Do Not Pre-Comply

Things are scary right now, and the range of disasters people are expecting to happen vary from a terrible but well-precedented "bad economy, high prices, and lots of ongoing injustice toward LGBTQ+ and people of color" to a dystopian hell where menstrual cycles are tracked in a central database, the intellectual class is purged a la the Cultural Revolution in China (and others), immigrants and trans people are placed into for-profit prison camps as slave labor, all funding for education is eliminated, environmental regulations are removed or ignored, and we go back to the not-so-good old days where once you had cancer you could never afford health care ever again.

Think it can't happen here? Well, did you think we'd see abortion protections overthrown? Did you think the Supreme Court would give the president blanket immunity for criminal acts so long as he does it while he's the president? Did you think we'd see a vice-presidential candidate make some shit up, admit he was lying, and then try to justify doing it?

I've heard of a Trump-voting woman who flat out doesn't believe that a miscarrying woman bled to death in an ER parking lot because of the abortion ban, because if that happened, that would be totally crazy. It is crazy! But the unthinkable becomes thinkable startlingly fast.

Did you know? In the 1960s and 1970s, Afghanistan and Iran were modern, progressive nations where you could walk around in an urban center and see women walking around untroubled wearing miniskirts. Kabul was known as "the Paris of Central Asia." All it took to change everything for everyone was a little organized violence.

In the coming days I'm going to say some things that will probably make you even more scared about what to expect and how little there is to protect us from it. I'm sorry. But this is a time to look inside yourself, acknowledge that you're terrified, and then forge ahead with doing the right thing anyway. That's what courage is.

So let's move on to action items. The first and arguably most important thing to do is this: Don't do their work for them. Do not pre-comply with rules you think might be given.

This is not the same as not enacting safety measures.  You might be trying to make yourself a smaller target right now: thinking about a different hairstyle, rethinking coming out to your work or you family or at all, not wearing religious jewelry or clothing, a dozen other things. Look, do what you have to do to stay safe.

But on a larger scale, pre-compliance looks like deleting your anti-Trump posts on social media, or quietly taking books off your school's shelves celebrating multiculturalism. It looks like dropping court cases in progress and dismantling your company's DEI programs. It looks like giving up before you even have a chance to fight.

And that makes it easier for the fascists to win.

Some months ago, there was a huge scandal involving the Hugo Awards, which were given out at a ceremony in Chengdu, China. The Hugos Awards always release their vote counts. This year they did it several months late, and the observant soon realized the numbers didn't add up; in some cases literally so.

To make a long story short — the (Western parts of the) awards committee preemptively and secretly eliminated a few legitimately nominated works because they thought the Chinese government might not like it if those works won. Nobody asked them specifically to do this. Certainly no orders or demands were issued. They just thought it was a good idea, and did it on their own.

That's how censorship often works, and how a lot of authoritarianism operates as well. The worry about what might happen if you push the envelope means you keep backing away from the edge, and the envelope gets smaller and smaller, until—

One of the reasons the Nazis could do as much horror as they did is due to this exact phenomenon: working toward the Führer. Better, people thought, to do what you imagine Hitler would want you to do than make him endure the tedium of actually issuing any orders!

Make them say it. Make them say it, and argue against it loudly and publicly, and delay complying with anything morally or legally repugnant for as long as you can, because every tiny scrap of energy they have to spend on making you do it means something else they can't be doing. Make them fight for everything.

You know how Trump drags his court cases on and on and on for months and years until ultimately they don't even matter anymore? That's what we need to be doing, anywhere and everywhere we can.

I've got some things to say about practical safety measures you can and should be taking right now in another post — probably the next one, since the clock is ticking. And again, for some of us in some places, keeping that Star of David necklace in a drawer may actually be a matter of immediate personal safety.

But for now, don't make changes to anything because you're afraid that one day it might hypothetically get you in trouble down the line. That's tomorrow's problem, and it might never show up.