READ: How to fight back against tyranny (in three easy steps)

From the Roman resistance to Soviet prisons, people gave their lives to show us how to defeat oppression. Time is running out.

I came home last night — after running into Donald Trump — and had some thoughts about fighting back against fascism, or at least its rise in America.

Well, I suppose I didn’t exactly “run into” him. I was filming something near the White House and learned that he was dining just down the street. So I walked over and filmed it. I haven’t been that close to Trump since quitting his administration in protest and coming out against him, and I’ll admit it was a strange feeling. That’s a story for another time.

Last night marked Trump’s first dinner out in D.C. since reclaiming the presidency — a carefully staged photo op meant to suggest that Washington is now “safe,” thanks to his military deployments. So safe, apparently, that he can stroll out for seafood. Except, of course, he didn’t stroll. He had his full motorcade drive him a single block from the White House to a restaurant already nestled within the heavy federal security perimeter. I walked back and forth between the White House and the restaurant just to show how absurd the narrative was.

He didn’t even walk the block. The man who brags about his physical fitness was chauffeured a few hundred feet like an emperor, though his entrance was met by protesters making clear that Washingtonians do not welcome a strongman.

The symbolism was pretty rich. While Russian drones threatened a NATO ally and Israeli missiles struck Qatar, the president was preoccupied with marveling at the unneeded deployment of troops inside his own country … presiding over the soft occupation of an American city in violation of its residents’ rights … and dining on lobster while the world burned.

Anyway, it got me thinking. What we’re seeing isn’t new. Far from it, in fact. We’ve got thousands of years of history to draw on to decide how we want to fight back against a fascist, an autocrat, a dictator, a vengeful president, a corrupt politician. Whatever you want to call it. The playbook is old, and so are the tools for stopping it.

When I got home, I pulled three of my favorite dissident thinkers off the bookshelf. Each from a different age and persecuted for standing up to the powers of their time.

Here’s who I’ve got staring back at me on my desk: Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher, who spoke out against dictatorship and was executed for it (born a hundred years before Jesus); Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch Jewish philosopher, who was excommunicated, censored, and hounded into obscurity for defending freedom (born more than a hundred years before the American Revolution); and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet author who spent years in gulags for exposing totalitarian lies (born roughly a hundred years ago).

I like simple mnemonic devices. And there’s nothin’ better than threes. So hear me out: Three dissidents. Three eras. Three lessons on how to resist.

1. First, you have to defeat the coward within.

Before you can fight a dictator that’s violating your rights, you have to stand up to someone even more intimidating. YOU. Fear, apathy, and silence are the first obstacles in any free-speech struggle. Cicero understood two thousand years ago that standing up is scary. But as he made very clear, staying seated is much worse.

In his famous treatise On Duties, he put it plainly:

“Of injustice, there are two types: men may inflict injury; or else, when it is being inflicted upon others, they may fail to deflect it, even though they could… The man who does not defend someone, or obstruct the injustice when he can, is at fault just as if he had abandoned his parents or his friends or his country.”

Failing to act when we can is tantamount to betrayal of everyone we love and of our fellow citizens. That warning mattered two thousand years ago when Cicero’s beloved Rome was being hijacked by an emperor, and it is chillingly relevant now. Trump’s return has triggered fatigue and cynicism. It’s oh-so-tempting to look away. But civic virtue starts with courage. As Cicero knew, complicity is rarely a loud cheer in favor of the tyrant; it’s usually just the smallest whisper of inaction.

So resistance itself begins by defeating that inner coward. If you self censor, the regime doesn’t need to shut you up, because you’ve done it for them.

2. Second, you must accept that your voice itself is the best defense against tyranny.

Free expression is more than a passive right that you exercise at your own leisure. It’s your only enduring tool to draw a line in the sand. Baruch Spinoza understood this deeply. Writing in the 17th century, long before modern liberal democracy, he warned that even in democracies rulers might try to control the thoughts of their citizens:

“Government which attempts to control minds is accounted tyrannical,” he wrote, adding a line that feels ripped from today’s headlines: “The real disturbers of the peace are those who, in a free state, seek to curtail the liberty of judgment which they are unable to tyrannize over.”

He seemed to anticipate leaders like Trump, who sue the press, defund critics, and threaten media outlets that won’t submit to MAGA monitoring. Spinoza’s solution to resisting this kind of autocrat was devastatingly simple.

“Every man should think what he likes and say what he thinks…The free man does not fear, and he is not consumed by fear’s boundless conceit.”

In other words, it’s not enough to muster up the courage. You have to actually say something. Your right to free speech won’t defend itself. So you must state your case out loud. And the most fundamental thing to speak freely about is the very fact that you have a fundamental right to speak freely — without worry — whether it’s a social media post, a local opinion essay, or a chant you shout at a protest.

3. Finally, you can’t just promote the truth. You MUST go after the lies.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn closes the loop here. He echoes Cicero’s call for courage and Spinoza’s encouragement to speak out. Then he demands just a little bit more. From his jail cell in a remote gulag in the Soviet Union, he wrote this:

“We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others…In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers…we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

Speaking truth isn’t enough, he insists. You must actively attack the lie. This is especially true when it comes to lies about dominating others.

And make no mistake: repression is back in fashion. Trumpism was built on the recycled and foolish belief that power somehow confers impunity on the powerful and that loyalty is more important than the law.

Which brings me to my final point…

There is a new “Big Lie” in America.

The most dangerous lie today isn’t the old yarn the president spins about how the 2020 election was stolen from him. There’s a much, much bigger lie. He has convinced himself and millions of people that dissent is treason.

That single lie undergirds all the others. To the president of the United States, disloyalty is traitorous conduct. You’d think that such a petty and obviously unconstitutional sentiment could never take hold in the White House. Yet today, the falsehood forms the foundation for all of Donald Trump’s abuses of power — his revenge against his enemies, institutions, and the people themselves.

Trump is using it as justification to launch investigations into his first-term critics … to go after law firms and schools and businesses that dare to challenge him … to send troops into Democrat cities and states … to punish foreign allies who deviate from his wishes … and to treat the government like his own personal piggy bank, opening it up to friends and slamming it shut for political rivals.

This is the real Big Lie. The idea that the president can criminalize criticism — that to oppose him is to oppose the country — is a lie so colossal that it threatens to destroy our republic.

So as you look to the next three years, consider the truth that to keep our country intact, you’ll need to step forward yourself. I implore you to follow the guidance of those who’ve faced worse than us. And their guidance is simple.

First, fight back against your own fear. Second, don’t wait around; actually speak out. And third — whatever you do and whatever you say — make sure that you are relentless in attacking the lies. Silence, as these brave dissidents taught us, is what tyranny counts on most.