? He just wanted to live his life like any other American. I didn't feel that I was I did anything wrong. But there's another case that's much less well known, and that's the case of Mitsuya Endo. And that case was also taken on by the Supreme Court. She was a Christian who spoke no Japanese, and her brother was serving in the US military. When Purcell asked her if he could file a petition on her behalf challenging the government's detention of Japanese American citizens, Mitsue hesitated. She was an intensely private person who had never sought attention. But as she later said in the oral history, she provided for posterity. When she understood that her decision would affect the lives of thousands of others, she knew she had no choice. Even a court deeply sympathetic to internment could find no basis for the discrimination against her. Mitsue's was the only successful challenge to the incarceration. After they made their ruling nine months ahead of the victory over Japan, the government began to release detainees. Mitsue's sacrifice returned a measure of justice to 120,000Americans whose freedom had been taken from them. Another great example of a very different kind of effective resistance is from my hometown of Parkersburg, West Virginia. Though the events I want to tell you about happened before West Virginia had even split off from the state of Virginia. Several counties had seceded from Virginia to stay with the Union already, but the state had not yet gone to become the state of West Virginia, and everything was still very unstable. My High school classmate, Dr. Michael Rice has written about how a group of black men met at Robert Simmons barbershop in Parkersburg and planned how their children might get an education. An education that was technically illegal in that moment under the laws of the state, and one which could be punished with 20 lashes, officially and unofficially, of course, could be punished in much worse ways. The Sumner Seven, as these men came to be known, met in secret, but they managed to recruit students and collect funds for a teacher. By the time the Confederacy was defeated, that teacher had nearly 50 students. The Sumner Seven managed to keep instruction going for decades until public funding became available for educating all area children. In time, Sumner School would be formally established and would host such dignitaries as Jesse Owens, Booker T. Washington and W.C. handy. But the whole enterprise had started when Parkersburg was part of Virginia and Virginia was a slave state, working under less than ideal conditions. You may not be able to save everyone, but you can save some people. You can make a clear difference. You can invent the future country that you want to see. Another example I want to give, that's from my lifetime, happened in Philadelphia on the night of the Ali Frazier fight in 1971. Last March, someone broke into the FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania, stole some records and mailed copies of them around to several newspapers. Those files were extraordinary, and they revealed illegal and reprehensible operations undertaken by their own government, the US Government, our government. Those records would help bring an end to J. Edgar Hoover's secret activities within the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He ordered his agents not only to expose new left groups, but to take action against them, to neutralize them. Many Americans were tapped and bugged, had their mail opened by the CIA and the FBI. Those actions to open up those files changed the face of history. They didn't come forward for decades to take credit for this, or maybe to take blame. The FBI was desperate to find the burglars. The Bureau put nearly 200 agents on the investigation. No one is asking you to break into an FBI office and keep the secret for Decades or risk 20 lashes to teach future generations. It's up to you what to do, but you can do something for many people, if they're just willing to let everything happen kind of wash over them. Things under the new Trump administration might not change too much. The malicious will flow seamlessly into the ridiculous. Expect attempts to roll back everything. Donald Trump again vowed to shut down the Education Department if he's reelected. He also endorsed a recent Louisiana law mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools. But those are just two of the multiple changes to public education that Mr. Trump is proposing, including when it comes to vaccinations. Christopher Ruffo targeted ASL just recently, and I fully expect somebody to try to roll back seatbelt rules. It's hard to know what's going to be next. Don't try to keep up with every part of it. The whole point of it is to exhaust you. We spoke with First Lady Melania Trump about what we can expect from her over the next four years. Take a look. So I had an idea to make a movie, to make a film about my life. My life is incredible. It's incredibly busy. And I told my agent, you know, I have this idea, so please, you know, go out and make a deal for me. I also fully expect complicity, which we're already seeing so much of in corporate and political worlds. The three richest men in the world, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta CEO Mark Zuck. Zuckerberg will be present at the inauguration. I'd like to honestly promise that there will be serious accountability for the people that are complicit. Special counsel Jack Smith says that the government had enough evidence to convict Donald Trump if he had not been reelected. You know, when you look at the US in these other cases, the founders actually did a pretty amazing. I mean, they did a bad job at a bunch of things, but they did a pretty amazing job at seeing what some of the risks would be to the system and trying to build in institutional ways to handle those threats. And if you read Madison's records of the Constitutional Convention, the almost paranoia about power, you can feel it in the air. We're going to create an executive. Oh, no, let's make sure that we restrain him. We're going to create a legislature that is the most powerful branch of government. Well, how can we make sure that it doesn't become tyrannical? Every piece of power they give to a branch of government, they then stop and say, what are the dangers of doing this? And the truth is that we haven't done enough to build on those institutions, that they gave us those seeds that they absolutely planted and that we, the descendants, have failed to reinforce those institutions, and we made ourselves into a system that, in fact, couldn't use the very tools we've been given. The U.S. supreme Court ruled unanimously today that the 14th Amendment does not allow individual states to remove former President Donald Trump from their ballots. In an unsigned opinion, the court said only that Congress, not states, can disqualify presidential candidates under the Constitution's so called insurrection clause. The former president celebrated the decision. We are the ones in the 20th and 21st century who fell down on the job. And that is why our system, even given some of the history we have and the flirtations with fascism and the potential coups by not building in those safety mechanisms we maybe didn't guarantee, but made very likely the outcome that we got, which was that the legislators and the judicial branch didn't enforce the mechanisms that we had because they didn't have to, because they were complicit in the coup. They went around the table. It was a hard and fast 63 vote with 6 the 6 Republican appointed conservatives on one side ruling for former President Donald Trump, and the 33 Democrat appointed liberals ruling for special counsel Jack Smith in his effort to try to bring the former president to a criminal prosecution. There was no effort by the Chief justice in this case to reach out to the left at all. But we do know that in many cases that accountability isn't always what we wish it would be. There are a long line of examples, including for instance, Volkswagen. The utilization of forced labor from concentration camps, including the notorious Auschwitz, in the construction of the KDF Wagen Kraft Dersch Freude strength through joy car laid bare the moral compromise at the heart of Volkswagen's Genesis. Corporations and democracies after the fact often manage to skate or make minimal amends. But accountability is still worth something and it's worth fighting for. And I think it does at least preserve the real history for us in some important ways. And I'm thinking of the example of June 2024, when Banana Company Chiquita Brands International was found liable for financing a paramilitary group and they were ordered to pay 38.3 million in compensation decades after the events in question. A landmark ruling in a case that sought to hold a major US corporation liable for its links to human rights abuses in another country. As we enter this new era, we can remind both corporations and public officials that if we can't perfectly control what kind of punishment they'll get, that their deeds are likely one day to be known and publicized. New numbers from Tesla show its annual EV sales decline for the first time in more than a decade. That's something that they should keep in mind, and it's something that may inhibit some of the people that are less devoted to the agenda that the Trump administration presents and more inclined to look out for their own self interests. We have to hold fast to the Understanding that whatever flaws there have been in prior administrations, this one that's coming in is actively bent on doing physical harm and putting millions at risk of violence in order to accrue more power. When Time magazine asked you if you would consider pardoning all the rioters, you said, yes, absolutely. You called them patriots. As events unfold, it will be easy to ignore these harms if they don't touch you directly at first. There's been enormous pushback against school vaccine mandates, so much so that we've had more than 300 cases of measles in the last few years. And I think if we continue to do this, continue to try and push back on school vaccine mandates, as former President Trump is doing, you're going to get to the point where we'll see 1,000 or 2,000 cases of measles a year, at which point children will start once again to die from measles. It will be easy to let it seem as if it's just another president that you don't like. But hold fast to reality. The best parts of our ability to demand accountability are at risk now, and our very ability to govern ourselves is also at stake. The next thing you have to do is stay human. Don't take every piece of outrage bait. Read the damn story to make sure you know what's being said and what happened. Check out for a while when you're overwhelmed, but don't hide. Buying into nihilism is giving up. It's turning you back on everyone who will be harmed. How should you act if you're approached by immigration officials? What should you do if they come to your house? Don't open the door. Use your rights. Don't say anything until you have a lawyer. Celia Correa fled el Salvador in 1991 to seek asylum. Her children are US citizens, thanks to birthright citizenship. But Celia remains undocumented and could be deported at any time. I don't want to go back to my country. I mean, it's been 34 or 35 years. This is my whole life. One of the great assets to Trump and his allies is the alienation from reality that so many have in modern life. Less than two thirds of eligible voters shows up as it's become more possible than ever to follow politics more intensively than at any time in history. Every hearing, every news appearance and vote while actually doing nothing at all. One issue is that that third of the electorate has pretty much checked out. I don't think either of them are good leaders. In my opinion, one of them is definitely going to bring up more violence. So one candidate leading to more violence didn't get you to vote. Yeah, I know. I don't know why. I just don't know. I didn't. Another third is supporting someone using all the language of authoritarianism and abuse. A new and disturbing analysis shows attacks against women have surged on social media in the days following Donald Trump's election win. Hateful and sexy, as phrases like your body, my choice, and get back to the kitchen are getting millions of clicks online. And the remaining third is following what's happening in a lot of cases. But many in that one third are mistaking knowledge for action. Knowledge is necessary, but knowledge is not the same thing as action. And spectatorship is not participation. It isn't even historical witnessing. Partly because of larger trends of isolation in American society and partly because of consumerism and partly because of deliberate attempts to manipulate the public sphere. A lot of people who care do not actually engage with anyone else over politics. Knowing what you think about the issues is not the same thing as actually building a democracy. Most people never communicate in their entire lives. They think that what they say is communication. The communication is the effect of what you say. It's not what you say, it's the effect of what you say. Even if everyone involved rejects bigotry and scapegoating, the political process is messy and it requires negotiating conflicting desires. We need to do more than touch grass. We need to dig dirt and actually plant seeds. Yet instead of engaging, my pet theory since long before the pandemic is that most people are living more and more derivative lives. We have an incoming president who exists only as a believable figure on television. The ratings are too good. People watch the 11th or the 12th or the 13th in a series of movies based on a comic book novel or a story from decades ago. Pete Hegseth, Tulsi, Vivek and Elon and now RFK Jr. It feels as though there truly is like a team of events Avengers focusing on the excesses of government. I love it. Surrounded by politicians left over from the 80s. Sampling and remixing is fabulous and can be highly creative. But a lot of the most visible modern productions the mainstream culture feel like they're circling the drain. Meta glasses X ray glasses from comics when you were a kid. A lot of people have said that this is the craziest technology they've ever seen. Virtual reality, That's a joke. We are surrounded by muscle bound incel types interested only in making the dumbest version of the world that they grew up imagining. This is a whiny liberal. It's fucking climate change. Wake up. Based on novels and comics they misread half a century ago. I specifically wanted to make something that looked like the future. Wow. So, yeah, it's like. I mean, I think that the. Really. It's like, if what car would Blade Runner drive? And they hope to force us to live in it. There is less and less a sense of being moored to anything tangible, anything that isn't experienced secondhand. Any unusual experience in the real world is an immediate chance to refract your life through a screen, post it to social media. And for a lot of people, that kind of virtual validation from strangers is more powerful than the validation they get from being present in their own lives. Musk claiming to be a top player in games like Diablo 4 and the new Path of Exile 2, which then led to accusations that he bought the accounts, as well as speculation from people in the community, like Moist Critical, that Musk just has a need to be seen as cool and smart. It's such a weird, stupid thing to even lie about in the first place. And yet here he is, telling blatantly obvious fibs. He's got all the money in the world and all of the insecurity imaginable. Seeing their own lives refracted through a social media platform can be more real than when they're living it. Generative AI is another example of how this derivative life can warp our understanding of reality, given the overrepresentation of women in porn as just one example, it's Fed material that bends back to us in a way that deeply misrepresents the actual world and boxes women into that one facet of existence. But what does it do, right? It, you know, presents visual images that are often, you know, stolen from artists or, like, far too close for comfort, and it presents plausible text, right? It infers what's the sort of plausible response to a prompt based on, you know, mountains of data from the Internet, The Reddit, the 4 chance, you know, the storm front is in there, as Natasha's work has shown, you know, and kind of presents text that looks plausible but has no relationship to facts, has no relationship to reality. It is retrograde by definition, churning history made available to it into a flat, dead present lacking any context. The dangers inherent in living in that derivative reality aren't just linked to what we're checking out of here in this world, but also the world that we replace it with. Trump takes advantage of where we are at as a species, telling so many untruths that it allows people to enter an alternate world. It was love and peace. And some people went to the capitol and a lot of strange things happened there. A lot of strange things with people being waved into the Capitol by police. They know it's unreliable. So they can tell themselves that the most reprehensible stuff is isn't real and isn't likely to happen, even if the most retrograde parts of their minds sometimes want it to. Helassio Velazquez is an undocumented mechanic who has worked in Houston for 25 years. He plays in this park with his two U. S citizen children ages 5 and 9, and stands by Donald Trump. So you support Donald Trump because of the economy? For the economy, yes. But you don't support the anti immigrant rhetoric? I'm not support the anti immigrant action. Do you support his mass deportations? No. It's not human. Are you afraid that you could be deported in this mass deportation? I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid. Giving up the attachment to reality is a way for people to evade the real life consequences of empowering someone like Trump. And this has real consequences. We find that radical right populism is the strongest determinant for the propensity to spread misinformation, wrote Petr Thornberg and Giuliana Chiri in the conclusions of a study out just the other day in the International Journal of Press and Politics. These results suggest that political misinformation should be understood as part of and parcel of the current wave of radical right populism and its opposition to liberal democratic institutions. Charlie Warzell recently wrote at the Atlantic that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality. He added that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes, but willing participants. Did Trump cause all this? No. Maybe we're lying. Everybody's lying. So this truth is unknown. You cannot find the truth because there's so many versions of that. That's what brings the free world down, because that gives a huge advantage to the other side that doesn't care about the rule of law. But these are trends that have helped make his success possible, and they are conditions he can take advantage of. Yes, we did that, but you know, somebody else did that. This is not just a phenomenon on the right. In this case, the converse is also true. The more we narrow our existences to what we see on screens, to just insulting Trump or his followers on social media, and the less contact that we have with humans that involves changing something in the actual world, the more we're participating in a dream world parallel to that created in Trump world. Less malevolent perhaps, but no less delusional. And living inside it is a way to evade the real life results of doing nothing. So one of the questions I get asked a lot is how bad will it get? And after a few years spent researching concentration camp history around the world for my book One Long Night, I could list a lot of potential worst case outcomes. But the real answer, given the resources and freedoms available to most American citizens, is how bad are we willing to let it get? It's really up to us as a country, and I don't mean that flippantly. Genocides, totalitarian states, and often even authoritarians have similar goals. They want to flatten history, to make the future become a hallucinated version of a past past that never happened. And there's a lot of talk these days about do not obey in advance. And I want to address what that means on an individual level. It's important to separate yourself and try not to be swept into any mainstreaming of hatred and corruption, because they're already everywhere. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who always had a reactionary streak, it's the same in the West. Here, totalitarian power dictates. Over there, it's fashion, fashion this horrible fashion which prevents people from seeing. But who was also tremendously brave in surviving and documenting the Soviet Gulag, he wrote a phrase that has long stuck with me. The first step to freedom in an oppressive culture, he wrote, is to live not by lies. He said that we have been so hopelessly dehumanized, and he was writing this while he was still in the Soviet Union. We have been so hopelessly dehumanized that for today's modest ration of food, we are willing to abandon all our principles, our souls, and all the efforts of our predecessors and all the opportunities for our descendants, but just don't disturb our fragile existence. Solzhenitsyn suggested that we should refuse to participate or to support in any way public events, private conversations and professional interactions based on a government that perverts and obscures our humanity. Refusing to lie or to support the government's lies is at least a step above abetting harm. Even better, of course, is when you take action. You can teach someone to read, you can make something, you can call your representative. Almost any action in the real world can safeguard you from the online delusion that you're making a difference, except for those of us in the utmost danger. And those people do exist. A secret online life that's not reflected in what you actually do in real life is unlikely to be much of a life at all. How are you actually standing up against Trump? You are effectively obeying in advance. Whatever you can imagine as the worst of what might happen under Trump, it isn't acceptable to go along with it. And as Hannah Arendt said to Joachim fest in a 1964 interview, no one has the right to obey. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, Please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what a five star review where you get your podcasts.