Protester implores federal workers: Do not obey in advance

Presenter: A protester with a bullhorn pleaded with federal employees: Do not obey in advance. Alternating commentary with readings from the book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder, here’s Faith: 

Faith (protesting at the Eugene federal building, 6th & High): ‘Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy. Perhaps rulers did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise this value or that principle. Perhaps a new regime did not at first have the direct means of influencing citizens one way or another.

[00:00:34] ‘After the German elections of 1932, which permitted Adolf Hitler to form a government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their service to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly towards a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity would not then be reversed.’

[00:01:16] This, my friends, is exactly where we are in this current inflection point: You all have obeyed in advance. Some of you likely have personal objections to what this regime is doing. Rather than try to resist that, you have decided to just obey, to just do exactly what the regime has told you to do.

[00:01:43] This is obeying in advance. You have told the regime explicitly and implicitly that you will do exactly what it tells you to do.

[00:01:55] We can contrast this with the brave demonstrators who stand out here on a daily basis to tell you that what you’re doing is wrong, to tell you that what you’re doing should be cause for shame among you and your families.

[00:02:15] We are here to remind you that when your children ask what you do during the day, that it is wrong, that you know it is wrong, that you have the ability to take a stand and not obey in advance.

[00:02:31] This extends to other federal workers in the building. Other federal workers in the building are able to not support this regime. They are able to deny the regime its continued operation.

[00:02:48] All of you can stop obeying in advance, all of you can stop what you’re doing and stop these actions that make this world more dangerous, that make our country worse, and that desecrate the principles that this country was founded on. Continuing with Snyder:

[00:03:09] ‘In early 1938, Adolf Hitler, by then securely in power in Germany, was threatening to annex neighboring Austria. After the Austrian chancellor conceded, it was the Austrians’ anticipatory obedience that decided the fate of Austrian Jews.

[00:03:32] ‘Local Austrian Nazis captured Jews and forced them to scrub the streets to remove symbols of independent Austria. Crucially, people who were not Nazis looked on with interest and amusement. Nazis who kept lists of Jewish properties stole what they could. Crucially, others who were not Nazis joined in the theft.

[00:04:01] ‘As the political theorist Hannah Arendt remembered, when German troops invaded the country and gentile neighbors started riots at Jewish homes, Austrian Jews began to commit suicide. 

‘The anticipatory obedience of Austrians in March of 1938 taught the high Nazi leadership what was possible. It was in Vienna that August that Adolf Eichman established the Central Office for Jewish Emigration.’

[00:04:36] Interestingly, this reminds me of the DHS post that said, ‘Emigrate now.’ It’s almost like that’s the exact same terminology the literal Nazis used in the 1930s. In November, 1938, following the Austrian example of March, German Nazis organized the national pogrom known as Kristallnacht.

[00:05:03] We are going to pause on commentary to continue the history lesson. Then we’ll get back to the commentary.

[00:05:10] ‘In 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the SS took the initiative to devise the methods of mass killing without orders to do so. They guessed what their superiors wanted and demonstrated what was possible. It was far more than Hitler had thought.

[00:05:39] ‘At the very beginning, anticipatory obedience means adapting instinctively without reflecting to a new situation. Do only Germans do such things? The Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, contemplating Nazi atrocities, wanted to show that there was a particular authoritarian personality that explained why Germans behaved as they had.

[00:06:06] ‘He devised an experiment to test the proposition, but failed to get permission to carry it out in Germany. So he undertook it instead in a Yale University building in 1961–at around the same time that Adolf Eichmann was being tried in Jerusalem for his part in the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews.’

[00:06:28] This is not going to end well for Milgram and the people who are in his experiment.

[00:06:34] Wondering if you all notice a theme: Trump, Russell Vought, Stephen Miller, and the rest of the establishment talk about making America great again by removing brown people, by restoring ‘Christian values,’ by returning to a different, more great time of American history.

[00:07:01] In doing so, they evoke the time of the ’50s, the ’40s, the ’30s, earlier eras of America. They glorify the Confederacy. They refuse to denounce white supremacists, and they refuse to denounce overt Nazis like Nick Fuentes.

[00:07:23] Trump and his regime have not told most people to do those things. They simply announced the vision. A leader announced a vision and the people under their command followed.

[00:07:41] You are those people. You are the people enacting those agendas. Without you, it would be impossible to enact those agendas. Trump, Miller and the billionaires are not coming down here to kidnap people from their homes.

[00:08:04] There were no billionaires down in Cottage Grove yesterday, kidnapping nine people and destroying countless families. There were no people who were even millionaires among those agents.

[00:08:20] My guess is the average salary of the agent who participated in that was what, a GS-10, probably making between $60,000 and $90,000 a year, barely affording mortgage payments, saving for college in an economy that favors billionaires.

[00:08:40] And yet all of those people did it. All of those people went down there with guns and armor and boots and vehicles, and they enacted the regime’s will.

[00:08:55] The Department of Homeland Security did not tell people to go to those homes in Cottage Grove. They told ICE to enact this mission, the mission of making America safe by deporting people, but it turns out, as we know from hard data that your own agency has released, only one-third of people detained in this country, in this state, and in this county even had a criminal conviction.

[00:09:28] Two-thirds of them had no criminal conviction. Some of them had a pending charge that looked scary until we realized what the pending charge was for. Guess what? The pending charge in most cases was for unauthorized reentry, a misdemeanor that carries a maximum sentence of six months. For folks who had repeat offenses, this would’ve been a felony.

[00:10:03] But again, unauthorized reentry is not a real offense. These are people who have tried to get in the country legally through the processes that your government has created. These are people who have tried to jump through the hoops and have been unable to, and most importantly, for your own arguments, these are people who tried to do it through the court.

[00:10:29] They have work permits, they have visas, they have green cards, they have asylum claims, they have refugee status, and yet you denied them. You disrupted that. You detained people outside of immigration, period.

[00:10:48] Shame on all of you. Shame on the security guard who was just looking at me, and this is what gets us back to obeying in advance because the billionaires in the regime never told you to go to Cottage Grove.

[00:11:07] They never told you to go over to Norkenzie in Eugene and detain a landscaper. They just said, enact our agenda of making America great again. And then all the way from the top down, you and the rest of the cronies in the government did exactly that. You obeyed in advance. You enacted the regime’s will before they went down here and did it themselves.

[00:11:36] You are the reason the billionaires maintain power. You are the reason they can distract from the Epstein files. You are the foot soldier. You do not have to do what you are doing.

[00:11:47] Presenter: A protester asks federal employees not to obey in advance, sharing the first lesson from Timothy Snyder’s book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the 20th Century.