exhorting his colleagues this year, he said, do not anticipate what a dictator wants and accede to it in advance.

Do not obey in advance.

Whenever you see those words, do not obey in advance, you are seeing Tim Snyder's ideas at work in the world.

And that admonition has wormed its way into all of our consciences, right?

Start by not giving in.

Lesson one.

One of the other things I'm going to talk about with Tim tonight is another one of his lessons

that sometimes comes to me in the middle of the night,

which is his lesson 18, and that is be calm when the unthinkable arrives.

Tim Snyder somehow got that essential idea down to six words.

Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. It now lives in my brain every day.

And it lives in the world as unforgettable guidance for anybody who does have a tyrannical nightmare

unfolding where they live.

What do you think that our national reaction should be to those prosecutions and relatedly

to the administration's efforts to characterize all these overwhelmingly nonviolent protests

against them, as if they're all riots and they're all, you know, constructed, nefarious criminal, dangerous things.

Yeah, I mean, we should all know, and I'm sure we all do know, that this is how authoritarian

regimes react to any kind of physical opposition. You get characterized as terrorists and

criminals and foreigners and so on. This is absolutely authoritarianism 101,

and we should help make sure that in sensitive issues like this,

the media don't just repeat what the leaders say,

because when they repeat it, they normalize it.

...