Whether they participate voluntarily in a commercial transaction or participate only when compelled to by law (setting aside the question of whether the government does or should have that power) is certainly their call to make.

Just as any individual can decide whether to volunteer, whether to wait until drafted, or whether to refuse to be drafted and face the consequences.

(History shows these decisions, and the rights to make them, are meaningful at scale!)

Finally, governments who expect their leading scientists to do groundbreaking work simply out of fear of imprisonment are NGMI against governments whose scientists believe in their cause.

Conscientious objection still puts the ball in the government’s court. You have to make your case to the government that you have a deeply held religious or moral belief that precludes participation in war, and then the government decides what it wants to do. It’s not clear to me how a corporation would prove the existence of such a belief. But even if that was possible, it wouldn’t give the company the right to decide unilaterally.

As for getting shot, while the chance of getting shot in the US for opposing the government is much higher than in similar circumstances in somewhere like the UK (which is far from perfect - but rarely actually shoots people), its also much, much lower than in Iran or China or Saudi Arabia.

Pushing back against the US government is a lot safer than taking part in something like the 2022 protests that ousted the Sri Lankan government, and lots of normally apolitical people took part in that (which was why it succeeded).

If you are in law enforcement, do not follow clearly unlawful orders. The president is not your boss. This is a functioning democracy.

If you are a librarian, do not hide otherwise lawful books that the current administration dislikes.

If you are in logistics, do not collect obviously unconstitutional taxes. Make sure to challenge them in courts first.

If you are in a university, stick to what is true and scientifically sound. Do not hide inconvenient truths.

If you are a baker, do not refuse to make a rainbow colored cake just because you are worried what the people wearing metaphorically brown shirts might say.

The list goes on and on and on. This has been well documented throughout history. Fascism needs a seed to thrive, and that seed is people complying in advance. Not with actual laws, but with the idea what direction the law will take, just because it's easier for them. People not helping other people because immigration is not in vogue right now and who knows what the neighbors might say.

You're making the mistake of assuming an attribute of a culture cannot be accurate unless it's 100% accurate about every member.

I think it's perfectly valid to call Americans to the carpet when they won't live up to their stated principles, if only because of how obnoxious they've been about their own sense of exceptionalism, and how their guns serve as an absolute vouchsafe against tyranny.

History is going to note that the only times Americans attempted a revolution against their government was first in defense of slavery and second in defense of fascism, and that isn't a good look. Replying with #notallamericans doesn't help.

edit: OK partial mea culpa as the US had anti-slavery revolts[0], but the two events that will stand out for their lasting impact and scope are the Civil War and Jan. 6th. The Revolutionary War doesn't count because they were British at the time.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_rebellion_and_resistance...