Maria Ressa:
Don’t voluntarily give up your rights, right? I mean, again, in — I will give you our example in the Philippines, where the first newspaper gave up — the television station gave up largest — it lost its franchise or license to operate.
And guess what? It never regained it even after the time of Duterte. Little Rappler with, about 100, 120 people, we stood up. And it was difficult. It was frightening, but we’re still here, right? A point in time when I faced over a century in jail, but I’m still here.
And, after 2021, I had lost some of my rights. I wasn’t allowed to travel, for example, but now here I am. I’m in New York City teaching at Colombia University, right? So I guess what I’m saying is, hold the line is the phrase we use, because it’s connected to the rights that you deserve as a citizen.
And if you do not hold the line at this crucial moment — this is the moment when you are strongest — it will only — you will only get weaker over time. And it isn’t just the journalists, because journalists are the front lines in this, but the question is to every single citizen in America.
It’s the question I threw in the book, how to stand up to a dictator. And that question is simple. What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth? Because if you don’t have facts, you cannot — and I have said this over and over since 2016. Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without these, we have no shared reality.
You can’t solve any problem, let alone existential ones like climate change. You can’t have journalism. You can’t have democracy. And in a system like that, only a dictatorship wins.
