How to be Sand in the Gears of Tyranny

A Guest Essay by Emily Galvin-Almanza

Friends,

I’m aware many of you want/need actionable advice on things you can do to help thwart what is coming so you don’t marinate in hopelessness. As Dr. DOOM, I’m not well-positioned for this role!

That’s why when I came across Emily Galvin-Almanza threaded tweet offering tangible, actionable ideas for real resistance that can really matter I knew I needed to get it to you.

So, I reached out to Emily and offered her the opportunity to write up her ideas to share with The Cycle’s audience and I am delighted she agreed.

What follows is Emily’s article.

Editors Note: Next Episode: we’re taking a deep dive into the Christian Nationalist movement coming into power with the MAGA movement with Matthew D. Taylor, author of The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening Democracy in a conversation you can not afford to miss.

Now, I give you

How to be Sand in the Gears of Tyranny, by Emily Galvin-Almanza

https://x.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1743656953664963058

I, too, believe in the power of the corporeal.

But then again, I am also one of those elder millennials whose life has been a slipstream from watching 9/11 on my college dorm room TV set to having my high school friends sent to die in Iraq as the rest of us back home marched in the streets to no avail, to the financial crisis that would cost so many of us our future stability, to an impossible housing market, couples having crisis conversations about whether to bring kids into this world, and now enduring the start of Trump 2.0. It’s been a ride. And unlike my parents, it has not been a ride where the marches I have taken part in have singularly changed the course of history.

That’s not to say protesting in the streets isn’t important—it’s vital to our democracy, and also a bellwether of how much we have retained that democracy, how strongly those individual rights hold. As a criminal defense attorney, there are a lot of people in my ambit who write my cell phone number on their arm in sharpie before they head out to a march, in case the persistent alliance between police and the status quo results in their detention. I believe in Snyder’s perspective.

What we are facing now, though, will require more from us. And when we think about how to stand with our bodies between the people we care about and the worst overreaches or abdications of government, we have to think of what people in ordinary, government-involved or government-adjacent jobs can do to become, themselves, sand in the gears of tyranny.

Criminal defense—and public defense in particular—has given me a lot of interesting opportunities to watch this kind of resistance in action. In our field, much of the time, our systems simply do not care about protest—this is, after all, a system in which demonstrably innocent people are routinely killed by government actors who prize efficiency over justice.

As long as protest costs them little, they can ignore it.

But working within that system has also demonstrated, for me, how much individuals can do, quietly and daily, to advance the fight for a better world. Now, in a moment which, for many, feels so overwhelming, is a great moment to remember that some of the most meaningful acts of resistance are actions that can, in practice, look more like workplace procrastination than like outright battle.

In my world, this happens almost every day. As a public defender, it’s my job to protect people’s Constitutional rights, and also to try to force others in the criminal court to really see their full humanity. The law is often unbending, overly broad, and falls on people in uniquely stupid and cruel ways. But even in the face of bad law, ordinary people within the court system can gently put themselves between the system and the vulnerable. Sometimes this looks like a court clerk who is willing to delay calling my case before the judge until my client’s mother is able to come to court and personally assure the judge she will look after him if he is sent home. Sometimes it looks like a deputy who chooses to put off doing bail paperwork by just an hour or so, enabling family members a chance to come to the court with bail money before their loved one is sent to Rikers. Sometimes it looks like a prosecutor who is told by her manager not to dismiss a patently unjust case, but decides to do it anyway and take the heat. Small, human choices which comply completely with the laws and obligations of their office, but which nevertheless advance the cause of, for lack of a better word, mercy.

In our present moment, when I look at the upcoming change of government, I see nothing but opportunities for this kind of action. Take the little squabble Trump has been having with the Senate over confirmation, for example. Article II of the Constitution sure reads a hell of a lot like the President has the power to simply send Congress out to recess if the House and Senate cannot agree on a schedule. To be clear, no President has tried to tell Congress to GTFO but we now have an incoming President who is basically the GOAT of trying new and unproven—and usually shocking—tactics.

So let's say he does that. Let's say the Senate wants to hold their power to advise on Cabinet appointments, but Mike Johnson makes the House schedule impossible to match and the President simply declares Congress adjourned, leaving Senators screaming on Capitol Hill while the new President proceeds with “recess” appointments. The various Cabinet members the incoming President has declared are literally just showing up at their various agencies, without Senate approval.

Now, it looks less and less like this is really going to happen—but it’s a good example of how, even when there is an unprecedented power grab happening at the top, people on the ground can still try to impose normal order. The administrative assistant at an agency decides that the overview of her role doesn’t allow her to unlock the office for an agency head without Senate approval. Various people who work in the process of vetting security clearances decide to (I mean, rightly) optimize their work process for thoroughness over speed. A legal team member who points out all the different forms of review a new edict could require, slowing the process down until there has been more review—both publicly and governmentally—of the impact of an action. Each one of these has a small impact individually, but collectively, the impact can be huge.

This is, of course, a huge part of how we survived the last go-round without catastrophe—Bob Woodward’s book details numerous accounts of ordinary aides pulling orders off the President’s desk, fearing that Trump would essentially sign whatever was put in front of him. Some of these would have, for example, demolished our ability to detect a North Korean nuke. I am personally grateful to everyone who had the bravery to take part in such an action. But as heroic as they may seem to me, in hindsight, in actuality these were actions as simple as moving a piece of paper during the workday.

Yes, a lot of people stand to get fired during this time around, mostly because the incoming administration seems to be much more on guard against this kind of resistance. And also, many of these actions cannot fix the larger problem (in my example above, the crisis of the power balance between the legislative and executive branches). Nevertheless, most of what we’re talking about here are quiet, workplace actions that undermine overly illegal, unethical, or objectively dangerous things. The kinds of actions that anyone, regardless of political background, might be able to take (after all, it was Trump aides who saved us from that North Korean problem last time around). Actions that certainly do not fix the larger problem, but which protect us, for a little while longer, until we can find our next foothold to address the bigger issue.

Additionally, so many of these protective acts of quiet workplace disobedience happen at ground level, subverting authoritarian agendas where the rubber meets the road. For example, the Oklahoma superintendents who are refusing to show a propaganda video issued by the state Superintendent, deciding that students don’t need to be subjected to a lecture on how church and (educational) state are being cloyingly merged with Trump bibles. Or the Texas teacher who keeps a secret shelf of banned books in the classroom, subverting state censorship.

Yes, there will be a massive effort to root out and fire people who will use the limited power of their job to delay, derail, or even undermine toxic power. But there are a lot of people who work in the government and its subsidiaries, and the odds are stacked against the government who seeks to roust out all of them. After all, social actions where just 3.5% of the population succeed in taking action rarely fail.

We also tend to overlook the sheer scale of state governmental staffing. While the federal government’s staffing levels have been roughly frozen since the 1950s (another fact that makes all this DOGE talk of paring down feel a little untethered from reality), local governments have grown substantially. Also, side note a lot more of them are teachers than you might suspect.

In other words, they can’t fire everyone who doesn’t want the same things they want. They can’t detect all acts of resistance to tyranny. Especially because many of the edicts required to rapidly dismantle our government are, themselves, illegal, unprecedented, or contrary to existing processes.

When I spoke about this on the platform I still call Twitter, several people asked me about Kim Davis, the clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples even after the Supreme Court approved of same-sex marriage. “Aren’t you calling for your side to do the same thing” was the general tenor of the questions. And no, actually, I’m not. Kim Davis wasn’t slowing down the passage of an illegal edict, or preventing the country from losing its ability to detect North Korean missiles. She was imposing her personal morality on other people, in a way that was directly contrary to clearly-established law. What we’re talking about here is very different—not a prioritization of personal beliefs, but rather transparency, rigor, adherence to process, and a refusal to capitulate to demands which may put others at risk of actual, physical harm.

Declining to follow an illegal order, or delaying action in order to seek legal advice on an order that might be illegal. Choosing to speak publicly about an upcoming policy or rule change rather than quietly processing it. Choosing to deliver information about the scale of harm of a policy in a public memo rather than behind closed doors. Cluing the public in rather than leaving them helplessly subject to obscure levers of power.

All of this is resistance against the illegal, the immoral, the harmful, or even lethal. And crucially, in a world where the incoming government is quite actively talking about imprisoning dissidents, what I’m talking about here are legally defensible actions which both protect the public and, ideally, exist within the parameters of one’s appropriate role. All of it can look just like another day at work.

In other words, there are many, many more ways to put your body between another person and true harm. And there are many motivations for doing so—after all, acts of protection may be acts of protest, but they also may simply be protection. All of us, from all perspectives, have something we can do. Some of it small. But none of it meaningless.