How To Be a Dissident in Trump’s America

Between 2021 and 2025, I worked on a series of war games and tabletop exercises focused on one central idea. What would happen if Donald Trump tried to return to power through force? Or what would happen if he won and governed like an authoritarian? The reason that think tanks, journalists, congressional investigators, and even members of the January 6th Committee brought me into these conversations was because of the work I've spent years doing studying the information ecosystem around Trumpism. The online culture, the propagandists, the influencers, the live streamers, the conspiracy theorists, and the extremist movements that shape the world that MAGA lives inside of. Not just the violent fringe, but the entire emotional and media ecosystem surrounding Trumpism. The people who followed him with the devotion of parrots following Jimmy Buffett. It's a political movement that became not just ideological but cultural tribal, and it consumed the very identities of those involved with him. A lot of that work in building war games and training exercises was informed not just by my own observations in the field, but by placing my own research and experiences in the context provided by the books that I've recommended for years. Especially the books I eventually included in the original Anti-Fashes Book Club reading list after the 2024 election. Books like "Strong Men" by Ruth Ben Giyat, on tyranny by Timothy Snyder, and surviving autocracy by Masha Gessen. I also included how to be an anti-racist by Ibrahim X. Kendi, because I believed and I still believe that learning how oppression functions in America for black people is essential to understanding how authoritarianism works here for all of us in the world that we're most familiar with. Ibrahim X. Kendi's work talks about a reality that's closer to home than Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Mussolini's Italy, or Putin's Russia. And the how-to part of Kendi's work is important. It's instructional. It grants you agency. It gives you a mission. The book asks readers to examine how everyday choices that they make either reinforces injustice or challenges it. But of all of those books, all of them, as important as they are. They were all written before Trump fully returned power. They were written before mass federal agents started disappearing people into vans in American cities. Before universities folded, before law firms surrendered, before billionaires openly aligned themselves with authoritarian politics. Before Americans began adapting themselves psychologically to living under constant democratic erosion. Back then, much of the conversation was still theoretical, preventive, preparatory, like my war games and tabletop exercises, my scenario planning and the trainings that I led. But today we're living beyond the horizon that I built into my war games. And that's what struck me when Gal Beckerman reached out and offered to send me his new book "How to Be a Dissident." I intentionally avoided reading reviews or interviews beforehand because I wanted to encounter the book on its own terms. And almost immediately, it felt different from many of the books written during Trump's first rise to power. It opens with a nightmare, a familiar scene, a scenario you've probably had in your own mind, something that every child imagines when they learn about the ugliest parts of history. But Beckerman isn't writing about history, he's writing about now. And this book is different because it turns inward and demands that we answer the questions, "Are we who we believe that we are? Are we who we want to be?" Books like "on tyranny" often focus on action and reaction. And you probably have your favorite rule. Do not obey in advance. Defend institutions. Believe in truth. Timothy Snyder tells you how to respond to the world around you. But Beckerman is doing something different. He's not asking just what should you do, but who are you becoming while all of this happens around you? What does it mean to live with integrity in an age of conformity? How do ordinary people convince themselves to stay silent? Why do some people comply while others sit apart and become dissidents? Much of the book feels intentionally counterintuitive. The chapter titles are clever, unsettling, and sometimes even a little off-putting. Be a pessimist. Be reckless. Be alone. But underneath all of it is something deeply clarifying. This isn't just a book about resisting authoritarianism. It's a book about resisting the psychological pull to normalize it. At this point in American history, we're no longer preparing for authoritarianism. We're living through it. Now, before we get into my interview with Gal Beckerman, I want to ask you a quick favor. Wherever you're watching or listening to this, please make sure that you like this episode, subscribe, and if you can leave a comment. A lot of you did that on the last episode, and it helped us to reach five times our average audience. If we keep this up, this show is going to succeed in its mission to bring hope and critical information to more Americans who need these things. I'm Chris Goldsmith, and this is on offense. Now let's get into it. [Music] Gal Beckerman, author of How to Be a Dissident and Staff Rider for the Atlantic. Thanks so much for joining us on offense. I am really excited that you reached out and put this book on my radar. It's very clear to me for reading this, that this was written under the second Trump regime. Can you tell us- You are correct in that assumption. Can you tell us about when you got started what made you write this book? Yeah, so there was a very clear impetus, which was those first few months of this current Trump administration, when one for powerful elite institution or person after another seemed to sort of fold in the face of what felt to me, at least in my own lifetime, to be unprecedented, degrees of executive, exercise of executive power. And we all remember these stories, the prestigious law firms, academic institutions, the media executives. It was just like one after the other, and I thought myself feeling sort of shocked, you know, as somebody who has spent much of his writing career looking every two books previous to this one that both looked at sort of dissidents or social movements, but mostly outside of the United States, I was surprised to see how little capacity people had to just say no. And I sort of turned the question on myself too, was I prepared if I was in a situation where I was forced to sort of compromise my conscience or where my moral compass was normally headed? Would I have the reserves, the tools to actually say no, to resist a pushback? And so that led me on this sort of, you know, the book is really an exploration of trying to understand, you know, what is this character type who can almost stand as a kind of a North Star for us in those moments, who is the dissident? And this is somebody, you know, we've always had sort of people like this throughout human history. And so I looked at history, but I also looked outside the United States in places that are much more repressive than our own places like China and Iran, where these people exist and they're saying in prisons right now, many of them. And I tried to understand sort of what makes this person tick. That was the real sort of impetus. You opened the book talking about a dream, how you are basically sat down and being interrogated. I think that a lot of people have had something similar, you know, for decades, I think since World War II, as a child in school, I think that people have sat and thought, reading and Frank's Diaries is most school children do, think about like what would I be doing in this situation? But your dreams seem to haunt you. Can you kind of tell us why that dream haunted you so much? Yeah, well, so this was around that same time. And it's, you know, in the way that anxiety dreams are sort of this kind of trickle down from the things that are happening around us in our world. You know, this was a dream where I was, I didn't really know the reason why I was being interrogated, but it seemed something clearly political. Maybe I'd been in a rally or I'd read a book I wasn't supposed to read or laugh did some joke I was supposed to write. It wasn't clear, but what was clear is that I was being given a kind of ultimate. I was being forced. to, I was forced to weigh a decision, which was how much was I willing to sacrifice and compromise and give up in order to stand by the principle that I had, not give up my collaborators, not confess, not. And I say in the book, the dreams are ends before I know what I would do. And I'm honest enough with myself to say that I don't actually know what I would do. I mean, I think we all, I heard those stories growing up. You know, my grandparents were Holocaust survivors. So my childhood was filled with stories of that period of time. And there was always this question of sort of who is the person who hides when the Nazi has show up. Because it's not. And I think everyone wants to believe that they are the person who would do this, right? But when you think about the risk to your family involved, kind of an actual to the life of yourself and your family, when you think of just the human drive for self preservation, right? And to conform all of that ways so much heavily against what would seem an incredible act of conscience and bravery. So it's not clear to me at all that all of us sort of put to the test would respond in the way that we would like to think that we would respond. And so it seemed important to me to sort of understand people who did and sort of what actually motivated them. When people are reading your book, who do you envision your audience being? Do you envision your audience being people who are looking for an instruction manual? Yeah. Who are doing soul searching? I think it's a really good question. You know, and I thought about this a lot and it's actually been interesting to see who responds to it and how since it's been out. I think when I wrote it, I wrote it. I genuinely, author's often say this, but I genuinely wrote it to answer a question for myself. So some of the most exciting parts about this working on this book were actually the months that I spent sort of immersing myself in dissident memoirs and talking to dissidents and sort of trying to unpack this question for myself. And I think that I'm representative to some extent of a person who has progressives or left leaning values and feels totally overwhelmed by the reality that we've been living through over the last, let's say, 10 years. And also, sort of looking around me and thinking, you know, why is it so hard for people to get it together? To resist when it comes to sort of these fundamental aspects of what we think is should be normal, right? But I actually, you know, when I say that I've been curious about how it's been received because to my sort of great surprise and kind of satisfaction, a lot of never-trumpers have taken to this book. You know, so these are conservatives who, and most of the people who are in this category who I've talked to, at least, are like never-trumpers from the beginning. From like 2016, as soon as Trump became the head of the Republican Party, there's something I talk in the book about moral nausea, right? So there are moral nausea kicked in and they thought, I can't do this. Like I can't be part of a party that would put this kind of person with his set of values in his worldview, a completely self-interested worldview at the center of our, as the face of our party. And they turned away. But think about, you know, a lot of those people see themselves as dissidents because it involved probably splitting away from members of their family, sometimes their community. And they've been sort of in their minds. I mean, now they have a community amongst themselves. But sort of in the wilderness, you know, at least from the Republican Party and from the social rules that they knew. So it is really interesting to think about sort of who sees themselves as a dissident and sort of how you how you calm to self-define that way. As you're talking, I'm thinking about how the Republican Party has been taken over by its dissidents. How the dissident is not always the good guy. Totally. Yeah. It is the Republican Party is now an organization of self-dealing, of corruption, of expression of power for powers sake. What is it that your grandparents, who you write about in the book, taught you about this idea of being a dissident? Well, I would say, you know, that they're dissident, you're right. dissident is sort of a value neutral sort of mode, right? It just means that you are splitting apart from conformity, from the way everyone else is conforming. And you're doing it in a way that involves some risk. So I'd say those folks, you know, who are now in power, or I wouldn't consider them dissidents anymore, you know, they probably thought of themselves that way at the beginning of their quest to take power from within their inside their Republican Party. But so, yes. So dissidents can come and lost at different flavors. I mean, in the book, I even say that Hitler could be considered a dissident, take it to the sort of nth degree that Hitler could be considered a dissident in the 1920s, because he had, you know, a view that the government then in charge was, you know, violating some basic principles that he had and his supporters had. And he got sent to prison as a result in so he suffered consequences for those beliefs. But here's the thing. You know, there are these different flavors of dissidents to me. They're not equal in my own mind. You know, there are people who are dissidents because they're seeking their own self-satisfaction, their seek or self-gradification rather, and they're seeking to dominate other people. So Hitler's view of liberation involved, you know, killing another people, right, involved consolidating power in himself. So, you know, that was his view of liberation. What I'm interested in are the set of dissidents, and there's not a small number of them who are seeking freedom for themselves, and the freedom that they seek for themselves, they are seeking for everybody else, right? So, so that is that is that those are the people that I felt like I had something to learn from, because they're just the it's the category of dissidents that I think, you know, we need more of in our in our world. I think and my listeners will, I hope, excuse me because I'm crossing wires a lot with my books. I think that you wrote about how an example of these the opposite of a dissident are the kind of like evangelical church that is filled with people who have or I should say churches or filled with people who kind of just want to live by a set of rules. As those rules change, they kind of just go with it because it's it's the path of of least resistance. You're also talking about how the never trumpers, the people who kind of did go along with it have recently come come to find your book and a bit of liberation through it, I think. Do you see this book landing in front of a in audience of evangelicals who are not already convinced who are not already never trumpers. Do you see this being a tool that could potentially convert some of these folks and make them a little more self reflective? I mean, I would hope so, but I don't know. I mean, I think that the counter-vailing force to dissidents is conformity. The conformity doesn't just mean conformity within a wider society, it can mean conformity within your tribe. So you just do what everyone does because everyone's doing it and you keep your head down. I actually think this is a very hard wired human instinct. You could make an argument that our whole species of survives for as long as it has because we have this instinct to just go along and actually keep our head down and work together towards some goal. I mean, we're social animals. That's what we do. If everybody was a dissident, you know, it would be a constantly an arctic situation throughout history. We'd never get it together to like, you know, hunt woolly mammoth or whatever we had to do historically. So I think that it is very hard actually to become a dissident. It's not something that's necessarily natural to us. I mean, I think we have a natural instinct towards individuality, which is the other side of this. That is what leads to dissidents. But there's a very strong pull towards being inside of a group. And so I don't know, could somebody in that group who was generally dissatisfied but couldn't understand or put their finger on the source of their dissatisfaction, could they discover that thinking about being a dissident could change that maybe? I mean, you know, the first chapter in this book, you know, so the book is written as these ten kind of qualities of the dissident is be alone. And people who I've sort of, you know, have read the book and I've talked to about it are sort of surprised by that because they think generally like, you know, being somebody who's like challenging power, you need a group, you know, you need a social movement, you need a constituency, all of which is true and I get there, you know, by chapter seven I think. But first, almost universally when I was reading these memoirs of dissidents and talking to dissidents, they all describe this sort of deep, you know, existential moment where they realize that the way, the things that they thought and believed and felt in their gut were going to sort of make them have to sit apart, which is what dissident actually means. It means to sit apart. from the people who would otherwise sort of pull them into their worldview. So, and contending with that, and it can be a painful process, it can be a vertiginous process because it's harder than just saying like, "Oh, everyone's going in this direction, I'm going to walk with them, you know, just say I'm going to go this other way." You'll find your people eventually or people most likely do, and you will need to if you want to actually make that worldview create change, but at that initial level, it's a confrontation with, you know, this, this sort of moment of individuality sort of splitting off from the larger sort of social world that you're in. One of the things that I think, I had this book sitting on my desk for over a month, and when I finally just opened to it, I think the thing that really grabbed me as I was skimming through was that your title chapters are reminiscent of something like "On Tyranny." Like you've got your rules for survival. However, "On Tyranny" at least in retrospect, all of them feel obvious to me, but here I'm looking at things like "Be a pessimist." And that, I think, is, it's a little relieving to me because I am definitely a pessimist, and I hope that it's relieving to my listeners who listen to my very pessimistic attitude. Could you explain why you went with these counterintuitive rules, and specifically could you tell us about your pessimism? Right, right. So I would categorize you as a hopeful pessimist, and I'll explain what that means. Because it's a funny phrase, but I really like it, because it sort of, I think it works well. So first of all, I mean, I went with those because I felt like I wanted to challenge people's sense of what it means to be in this position of sort of pushing back or resisting. And sort of one, you know, fun way to do that, the fun, I don't know, funds the right word, but is to challenge your preconceptions. And so I think our understanding of what it means to be sort of an activist or somebody who stands up to power is you have to be an optimist, because you have to believe that like, you know, the arc of justice is eventually going to like bend in the right direction. But when I really thought about it, and again, this is all built off of sort of really looking at the universal aspects of what it means to be a dissident that I found everywhere from like, you know, ancient Greece to Tehran today, I found that there was actually a very different kind of attitude that most dissidents had a more kind of sober attitude. And what and and so, you know, first of all, let me say that pessimism is not fatalism, right? So let's make that distinction first of all. So fatalism is the belief that, you know, everything is bad and we'll only ever get worse, right? It's just determined to get worse. pessimism is not that pessimism is the belief that things will probably or most likely get worse, kind of if left on their own, right? So so there is kind of a small there's a space for action. There's an opportunity to make that not be the case to mitigate the worst that that will most likely are probably come if you don't do anything. Optimism on the other side of that is this belief that things will most likely are probably be fine, you know, the most likely be good. And so if you think about something like authoritarianism, you know, and the optimist says people will come to their senses, like there's no way that people will accept a system that's subject to a system like everyone will, some smart politician will sort of rise up and challenge this effectively. Like again, that arc of justice will just bend in the right direction because that's what it always, you know, tends to do that tends to do. So I like pessimism because pessimism is the sense that, you know, you believe that things are tend to get worse. It really is motivating. It's it's it's animating. It sort of forces you to wake up in the morning and say, what do I have to do right now to keep the worst from happening? And and and so hopeful pessimism, which is a phrase that I sort of stole from this wonderful Dutch philosopher named Marav Andrew Lut, who was looking kind of a way to understand, you know, she was looking at a climate activist, particularly. And and and she realized that a lot of them sort of do do live with this sense that if they don't do anything like the temperature will rise, you know, a degree and a half to two degrees. Like so they but but they act they act in the moment here and now. And so hopeful pessimism is is what she calls hope without expectancy. So you don't do what you do because like you'd think that it's going to have immediate results. You're not looking to like, you know, see what the what the metrics are, you know, you're doing what you're doing because because it matters right now. And in your gut, you know that it's the right thing to do. And this is this is heart. This is really hard. It's a different concept of hope. A block of hobble, the teptis that it also calls he talked about, you know, that hope is not a prognostication. Hope is not, you know, like I know that everything's going to turn out okay. Hope is something you have to feel in the moment that you're acting because you know that it's the best that you can do right now. So I like that sort of shift of a focus to to the present moment. How do you deal with right now? We're in a world where a lot of folks just think, well, if we vote harder in the midterms, like everything's going to be okay. Are they optimists? Are they delusional? Do we need to change their behavior or their thinking? Is that belief counterproductive? Is it too much of the go-along to get along conformity that brought us here? I mean, I think it is a kind of conformity in this sense, which is that you believe that elections are the only thing that are demanded of you as a citizen of a country. And that's a belief that a lot of people have, you know, that they wake up every four years and they go to the ballot box and like that's their fulfilling their responsibility, you know, when they do. Just many people that don't even do that, right? But let's assume that's what you do and that like you think that that is sort of how you express yourself. Like I think that that's a really wrong way of thinking about what it means to be a citizen of a country. And it's actually not what was ever intended to, you know, when you think about our democratic institutions, you know, they were always meant for us to have an eye on them pretty consistently. And to act as citizens at local levels, you know, in our communities to work with each other to make things sort of gradually incrementally better or towards the vision that we all share kind of what we want. So, so I think that, you know, what we need are more sort of processes, you know, of activism that are continuous, you know, where people are, you know, meet like I love when I come across and I have recently just touring with this book, like, you know, small, like democracy groups, you know, where people are like gathering together to talk about about ideas, you know, and about things that they want to change in their communities. You know, I recently did some reporting on Hungary and it was really fascinating because I wondered how people sort of stopped being able to after Orban, when they lost the election. And I wondered how people were able to sort of step away from their identity as, you know, Orban supporters because they had something going on there that is very similar to sort of our MAGA situation here, which is people had these sort of like tribalized political identities where they couldn't imagine themselves. It wasn't even about the issues anymore, about the ideology, it's just like, this is who I am because this is like the social world I belong to and we just like do whatever the leader tells us to do and we support him, you know, whatever. So, that was the same situation in Hungary, but somehow these people and in the rural areas in particular, which were the strongholds of Orban, managed to step away from that identity and then vote against him. So, I was really fascinated by that and I learned something really interesting when I started talking to people in Hungary that didn't get reported sort of widely outside of Hungary, which is that about two years ago, there were these small sort of civic groups that started up all over a lot of rural areas, somewhere between 8 and 1200 of them by, you know, over the course of these two years. And these were just groups of people who were Orban supporters, but were sort of like, you know, had some kind of like vague dissatisfaction, they wanted to sort of like be active again in their communities. Like, their citizenship muscle had grown totally slack over the last 15 years that he'd been in charge. And they started doing things like trash pickup in town, you know, or like painting bus benches. And then eventually they were also talking about, they were like these debating societies, they were talking about like the local factory that was polluting, and what could they do anything about that, or there was like an issue at the school. And this was this kind of like slow baby step tiptoe towards citizenship, towards thinking of themselves as citizens again. And citizens have a choice, right? Citizens can choose who they want to like, they're not like loyal followers. So, you know, over the course of two years, these groups which hadn't started out like overtly political eventually, you know, started registering people to vote, started picking candidates for the TSA party, which is the party that opposed Orban in the election. And eventually they became like part of the reason that Orban was brought down. So I just thought this was fascinating and sort of confirmed for me this feeling that, you know, we can't And we can't approach these problems from a purely political or ideological perspective of, oh, if we could just flip Republicans to becoming Democrats. People need to kind of take a step back from their tribalized political identities to actually approach their relationship to the country, to the society, to other people that they live within this country as citizens. And citizens who have a choice who can actively work every day towards the betterment of the communities they live in. Do you believe that from your research, you looked at historical, especially like World War II era people resisting against fascists and Nazis and you looked at the contemporary Iran-China. From your research, was it apparent to you that dissidents can be recruited and trained or that being a dissident is inherent in someone's mindset? Is it deeper than education and politics? Is it biological? Is it genetic? Is a person born a dissident or is there kind of a nature-nature combination that can happen? I say there is a little bit of nature-natured, what I can tell without claiming to be scientific about it. I definitely saw that some of the people that I looked at in this book, who are like, let's call them like the superstar, the MVP dissidents, I do believe that there are people who are born with a constitution that's just like much more inclined towards that individuality and that constantly asking themselves, can I live with this situation? Can I am I okay with this? There are more skeptics, doubters who are constantly testing how they feel against how they feel and how they act. They want to make sure that wherever their conscience is, that it's actually manifesting and how they behave in the world. I do think there are people who are more inclined to be like that. They can also be difficult people by the way. These are people who, it's not always most fun to be in a room with somebody who's constantly like, why are we doing it that way? Does it have to be that way? Who said that this is the, so there are those people and I think then there's the vast majority of the rest of us and I include myself in this who I think could be trained to sort of understand what it means to be that firm in your convictions who can understand, and this is the project of the book, by looking at these people, what qualities they have that actually allow them to push back when you need to push back. But it's going to be harder for most of us, because I think there are these counterbeiling forces that move us pull us in the other direction. I believe, in this sort of what I stepped away ultimately from the book with was a sense that what's most important, and I'm willing to sort of like, this is something I'm willing to like sign on to, it's like the ultimate lesson from the book, is to understand that you have moral choice. I think that's almost important than more important than saying like, then like, you know, minting new dissidents is getting people to understand that in any given situation, you actually have the opportunity, and that this thing is an opportunity to act in a way that's consistent with what you believe, and to actually test out what you believe. And in some cases, that might mean that you don't do anything, right? There are really good reasons I have two small children, I need to feed them. I need to, it would take a lot for me to decide to martyr myself for a cause and leave them behind. So I do think there's many instances where the choice you're going to make is to do, at least for me, is going to be to do nothing. But I didn't want to go through life anymore, sort of opening up the newspaper and seeing, let's say, a picture of a dead child and feeling somehow implicated and saying, okay, well, let me not look at it or turn the page, or it's not my problem. Or, you know, I wanted to kind of confront reality in a different way, which is to say, I have a moral choice here, and I want to contend and wrestle with that moral choice. And there's a way to see that, an easy way to see that as a burden, right? Like it's not fun. But I also came to see it as something incredibly creative, like sort of the act of making yourself. And how do we have a meaningful life? Like I think we have a meaningful life because we sort of stand at those crossroads and we make the choices then we then feel sort of make us who we are. So I kind of flip from feeling like, oh man, what does it mean now? If I think about everything that I do in my day as a moral choice, the homeless guy that I walk past, the story I read in the newspaper, but actually if I sort of embrace it as agency that I have, as a power that I have, that I'm not going to just give up by pretending that it's not there, it can be incredibly fulfilling ultimately. So does a true dissonant, kind of like MVPs as you just described them? Do they ever know peace or even when they've kind of relatively speaking accomplished their mission, say getting rid of an authoritarian regime? Then they ever rest, do they ever relax or is the things that are inherent in being one of the MVP dissonance for lack of a better term? Yeah. Is that something that's going to haunt them for the rest of their lives? That's such a good question. I do think about that and it sort of ties into this sense that I was saying earlier that these can be difficult people. There also could be people who are at some level do have that restlessness. But I, you know, and a one person I write about a lot in this book just to kind of ground it in a concrete example is Alexei Navalny. Alexei Navalny was the anti-corruption activist in Russia who was wanting to create a more democratic society in that country and fighting Putin and the corruption that's spinned around Putin. And he, you know, people who don't know, he was poisoned by Putin. He managed to somehow manage to get out or his wife managed to get him out of Russia. It's would be brought to Germany where his life was saved. And then he had a decision to make about whether to just stay outside of Russia or to go back. And I kind of wrestle with this in the book a bit because it sort of the decision that he made, which was to go back, was a decision to embrace certain, you know, at the very least he was going to be thrown in jail for, you know, as long as Putin was in power, but he could certainly find himself, you know, an obsession where his life was at risk in which it was, you know, he was then killed through four years later, most likely by Putin. So, but when you read Navalny's memoirs and these are memoirs for, you know, he wrote from prison for public consumption. So you have to sort of take that little bit grain assault. He seems very clear. He doesn't seem restless. He seems like he knows exactly what he's doing and why he's doing it. And I think that it comes down to a kind of duality that I noticed in a lot of dissidents. I call it like a color in the book Immortal mode. It's sort of where I land by the end of the book. And Immortal mode is this, which is that Navalny was at one level sort of working in the here and now, you know, he was really trying to improve society in Russia, the society, you know, for Russians, the country itself, its health care, its education. He was wrapped up in the granular details of like what it would mean for people to live a better life right now in Russia. But he also was had this sort of like higher purpose that he was, you know, very much linked into. And you know, for him, he was, he was actually a person of faith. And so he talked about righteousness. And his righteousness was this kind of exalted sense of, of, you know, what a just world should be like looks like. And so, and that was something that righteousness existed long before Navalny was here on earth and it would exist long after he was gone. So it kept him in a way in this place where he could sort of work towards the goals that he wanted to work on here on earth, right? In his lifetime doing what he could, hope pessimist that he was, but he also felt like the way that he was acting in the world was tied into these sort of higher, this, this higher purpose, this higher, you know, which, and I don't think it needs to be religious by the way. I think it could be, you know, it could be like an exalted sense of justice totally unrelated to whether or not there's a god up there who's ensuring that justice. It could just have an idea that the world is, you know, that there is an ideal picture, the world that we're all working towards. It could be a responsibility to the earth, right? And sort of, and as, as human beings, it could just be an understanding of just the cycles of, of life, you know, of life and birth and sort of how the world actually works at its most fundamental level and sort of your, you're working to ensure that that is the case for everybody, you know. So, but I do think this kind of duality to, to ground about way of answering your questions, immortal mode, uh, can mitigate a bit against that restlessness because it's not that it's like an endless search for, for the just or the perfect situation. You sort of know what you're doing, why you're doing, why you're doing what you're doing right now in an imperfect world, but you have in your mind that there is sort of like a bigger purpose that you're, that you, that your own life might not be the fulfillment of, you know, like, but, but that exists up, up there. Now, if I'll need someone who I, I think was, was very calculated in, in his risk taking, can you explain the difference between that calculated risk taking and recklessness, which is an instruction in, in your book? Yeah. So, so there, so there is a chapter called B reckless. And in some ways, this was the hardest chapter for me to write because I really wanted to wrestle with this idea of, you know, what does it mean when an, an dissident, when kind of push comes to shove in many situations, a dissident needs to put their body on the line or has to do something, risk something, you know, whether it's their own, you know, safety or their job or something in order to, to point to the injustice that they're trying to, they're fighting against, right? So, so where it, where is the line that divides like a kind of a recklessness that can be a little bit like self or a lot self-destructive and even a kind of like a performative or, you know, or a test of purity, you know, like, or even at the most extreme and something like mental illness, you know, like not everybody who sets themselves on fire, you know, to protest something is doing it because like they have a strategic or a sort of like their, their, their, their objective is one that is, that is clear, you know, there, there, there might be sort of inward focus, they're not outward focus to put it a different way. But then there is a recklessness and I think Navalny does fall in this category where you're really thinking about that you're doing something that it, it, it involves a lot of risk, but you know why you're doing it and it's sort of directed outward in the example that I use in this, in the, in the chapter, which I, which I like, I like this example because like we, we tend to think we know this story well, which is the children's crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, right? So this is when the civil rights movement was fighting segregation and Birmingham was the most segregated cities in the south and they decided to send children to the front line. Children, some of them as young as six years old and the city fought back with dogs, with fire, with water cannons, we all sort of, we know these photos, right? And we know them, those are because this was a successful, this was a successful movement, successful moment in the civil rights movement where you know what happened is that it's so, those, those images so dramatized the injustice of segregation, the ugliness, the evilness, the violinist of segregation that it put pressure on the city to then desegregate its downtown. But I kind of rewinded the tape a bit to this decision to send children to the front line because it's not so obvious, right? It's dangerous. It's, and at the time, I sort of started looking around like everyone's like Malcolm X to Robert Kennedy, who was the attorney general said, what are you doing? You're out of your mind. You know, what if somebody gets killed, what if somebody gets hurt? And the parents of these children in Birmingham were coming to Martin Luther King, Jr., and saying like, why are you sending our children to the, you know, to be cannon fodder? So, was that recklessness, was it worth it? So from King's perspective, you know, and he thought a lot about this, he was a strategist of recklessness in a way because he, and he, you know, there's a lot of this in the letter from Birmingham jail, which he wrote during that campaign when he was in jail for a fray days. And he, he felt that in order to change the situation in order to kind of break the log jam in that city, he needed to, to create a moment of tension. He needed to kind of create a moment of tension and conflict that would illustrate what he was fighting against, the segregation that he was fighting against. And he was directed mostly at Northern whites, who he hoped would, you know, be so shamed by what they saw that they would put their own kind of pressure on the city, the city would feel the pressure. And, you know, as a result of that, a young black child would be able to walk into the Woolworth's blunge counter and, you know, order a soda, right? Like that's what he was trying to achieve. So the recklessness had this very clear objective. That was the objective that it had. And this was also for the well-being of these children too, in their future. So he could argue it back to the parents, which is, you know, you can, you can suffer right now, or we can do this thing that might actually, you know, break through and, and, and lead to a situation that will be better for them and better for everybody's, you know, future. So, so that is a kind of recklessness that, you know, has a ton of risk involved. But, feels to me like it had a real outward projection, like it understood sort of what it was trying to achieve. I'm glad that you brought up Birmingham. We just saw the Supreme Court gut the Voting Rights Act. And as we're recording this just last weekend, there was a big march. And I'm thinking right now, are we being effective? You know, we are seeing not just the Supreme Court gutting voting rights, but we are seeing state legislatures act very quickly to erase the black vote, to eliminate the voices of black people, not just in Congress, but also in those very state legislatures, legislatures. Do you think this far into 2026 that we have a strong enough impulse towards being reckless? Do you think that culturally we're just not there yet and things need to get worse, to inspire people to actually become true dissidents, to put things on the line? I ask because I think that's the case. I think that, you know, we're recording this in close to the middle of May of 2006. And I'm hopeful that this series in this episode is valuable long into the future. But I think in this moment, we should be expecting, putting my threat analyst hat on for a moment. We should expect a hot summer. We should expect June, July, especially to be a time of growing protests, growing crackdowns from the Trump administration. Trump administration is very likely to lean even harder on governors. We've seen how difficult it can be in a place like Minnesota, which was targeted by Trump for months and months and months, not just in the infusion of a bunch of ICE agents, so that they could go out and terrorize their neighbors, but taking away benefits, you know, for the needy. At the end of this summer, after we see what I expect to be a spike in protests and in state violence, do you think we'll be at the point that dissidents rise up, that people who had been on the sidelines are going to get involved? Or do you expect what we've seen over the last year, which is people who are comfortable, major institutions, law firms, universities, that everyone's going to continue to fold? I don't know, but I will tell you that, you know, you mentioned Minneapolis, and I actually think, you know, that happened sort of after this book was done, but when I saw what occurred there, it really felt to me like the sort of dissidents that I'm writing about in this book, because it was individuals in their city feeling like they were seeing for what they took for granted as normal life, right, that a child should be able to walk to school, you know, without being scared, that people should be able to, you know, leave their houses if they're not white and not worried that they're going to get a stock, that people shouldn't be walking around their city with, you know, masked and with guns and harassing people, and also that, you know, people shouldn't be killed for monitoring what was happening. And they saw that, and it inspired, you know, what a colleague of mine at the Atlantic called "Neighborism", you know, this sense that, which I really love that phrase, I wish I'd come up with it myself, because it's so perfectly captures, you know, I think, you know, the layer which the sort of the drive that people had to defend some basic, very basic sort of human qualities, human conditions of life. These were not people who were driven, I mean, I'm sure they have their own political beliefs about Trump or, you know, their own ideologies, but I don't think that was coming from, this was coming from, you know, this isn't right to do this to one another, right? So, but I was very heartened by that, by people's ability to motivate in that way, and also another thing, which is they did it all, you know, most of these networks of concern and monitoring, and we're all done sort of away from the spotlight. We're not done in a performative way, which is sometimes in a protest in the last ten years and sort of tended towards this sort of just like big attention grabbing moments. This was just people saying, "Let's organize to bring food to immigrants who are afraid to leave their houses." Let's distribute whistles and stand on street corners at specific time and coordinate on WhatsApp groups. So this is the kind of dissidents and in the face of people actually being killed for doing this, right? So that the risk factor is there. So I found this hopeful for our country because I saw people resisting in ways that felt like they were sort of understanding what was being taken away from them. I see something similar happening with the resistance to data centers with some of the resistance to AI that sort of growing in a very cross-partisan way, which is kind of interesting to see. And what I, so that's sort of the hopeful part, right? I mean, the less hopeful part is that it took people seeing somebody coming in with a gun and with a mask over their face and sort of grabbing somebody or killing somebody in order for them to sort of activate in this way. So what I would hope is that there is a more of a recognition of what, you know, to also to bring in Voklov Havill again, the Czech dissident because he's all over this book because he's a real touchstone. And he thought a lot about what it means to be a dissident. And to him, it wasn't political, the drive to be a dissident. It was what he called pre-political. And pre-political could be anything in this sort of big basket of these sort of conditions of a regular human life or a, let's say, regular, let's say like an autonomous dignified human life. So the ability to like where your hair the way you want to read whatever you want to read, gather with whoever you want to gather with, defend your economic interests, like feature children, not have violence visited upon you or your neighbors. All of these things that I actually think we generally as human beings, generally for the most part agree on, right? So, which is why I think something like the data centers is so much tapping into something pre-political because people are saying, regardless, it's not a party thing. It's not an ideological thing. It's not a left-right thing. They're saying, our water is being taken away from us. You know, the air is being polluted around us. The nature of what our communities are is changing because of these external forces that are coming in and altering without asking our permission. Right. So, so that is all at this sort of pre-political level. And what I hope, just again, round about answer your questions. What I hope is that people, and maybe also even politicians, like tap into an understanding of that pre-political layer of motives and drives. And I do think that those, like in Minneapolis, when people sort of understand and see those things that feel like violations, that feel like encroachments, they will activate. I just hope that it doesn't take having to see something so extreme as people being killed in order to do so. You write that 72% of the world lives in under authoritarian rule. A, does that math include the United States? And B, what have you learned about human nature that this is the reality that we live in? I don't think it includes the United States, so that's so for one thing. But I have learned that, you know, it is very easy for leaders who want to manipulate that desire that we have to seek safety and conform and join our tribes to do so for the sake of, you know, gaining and consolidating and holding onto power. I think that we live in a moment of incredible rupture, rupture of all sorts, technological rupture, cultural rupture, you know, rupture in terms of, you know, what gender is or, you know, like, you know, any number of things, you know, that have sort of altered in our world and to throw AI into the mix, you know, what it means to work, you know, what it means to even think as a human being. All of it is sort of being scrambled in an enormous way right now. And I think what I've understood about human nature is we're actually quite simple, the way our brains work. And it is very, it is very natural in a moment like that where nothing feels sure where the ground feels like it's crumbling underneath you to huddle together with your tribe, right? And to assume that that's sort of the best that you can do. And, and then, you know, on top of that, it's not just huddle together with your tribe, but to point to the other tribe and say, there are the reasons that all that the world is crumbling underneath us, right? So that is a human instinct. We can't fight that. I mean, we can't try to fight it, but that is that is something that we need to contend with because a leader like Trump or any number of other populist leaders is sort of tapping populist nationalists, xenophobic leaders is tapping right into that. And so we need to do, I think, you know, is sort of a little bit of what I said before is sort of actually find ways to recognize the layer underneath those tribes, which does, which does exist. And that might bring us together and counterbalance some of some of what you know, some of what we're seeing at the risk of fulfilling the stereotypes that you just laid out. I want to know what you feel about the billionaire class. I mean, being a pop total populist, all billionaires are bad. There should be no such thing as billionaire. The quality of the world that we live in is that there are billionaires. There's there's a billionaire Tom Steyer, you know, could potentially be the next governor of California. He is someone that certainly a lot of leftists are extremely uncomfortable with. He's, you know, profited off the prison industrial complex. There are plenty of reasons to criticize him. There are billionaires like Mark Cuban, who generally seems to be a good guy, at least to my knowledge has not had any like major public scandals that have revealed him to be a terrible person. How does the dissident leverage these billionaires who are relatively speaking on our side? I'm asking because this is something that is very, very much on my mind, because yesterday, as we're recording this, Trump just announced that he is going to create a $2 billion slash fund that he's going to use to pay insurrectionists. The math works out. No, this is not the 100% truth of the way they got to this number, but the math does work out. This would roughly make every charged insurrectionist the 1600 plus a millionaire. And, you know, how do you get to 17? Well, the proud boys are suing the DOJ for $100 million, and then there's extra for all of those who went without indictment, turning point USA bust in 68, you know, buses full of insurrectionists. That's thousands of people that they put on the mall for the purpose of the insurrection. There are people like General Flynn who already got a payout. There are people like Alex Jones who right now might not be Donald Trump's best friend, but he just lost the onion lost infowars to the onion. He's probably willing to do a lot to get a million dollars right now. Can the dissidents make use of the resources of the billionaire left or are they something that is inherently hostile to the dissident? My instinct, you know, when I just hear you, and I haven't thought through my answer to this question, but my first instinct is to say that, you know, I'm less interested in I think a dissident might be less interested in sort of understanding a billionaire class is being like inherently evil or anything like that. It's a system that they've taken advantage of, you know, and so I think the focus needs to be on a system that creates people that are so seemingly wealthy who then have an opportunity to do what they want and mass enormous amounts of power. Like that is to my mind at least and now I'm just speaking as like, you know, this is my own set of beliefs like that seems wrong, you know, on this sort of in this sort of moral calculus that we're making. The system is wrong, you know, the individuals who are taking advantage of it. Yeah, I mean, I don't they fall into like a camp for me of people who are not living, you know, truthful lives, you know, or they're not living lives that are sort of honest, they're not honest with themselves about the advantages that they're taking and they believe that what's come to them is somehow like naturally occurring somehow. When really they take an advantage of this system, it's allowed them to get that obscenely rich while so many people are not, you know, they're not living sort of lives basic, you know, structures of, of, you know, that allow them to live fulfilling lives. So, you know, in should we sort of try to get the good billionaires on our side to fight the bad billionaires. And maybe in the short term, but I'm not sure that that's a real solution necessarily to actually leading to a better world and a better system that has more equality and democracy in it. What is the. How did researching and writing this book change your beliefs? Did the question that you were seeking to answer, how did it change you and what is it changing about the way that you're living life moving forward? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think I talked a little bit about sort of moral choice and how I've kind of come to embrace this agency that I have, this ability that I have to do something about the things that I tend. I sense in my gut matter to me. You know, it's also about having those moments of moral nausea and not just tamping them down, you know, actually living with them, living with that discomfort and doing something about it. But, you know, big picture, it's changed my life and that it's made me feel more intentional about how I sort of go through my days and how I encounter the things that do bother me and try to pick and choose where I can be most effective. And also I think, you know, and this is connected, but maybe slightly apart from the book, the idea of building community and understanding that that is where you sort of. That's how you grow sort of beyond yourself if you want to actually make change, you know, that notion of what citizenship means, which I think is something that we've really lost in this country, you know, we become so. Each of us can socially isolate it. And also in pursuit of a kind of perfection that community, I think, is intention with, like, you have to be okay in a community, you're not going to like love everybody that's in there, but you're all. But the idea of a community is that you take care of one another, you work together. I think that, like, in Minneapolis, I think that what really motivated people and what seemed attractive to me from a distance, you know, like, wasn't the risk that they were taking because that seemed scary. It was the fact that they were. These are people who were working together to achieve a goal of protecting their neighbors. And I think that that was quite apart from the good that they were doing for their immigrant neighbors, for their neighbors who weren't white. I think that that was probably extremely fulfilling for them. And, you know, I think that being part of something like that actually speaks to something in all of our sort of souls that we really want, that we need to find ways to get back to in our country that tends towards a kind of individualization, not in a good way, not in a dissident way, but in a kind of a self-gratifying way. So all of that is sort of like in my head now, I think, as I move through my days, and as I read the newspaper every day, and as I think about the issues in the world that I feel I want to try and do something about in my limited capacity, because that's the other thing that you need to. the hardest thing is accepting that notion of, you know, hopeful pessimism that you sort of do what you can right now without expecting immediate results. I don't want for this to get too personal, but it is a little bit personal. As a writer for the Atlantic, as a published author, as a national figure, are you able to make time in your own life for community, or have you had to make the choice of work and sacrifice the friendships, the family, and that kind of thing? No, it's a good question. That is what's tough about making those kind of commitments in some ways. You know, when we think about being a dissident, you're like, "Are you willing to throw yourself at the barricade?" But it's, "No, maybe it's just like, are you willing to make time every week to meet with, you know, for a community watch group that exists in my neighborhood here in Brooklyn?" You know, where we talk about the local park and wanting to kind of keep it clean. Like that is its own kind of form of dissidents in a way. So personally, I'm trying to do more of that in my life. I do have a person with kids who has a pretty demanding job, but in this clip about something I said earlier, it's like, "I don't, when I look back in my life, you know, whenever it is that I have that moment, hopefully in the distant future, when I look back in my life, I think the things that are going to feel meaningful to me are the hard choices that I made." And we sometimes sort of forget that because we're sort of trying to make our life as easy and as sort of frictionless as possible. And we have technologies that are always promising us that as well. That actually the hard things, the hard decisions, the hard work that meant sort of not doing the thing that I sort of really wanted to do, which is just like sit down and get a drink at the end of the day and not think about anything. But instead sort of go out and meet with my neighbors, like that's actually going to what's going to make me feel like I've had a meaningful, that's going to be the substance with which like my life is going to fill with meaning. I'm sure of that. Yeah, I asked that because that's something that I struggle with myself. I am someone who I write instruction manuals on how to build community, but at the end of the day, I don't have any time left to follow my own literal instruction manual. I can tell you one of the things that made a difference for me. I have kids who are, I have like a 13 and a 16 year old. And it really focuses you to think like, what am I showing them? Because you can have these ideals. Because what you're talking about is the difference between like ideal and practice. And so you can have these ideals. And I can, you know, there's two ways to convey those ideals to them. I can just like lecture them about it at the dinner table, which I sometimes do. But it doesn't, it goes like in one year and out the other. But what actually makes a difference is when they see me acting in the world in ways that, you know, is a kind of a works and a, you know, a smosis kind of way where they, so it's made me very self conscious, you know, because I want them, and then I'm self conscious in a good way, because I want them to, to grab those values. And I know the only way to really do that to do it effectively is for them to see, see them in action and to steal them. Yeah. So I, I have a daughter who's, whose first birthday is probably going to fall just before this episode. Okay. And happy birthday. It has been, I'll pass that on. The, the last year has been a hell of a learning experience because I have, I've been talked much about this, but I'm, I've signed a couple of book deals. I'm going to be writing my own books. I'm doing this podcast. I've become a social media creator. And this is on top of, of, you know, my entire adult life dedicated to nonprofit work, which is often very thankless and, uh, and tough and, and long hours, um, you know, not working for government outside of the army, but working with government. And, you know, I, I am, I'm hopeful when I hear people like you talking about how your kids, you know, give you an opportunity to actually engage in, those community things to, to escape the, the work that we do. Yeah. And, and get into the, um, into the community because that's, that's important for, for all of us, even the lecturers. Yeah. No. And, and you, and you will see, I'm sure you'll see that, you know, as she gets older, um, well, two things. One is that like she's going to seek, you're going to want community for her, right? You're going to, she's going to want to have the social and have friends. So like it will naturally sort of lead you to other, to other people, people that you might have chosen for yourself, which is actually, you know, the part of what community is sometimes. But also, you know, you will watch her watching you and, and understand that like it's, you know, she doesn't know what you're writing in those books, but she sees when you stop on a weekend, and instead of, you know, doing something that could be, you know, pleasing to yourself, you know, relaxing for yourself, you go and you, you know, join the local protest, or you go work in the, you know, farmstand or whatever it is that like is, is, is, is a form of sacrifice. Like, you will recognize that like she's watching you do that, you know, and so it, it is incredibly, it is, it is clarifying those moments. Yeah. It's, I mean, she's still young. She's, yes. Well, one is young. One is very young. The thing is, you know, things are going to change. Right now she loves people. So, so crowds, protests, you know, conventions might be, dissident in the making. Yeah, it might be her thing, but you know, it'll be, be her choice. Gal Beckerman, author of How to Be a Decident and Staff Rider for the Atlantic. Thanks so much for joining us. Please tell our viewers and our listeners where they can find your book, how they can find you online, how they can support your work. Sure. Well, the book can be found anywhere that books are sold. You know, go to your indie bookstore. That would be, that would be my preference, but you can get it anywhere. And you can find my work online at the Atlantic, but also, So I'm on Instagram at Call Becroman. And it was a real pleasure to be with you Chris. - Thanks, Leco. - Call Becroman's book asks a question that I think a lot of Americans are quietly wrestling with right now, whether they realize it or not. Not just what kind of country do we wanna live in, but what kind of people are we going to become while we live through this moment? One of the things that stood out to me most in this conversation was Becroman's argument that dissidence is not fundamentally political, it's pre-political, it begins before ideology, before party, before elections. It begins with the decision to reject normalization, to say this is not acceptable, this is not who we are, this is not how human beings should treat one another. And this is critical because authoritarianism depends on adaptation, I was getting used to it, it depends on exhaustion, it depends on people slowly adjusting themselves to things that once would have shocked them. History is full of ordinary people who convince themselves that somebody else would step in, that institutions would hold, that things would eventually correct themselves. But history is also full of ordinary people who decided that they had a responsibility to act where they stood. Not because they thought that victory was guaranteed, but because they held onto their integrity, because they valued their neighbor's lives, because they knew that future generations were watching. That idea of hopeful pessimism, that Becroman talks about, really stayed with me after this interview. The idea that hope is not optimism, hope is not believing everything will magically work out. Hope is choosing to act anyway. And I think that's where a lot of Americans are right now. Trying to figure out what responsibility actually looks like in a moment where democratic erosion is happening at a scale few of us imagined it could. So if this conversation resonated with you, I'd encourage you to pick up how to be a dissident. It's a small book, the kind you can easily carry with you. And when you're done with it, pass it on. And then think seriously about the role that you want to play in the years ahead. Thank you for listening. If you haven't already, please make sure that you're subscribed to Valor Media Network on YouTube. Make sure you're subscribed to OnOffense on Substacks, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Leaving a rating or comment really does help us reach new audiences. So I hope that you'll take a moment to do that. And if you want to support this work directly, one of the best things that you can do is share this episode with somebody else. OnOffense is produced by Gina Kim and edited by the Lombardos for Valor Media Network. I'm Chris Goldsmith, and I'll see you next time.