Introduction by Robert Evans:
This is a keynote speech I gave at a symposium on combating authoritarianism and preserving democracy for the Japanese American National Museum (JANM). It’s about what is necessary in order to deal with the new authoritarian wave overtaking the United States.
There’s a Q&A with me afterwards, where I sit down with Ann Burroughs, who is the president and CEO of the JANM. She is also an internationally recognized leader in human rights and social justice; she’s chair of the board of directors for Amnesty International and was jailed as a political prisoner for fighting Apartheid in her native South Africa. She’s a pretty cool person.
What Must Be Done? The Battle Against Fascism
Keynote address and fireside chat at the “Echoes of History” symposium, Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles, California, USA)
by Robert Evans
23 January 2026 (JANM event page)
4 February 2026 (It Could Happen Here audio broadcast)
The bad guys 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 weapons. How do you plan to make them?
A couple days before I sat down to write this, 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. 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.
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. 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 you think the “bait” is here?
As best as I can figure it, armed and armored cops 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 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 twenties after being rendered sterile by chronic tear gas exposure. None of the officers who poisoned her or thousands of other Portlanders ever saw a day behind bars.
That would be wrong. They enjoy qualified immunity. They’re doing an important job, one every person can agree needs to be done. The year she 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 sued to ensure he faced no punishment for this and was reinstated 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 tell me, state and local police aren’t the bad guys. ICE is just an aberrant agency. 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. It is part of why regular young people in this country hate elected Democrats.
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 Wrecktangle Pizza have raised tens of thousands of dollars to buy and distribute food and other necessities. Gathering and handing out donated groceries feels safe, peaceful, and legal, but that’s not how ICE treats it.
Wrecktangle’s fundraising campaign earned them a visit from armed ICE agents who, per the account of co-owner Breanna 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 only to have their munitions kicked back at them.
This is one small example of the kinds of networks of aid and resistance that are evolving on the ground. Another example that arose in the wake of Renee Good’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 might rightly consider it nonviolent, but the federal government does not. Remember: Renee Good was shot and killed for participating in exactly this kind of activism.
Through mouthpieces like Steven Miller, the Trump administration has made their stance very clear: anyone impeding the actions of law enforcement is a terrorist. Waving a sign at 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 won’t 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 protests. I know that kind of thing probably makes a lot of people here uncomfortable. If it does, 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 few years teaching himself to be an armorer. As he’d gained skill with a rifle he’d started to take his grade-school aged daughter out shooting. He didn’t like doing it. 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 couple years earlier, in the badlands of rural Syria. She’d been held as a slave by ISIS militants for two years, forced into a kind of life that would be 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 AK-47.
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.
Politics isn’t supposed to work that way in the United States. People should not need to use weapons in order to defend their most basic civil rights. But can you look at the mobs of armed men breaking into homes and businesses in Minneapolis, many sporting Nazi tattoos to go along with their badges, and tell me, definitively, that we can 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. That attempt had failed miserably. And as we stand here in 2026 awaiting a US invasion of Greenland that might hit any day, watching military helicopters circle American cities while secret police snatch victims from their families and haul them off to camps and deportation facilities, we must admit that this second attempt is failing as well.
We and our predecessors failed entirely at building and maintaining a system that would stop all 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. Citizen’s United, our refusal to punish Facebook executives over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and our failure to charge the people responsible for January 6 with treason are all further steps on that road. I could talk about what led us here for hours, but all that matters is this:
We are not special. Our long Democratic traditions, great wealth and high opinion of ourselves have not protected us. The enemy is at the gates.
Now I don’t mean to act as if all is lost, or as if the only path forward is bloody internecine war. 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 weapons.
How do you plan to make them?
One thing that gives me some 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, 23 January 2026. For a single day there will be “no work, no school, no shopping.”
It’s a demonstrative act, one you might compare to the flexing of a muscle. No one involved thinks one day of striking will 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 once the regime feels threatened.
And people on the ground in Minneapolis know this. Whenever I talk to activists, whether they live in Los Angeles, Portland, Atlanta, or Minneapolis, I see the same thing I saw in people’s eyes in 2020: a grim but very accurate assessment of what this fight is going to cost them. They are going to lose eyes and limbs to riot munitions. They and their friends will be arrested, beaten, possibly tortured, and imprisoned.
All 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 this: as far as the regime is concerned, there is no such thing. All dissent is violent. You attending this 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 Mayer. Not long after World War Two, 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.
Mayer 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 early or active members. They were regular people who had latched onto Nazism late but supported it enthusiastically because of the benefits it promised to give them.
They Thought They Were Free is chilling for a number of reasons, but there is no competition for the most frightening passage in the whole work. For Mayer didn’t only interview ‘Little Nazis,’ he sat down with people we might call ‘Little Antifascists.’ 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.
Mayer 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?” I’m going to read his answer in full.
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 the oath of fidelity. I said I would not; I opposed it in conscience. I was given twenty-four hours to ‘think it over.’ In those twenty-four hours I lost the world.
Now, this man knew that refusing 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 though he’d never been a Bolshevik, once fascists take over every one who isn’t a fascist becomes the worst thing they called their enemies. Today I guess it’d be “far left extremists” or “antifa terrorists.”
Anyway, Mayer’s friend explained that 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:
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, telling himself that simply by saying the words ‘I swear by 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, Mayer’s friend helped save many lives, using his apartment as a safehouse for people fleeing the Third Reich.
Most people would call that admirable. 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, Mayer was confused by this, saying what I’d imagine most of us would say in his position: 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 reply:
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 would have saved all the people later killed by the Nazi regime. Mayer responded logically: You don’t truly believe your lone refusal could’ve overthrown the Third 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, in education, and in position, rules (or might easily rule) in any country. If I had refused to take the oath in 1935, it would have meant that thousands and thousands like me, all over Germany, were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have heartened millions. Thus the regime would have been overthrown, or, indeed, would never have come to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist in 1935, meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, like me in Germany, were also unprepared, and 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.
Mayer still doesn’t believe his friend. He’s bogged down in historical details, the nitty-gritty of the rise of fascism. His friend, having lived through the rise of fascism, is instead focused on the greater moral and historic truths behind it.
“These hundred lives I saved,” he told Mayer, “—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.”
The faith he’s referencing isn’t an expressly religious belief per se, but rather faith that right and wrong exist, and that when people step into our communities hell-bent on causing harm to others, they should be stopped by any means necessary. So Mayer 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?
Mayer’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 Mayer was barking up the wrong tree:
My education did not help me, and I had a broader and better education than most men have had or ever will have. All it did, in the end, was to 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.
So 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 very 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 everywhere else and ask ourselves: 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 onto 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 take the advice of New Hampshire Episcopal bishop Rob Hirshfeld, who during a vigil for Renee Good told his clergy:
“Get your affairs in order, make sure you have your wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.”
Script supplied by the author with kind permission to reproduce. Q&A transcribed by Antidote:
There’s always potential, when enough people get angry and radicalized, that a system, even with the amount of violence behind it that ours has, can be toppled.
Ann Burroughs: Thank you for that amazing speech—inspiring, sobering, challenging, confronting. I don’t want to describe it; in describing it I may reduce it to anecdote. It was so powerful.
I was 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. When liberals today—all of us—tell ourselves that we’re choosing the lesser evil, when we’re staying quiet or staying within the bounds of a particular reaction, I often ask myself what we’re giving away in the process.
What compels people to cross from accommodation into moral risk? Is there a moment ahead where mass refusal could alter their trajectory, or has that window already begun to close?
I think of my own experience. Some people in the room know I was a political prisoner in South Africa, and I made a conscious, 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 compels people to cross from accommodation into moral risk?
Robert Evans: That’s a fascinating and incredibly important question, and one I don’t have a perfect answer to. There’s a degree of mystery. A number of times, I’ve been with a crowd where you’ve seen it come across their eyes, in confrontations with local police or federal agents: We have them outnumbered and their ammo just ran dry. You see everybody in the crowd make a decision in that moment to stay where they are, to not see what could come next, to not take a step forward.
Because they all have lives, because we have a functional enough society. People have kids and jobs to get back to, and nobody wants to play-act an October Revolution in the middle of their work week. One thing that is a potential moment of change is when the certainty of I have a life, and my friends have lives, and we all have something to get back to—when there is 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 causes mass and sudden flips.
You asked if I think the window is closing, and somewhat paradoxically, the window starts closing as soon as it opens, but it can never close all the way. There’s not a lot of them—this is true of every country and every state police force, compared to the size of the populace. There’s always potential, when enough people get angry and 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, advanced weaponry, drones, and stringrays against protesters. In that way, the window in which people can react and feel like they have a decent chance of getting away or 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.
AB: So what does “fighting back” actually mean? That’s a really important question. As you spoke about in your remarks and we know so well: when the government controls the police and the military, and has identified you as a “terrorist” regardless of what the circumstances might be—what does fighting back actually mean? What does that resistance encompass?
We know it can take many forms. I want to push you a little more: what does fighting back actually mean? What, for you, feels morally defensible and what genuinely troubles you?
RE: If the question is what fighting back looks like in terms of what an escalation is from the current ways of fighting back, that is still within the bounds of what most people on our side of the aisle would call peaceful and morally justified even if it’s not legal, one thing that comes to mind is a general strike.
In fact, the only thing that comes to mind that has serious weight, the weight to uproot a security state as powerful and established as ours is, the weight to uproot a regime as entrenched as ours is, is a general strike. It’s almost the only leverage we have—which is why I’m happy to see them starting to explore doing it, as a real thing, in Minneapolis.
There’s this thing online where people will periodically be like, We’re doing a general strike next week! Nobody go to work or shop! That’s not how it works. You have to have the backing of unions and a lot of infrastructure set up to figure out how to feed people and keep people’s lights on, and provide people with necessities during what will probably be an extended period of time out of work—and a time in which, if we’re talking about a real general strike, a lot of the pillars that uphold daily life and daily comforts will start to fail. You have to have systems built up for that. It’s one of the things people don’t often think about when they’re hearing these big-pitch ideas for resistance campaigns.
One of my favorite examples of this in terms of the difference between the idea and the things we have to do to execute it: in Liberia, at the end of the last big period they had of warring warlords, there was a massive protest campaign by women that was basically pulled right out of Lysistrata: We are not going to have sex with our husbands. It was a mass resistance campaign—this has been written about; it’s a real thing that happened. When they were considering how to actually do this, they had to consider really ugly realities, including the reality of rape. So a factor behind the scenes in figuring out how to organize this was how to create networks to smuggle women out of dangerous homes and keep them safe for the length of the protest campaign.
When you’re talking about what’s going to be necessary for a general strike, it’s a ton of illegalism: everything from people shoplifting food to stop people from starving, to the fact that carrying out and participating in a general strike, if one gains any momentum, will be declared illegal by the regime. They will 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. I’m hopeful about the potential for something like that in 2028.
One of the things that scares me is what happens if we cross the point past which there is no longer any hope or talk of peaceful resistance. You have to consider this when you have a large number of armed men saying, We just need to kill all of the people on the other side—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.
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. That’s the thing to try to avoid at all costs, because any kind of mass internecine conflict in the United States among Americans will also kill many people outside of the country. Global food and medicine supply systems will collapse.
We’re talking about governors calling 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 make it clear: is there anyone backing up the people from the 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.
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 people; they’re going to continue pushing what they can do in blue cities. This is not the extent of the shit they’re going to try.
AB: It’s also particularly terrifying when we think about the budgets that enable this, and the budgets that are about to be voted on. We’re talking about billions and billions, it’s just extraordinary.
Going back to my experience in South Africa and the idea of a general strike: what was ultimately the most effective weapon against the Apartheid regime was mass mobilizing and mass organizing across the country, mass marches and a specific campaign to quite literally make the country ungovernable. It was on every level: consumer boycotts, mass marches, marches specifically targeted at Apartheid laws and aided by incredible pressure from outside sanctions.
Of course things are very different now. But this does take me to another question, something I’ve thought a lot about. After this whole crisis is over, what are the consequences? What about accountability? When we get to the other side of this—which we will—what should accountability look like? Is it an American truth and reconciliation campaign? 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 is the societal-transformational aspect of that? Should we think about an American truth and reconciliation campaign? Is it something closer to Nuremberg? Who are going to be seen as the architects of this authoritarian movement? Who are going to be seen as the architects of this anti-authoritarian movement? How willing are we, as a democratic society, to pursue consequences?
We’ve just seen how hollow that can be, after January 6—Trump pardoned the insurrectionists. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.
RE: I have two answers to that. The first is what I think is likely to happen, and then what should happen.
What’s likely to happen: if we have a truth and reconciliation commission, it’ll be something we kind of half-ass. It’ll fall way too short and there’s not any criminal restitution for the people who are breaking laws and hurting and killing people right now. That’s a likely possibility, given the way this country has handled similar things in the past—and the ways other countries have handled similar things in the past. Let’s not forget that Nuremberg, for all the things about it that were good, was also a failure. The vast majority of the Nazis who participated directly, physically, in the Holocaust did not see any kind of criminal consequences.
What I think we should have—we need something along the lines of Nuremberg. If we want to talk about the people, politically, who are committing crimes right now and who should be on trial, we can all come up with similar names. I’m very supportive of trying to bring this regime to justice for its current and past illegal behavior. That said, it’s going to be a failure if we do not extend any attempt at criminal consequences, retribution, or justice to a group of people who have underlined all the negative societal changes happening right now: the people who run all the major social media corporations in the world.
All of them 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 further an ethnic cleansing, and they made the choice to sit with that because it made them money. 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.
That’s where I stand. I’m on a We didn’t go nearly far enough after the civil war either kick right now, but we don’t need to go into that.
AB: Robert, I can’t thank you enough for being with us and sharing your thoughts.
I’m so sorry about the hundred times you’ve been teargassed. I’ve been teargassed many times in my life, but it’s not a hundred.
RE: There’s a lot of people who got teargassed more than me in Portland and elsewhere.
AB: Thank you so much, and thank you all for bearing with us.
Featured image: art installation “In the Light of a Shadow” by Glenn Kaino, another keynote speaker at the same symposium. Source: Kaino, via the Japanese American National Museum
