By sTACY LEE KONG

A few days ago, a self-described morning rant from comedian, writer and actor Ryan Ken came across my TikTok feed and stopped me mid-scroll: “So because this man is the president, I’m just supposed to pretend that all of the social and cultural advancement of my lifetime didn’t happen? Absolutely not,” they said, going on to list times that queerness has been normalized in pop culture over the past two decades. “I don’t give a fuck who’s in office. I’m not going to pretend that my life didn’t happen.” 

It was definitely a message I needed to hear.

I’ve been feeling kind of overwhelmed at how willing companies and institutions have been to abandon the veneer of progressiveness that increasingly dominated media, culture and professional spaces for basically my entire adult life. When I was in university, I knew why my friend group was tapped to appear in the marketing materials for the school, and what message the institution was trying to send to potential students. (“Look! This is a place you can belong—so of course you should pay us those tuition dollars!”) For as long as I’ve been a journalist, I’ve understood that media organizations were going to at least pay lip service to the idea of diversity, even if I also knew they too often fell short of actually diversifying newsrooms, much less corner offices. I have spent a truly ridiculous amount of professional and personal energy thinking about representation, and how particular movies or TV shows or books or award shows stack up when it comes to telling stories about, and recognizing creatives from, a range of ethnicities, genders, sexualities, abilities, classes, etc. It also wasn’t that long ago that companies were not only releasing ads that featured different ideas and representations of families, but also saw the marketing benefit in doubling down on that messaging.

Clearly, there has never been a time that I felt like a company, or school or workplace was prioritizing diversity because it was the right thing to do. Even though there have always been people within institutions who prioritize these values on moral and ethical grounds, in many cases, the perceived benefit to the bottom line was likely the real reason any change happened. But I figured the business case was compelling enough that we’d keep seeing progress, so it has been, uh, wild to realize that is not actually the case.

Every example of a company discarding its previous progressive values is an example of anticipatory obedience

Actually, if we’re being honest, wild is not the right word. What it has actually been is sad and scary to see how quickly schools and companies and jobs and charities and even regular people will not just discard us, but will actually, actively sacrifice us if they think it’s politically, socially and/or financially expedient to do so.

Because no one’s making any of these companies do anything, right? Not to downplay political pressure or how fears of retribution from Trump and the gang have had a chilling impact on their critics, but there isn’t actually a law (yet) that compels American companies including Target, Walmart, Amazon and Meta to scale back, or straight up end, their DEI initiatives. (And in fact, companies like Costco, JPMorgan, Apple and the Cleveland Cavaliers remain committed to their DEI policies.)

There’s no directive saying MSNBC had to cancel The Katie Phang Show, Ayman, José Díaz-Balart Reports, The ReidOut, Alex Wagner Tonight and The Saturday Show and The Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart. (A list that ~coincidentally~ includes mostly racialized people and the network’s most vocal critics of Israel’s genocide in Palestine, naturally.)

And while there is currently an executive order targeting pro-Palestine student protesters, that was not the case throughout 2024 when American universities cracked down on anti-war activists, sometimes so violently that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released a statement expressing “grave alarm.” The torrent of news stories in this vein demonstrate just how much has changed in only five years, and contributes to a feeling of powerlessness, like all of that progress that we negotiated and demanded and fought for and snuck in and otherwise made happen doesn’t actually matter because there’s nothing we can do to stem this tide. And if that’s true, what’s the point in even trying?

But Ken’s video offers an alternate idea: while we have to acknowledge that there is so, so much pressure to go with the fascist flow, what if we just… didn’t?

Ignoring the impulse to cede power is perhaps the most important thing we can do right now

This is the backbone of On Tyranny, a 2017 book by Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University. Published just after Trump’s first political ascendency, it makes 20 recommendations for ways regular people can protect democracy, culled from Snyder’s understanding of major political upheaval in twentieth-century Europe. The lessons have been posted all over the internet, but even if you haven’t read the book or clicked on a handy listicle breaking down his key points, you’ve likely seen the first, and arguably most important, one: Do not obey in advance.

As Snyder puts it, “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 the other. 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 services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed.”

That’s what we’re seeing at Target, and Paramount, and I’d argue, Disney, and many media outlets. Just… so many: MSNBC’s decision to fire or demote a mostly racialized slate of anchors is definitely about yielding to Trump’s anti-woke, white supremacist worldview. When the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post refused to allow their papers’ editorial boards to endorse a presidential candidate during last year’s election cycle, it was “a sign of political capture,” as Guardian columnist Lois Beckett argued in October. And so was CNN’s (admittedly short-lived) decision to replace chief executive Jeff Zucker with an ostensibly “more neutral” Chris Licht in 2022, as activists Ian Bassin and Maxmillian Potter recently explained in the Columbia Journalism Review.

And unfortunately, we’re also seeing this type of pre-emptive compliance in individuals. That phenomenon Ken was describing, the act of mentally yielding historical progress, is also an act of compliance, I think. In fact, that’s what prompted me to make the connection between their TikTok and On Tyranny—both are centred on a call for individual action. I am generally not one to propose individual solutions to collective problems, but at this exact moment, it does feel important to remind ourselves (or maybe just myself) of what political action can look like, and how much remains within our control—especially outside of the paradigm of voting. Because yes, last night’s provincial election results are… terrible, but the discourse that I know is coming about voter turnout and political apathy is not nuanced enough. I genuinely think it’s more complicated than people simply not caring.   

It's worth understanding why people might obey in advance

Earlier this month, New York Times columnist M. Gessen discussed anticipatory obedience among the techbro billionaire class, and in the process, poked at Snyder’s framing in way that I think is important.

“Snyder is right, of course, but his admonition makes obeying in advance sound irrational. It is not. In my experience, most of the time, when people or institutions cede power voluntarily, they are acting not so much out of fear but rather on a set of apparently reasonable arguments. These arguments tend to fall into one or more of five categories,” they wrote. The categories: responsibility for others, a higher purpose, pragmatism, what they call the “if-I-don’t-do-it-someone-else-will argument” and the belief that this is just the zeitgeist now, which is where they classify Mark Zuckerberg’s incredibly stupid comments on Joe Rogan’s podcast about how companies need to have a more “masculine energy” and “a culture that celebrates the aggression.” Importantly, Gessen says, these are all rational reasons. We can even classify them as ‘good’—though, in this case, that means logical and perhaps values-based, though certainly not moral.

Similarly, there is a logic to feeling hopeless, powerless or ineffective in the face of overwhelming evidence that our society is turning away from values like equity, fairness and truth. And by that logic, anticipatory obedience could definitely be seen as a rational response. But I think what Gessen says next is an important corrective to that idea: “There are many good reasons to accommodate budding dictators, and only one reason not to: Anticipatory obedience is a key building block of their power. The autocracies of the 20th century relied on mass terror. Those of the 21st often don’t need to; their subjects comply willingly. But once an autocracy gains power, it will come for many of the people who quite rationally tried to safeguard themselves and their businesses.”

A confession: I don’t like conflict, so my first instinct is often to compromise, and even sometimes to just… comply. I have not yet truly unlearned the idea that it’s bad to be perceived as difficult, and even though this feels embarrassing to admit at my big age, I still feel that impulse to make people feel comfortable, even when I know they’re wrong. But that means every single time I speak up, it’s because I decided to take a stance, even if there are rational reasons for a precariously employed racialized woman who likes nice things to do the exact opposite.

So, I think what I’m getting from Ken’s TikTok and Snyder’s book and Gessen’s op-ed is the reminder that what we do as individuals matters, and the importance of seeing the value in small-scale action. Which I guess is kind of about hope, but I think is actually more about deciding that I’m also not going to pretend that my life didn’t happen.

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