'If You Can Keep It': The Power Of Dissent In 2026

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0:23One of the most critical parts of a democracy is the right to dissent. But if democratic expectations and norms weaken, the right to disagree can get harder to exercise. And when authoritarianism creeps into government, dissent can get dangerous. There are, of course, famous examples. Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison for resisting apartheid before becoming the first black president of South Africa. In Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel was jailed for his dissident writing under communist rule before he became president. But there are also dissidents everywhere around us here in America. They include people protesting ICE in cities across the United States within the last week, especially in places like New Jersey and Texas.

1:09And dissidents can be people like you. My name is Carrie, and I'm from Minneapolis, Minnesota. I have done a lot of animal activism. I have also been involved in the activism regarding ICE in Minneapolis and saw the value of a community coming together to provide mutual aid, making sure ICE knows that we are here and we are watching and that we continue to watch. It's a long game, not a short game. I'm currently learning much more about the French resistance, something I didn't know a lot about, but I see the value in sometimes more brazen activism, shutting down transportation. So what does it actually take to stand up to a government that stopped playing by the rules?

1:54And when does it make a difference? Those questions are at the heart of a new book built on conversations with more than 100 dissidents from all over the world, from Russia to Venezuela to Hong Kong. I'm Todd Zwilich, and you're listening to the 1A Podcast. We'll talk with the co-authors of that book right after this. Stay with us.

2:18The last time Antonio Mays Sr. heard from his son, It was in a note the 16-year-old left in the family's garage. He told me he was going to make me proud. Antonio Jr. left home to join a protest in Seattle. A week later, he was shot and killed there. I need some arrest made, justice for my son. Listen to We Keep Us Safe on the Embedded podcast from NPR. You know, every day on Up First, NPR's Golden Globe-nominated morning news podcast, we bring you three essential stories. At the heart of each story are questions. What really happened? What really mattered? What happens next? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and to follow the facts.

3:00Follow up first wherever you get your podcasts and start your day knowing what matters and why. This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. When I interviewed the screenwriters of The Invite, Rashida Jones and Will McCormick, they called it a sex comedy that's not about sex. It's about wanting to be seen and heard and valued. Get a peek into how the script came to be on Fresh Air on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's jump into our look at dissent and protest worldwide by meeting our guests who both wrote the new book, On Courage, How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. Both co-authors are here joining us from NPR studios in New York.

3:42Julia Angwin is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. She's the founder of two nonprofit newsrooms, The Markup and Proof News. Julia, great to have you. It's great to be here. And her co-author is Ami Fields Meyer, senior fellow at Harvard University's Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and former White House senior policy advisor from 2021 to 2024. Hi, Ami. Hey there. Good to be here. Ami, your book includes conversations and experiences with dissidents all over the world, but it also grew out of the results of the 2024 election here in America.

4:20What happened that made this book feel necessary at that time? What happened was that the shape of our democracy began to change, began to evolve, and the threats that began as ominous and coming sort of down on a campaign began to congeal as the new president took office. We started to see agents, masked agents in the street. We started to see our neighbors have to hide in ways that were reminiscent of the past. And the way that democracy began to look started to feel much more like a foreign autocracy. it's not russia it's not nicaragua but it was clear to both of us julia a long time tech journalist and and to me i've been in public policy for a long time and in politics that we were going to have to find new ways to engage that everything if democracy is sort of a wide open horizon that the flavor of authoritarianism that we were beginning to feel was much more like a narrow, constricting path.

5:30And that risk was going to become a vector for how to do politics in a way that it hadn't been before. So we decided to start calling people up all over the world, people who had engaged in this kind of dissent and things that hadn't previously felt like dissent, hadn't previously felt risky, like speaking out, maybe even in your workplace, not just in the most political places, started to feel like they took more. So we wanted to write a book that offered Americans new tools because the old tools of democracy aren't enough right now. Julia, politics has become an increasingly narrow vector that includes risk.

6:08Can you talk about that? I don't know if you feel the same way. I assume you do. But can you talk about what that means here in America? What it's meant for you that drove you to collaborate on this book? Yeah. You know, I spent most of my career writing about the industry we call big tech, And the harms they were doing, particularly in sort of trying to control our information landscape and exercising kind of a role that governments used to play of quashing speech, deciding whose voices get amplified. And when I saw the prospect of that type of power merging with a regime that declared that it wanted to be authoritarian, I thought that we really needed to think more about what would that merger look like and how would we defend against it.

7:00And so Ami likes to use a language of risk. I think they often choose a different language around caring because I think really what authoritarians want to do is tell you that these people are bad. That's why we're prosecuting them, these marginalized groups. And they're also the reason for your problem. So it's not our fault that we're stealing all your money and, you know, pursuing corruption. It's actually those people's fault. And so choosing to care for the people that the regime is demonizing is actually the beginnings of what courage looks like. Now, this book never names Donald Trump directly.

7:41We talk about the rise of authoritarianism in America. Of course, the book was written since, as we said, the reelection in 2024. We talk on the show all the time about democratic erosion and authoritarianism in America. and it is being caused, be clear, by this movement. But your book doesn't mention the name. Why that choice, Ami? We never mention his name because while the conditions, as you note, Todd, certainly are caused in part by him and the decisions that he's making and also the enablers of the regime, the enablers of the government, the response isn't about him. This is a book about people.

8:25This is a book about what people do when things begin to feel harder. And we spoke to over 100 people on five continents. We spoke to a Venezuelan mother who dissented, who broke from the Maduro and Chavez movement when she couldn't feed her kids anymore, even though she was deeply socially and ideologically connected to them. We spoke to Hungarian journalists who are being increasingly sort of squeezed out or were being increasingly squeezed out before Orban fell. We talked to Russian dissidents who have been and continue to be under extraordinary pressure, even serving in prison, being sent to prison as political prisoners because of their political activism.

9:12And what you find when you speak to people all over the world is that patterns emerge. and what we wrote about were those patterns. This is not a book about how to get out of Trumpism. That will require a lot of political calculus. It will require these broader movements. It will require geopolitics. This is a book about how to live as an individual and as a community when your values are at stake, when it's harder and harder to be who you are. And what we found over and over and over again in every context from those living under Trumpism to those living under many other shades of repression was that people consistently came to the same conclusions.

9:55And those conclusions had to do with listening to the voice in your head that told you something was wrong and following it instead of suppressing it. It had to do with finding people who share your values and organizing with them. It had to do with just doing no unforced errors, trying to remain safe. And it had to do with growing your movement and growing your political home so that it wasn't just people who you agreed with from the beginning. These were the things that we found everywhere. So the book that we wrote tells these stories, and it's stories about us and what we can do. And we hope that it will be helpful, certainly to those living in this country under various shades of oppression in this country, but also to anybody who feels like the walls of history are closing in on them, whether or not Trump is involved.

10:37So Julia, Ami is describing something that sounds deeper than protest. He's, protest is great. It's the American way. He's describing something that's deeper than I wrote a pithy message on a placard and stood on the corner. I'm not denigrating protest, but he's describing something on a different level, I think. Yeah, what we learned is that protest is necessary but not sufficient. Protest serves a certain purpose, which is largely, I would say, marketing. It's about marketing the movement. It's about standing on the street with a sign shows all your neighbors and your community that they are welcome to join, that their doubts are shared, that there are a lot of people who are worried about what's going on.

11:25And so it's an invitation to join the movement. But the movement itself is really what the scholar Maria Stephan calls collective stubbornness, which is throwing sands in the gears of the authoritarian project. It reminds me of what the caller at the beginning said. It's a long game, and there's a lot to be learned from places that are familiar with the tools of strikes, civil disobedience, civil resistance. Those are the ways that you stop a regime from executing their plans, right? They need compliance. They need institutions to comply. They need individuals to comply. They can't literally force every single one of us to do what they want us to do, to comply with the lawlessness and the corruption.

12:10And so we have to learn how to do all of these other types of things that we haven't had as much practice at in the United States. So one of the first dissidents that you talk to in the book is Paul Osedebe. I think he's one of the first. He's a civil rights lawyer in the Trump administration. He says he was fired after speaking out when the administration gutted his office's enforcement of the Fair Housing Act areas. This was done not because they thought it was actually legal or that I did anything wrong. It was to silence me and anyone else who would speak out about the truth. But I'm just not going to let that happen.

12:49He was speaking there to break through news. I mean, you alluded to this a moment ago, but I want to dig deeper on it. You say in the book that dissidents don't choose to be dissidents, that they choose to be who they are. What does that mean? In the case of Paul Osodebe, this is a child of immigrants who decided many years ago that his career was going to be as a civil rights lawyer. So that's an act, you know, that is a career choice and a life choice that chooses to actualize one's values. and we so when it became clear to him that the new administration was not going to allow him or his colleagues to enforce civil rights law the fair housing act which was what his job but also if you hear him talk about his calling in life he really had two choices he could sort of just allow himself to become hollowed out to become sort of a an apparatchik to become a tool of the state, or he could continue trying to do his job and do his calling at whatever cost came.

14:02And that's what he decided. This is something that we see in dissidents all over the world. We decided to begin with Paul because it was so archetypal in what we saw in the people who we call dissidents. It's, we hear this as far back as the Soviet dissidents. In the same chapter opening the book, we talk about a writer named Andrei Szynovsky, who was similarly passionate, not about the same things, but he was a writer, he was an artist. And when Stalin passed a series of laws that made it functionally illegal, but punishable by gulag or by death or other consequences, to do art that contravenes Soviet values, He describes a very similar choice with different consequences, but a sort of similar choice intellectually, which is either I stop doing art, I stop writing, but that to me is not really a life.

14:58So he continued to write, and he was sent away, and he writes later, to be a dissident is not to consider yourself guilty. It's just to be who you are. Authoritarianism, I don't want to get too meta with this, but authoritarianism attacks authenticity, doesn't it? It attacks authenticity. And one of the things you're describing is maintenance of authenticity for yourself. That's right. I mean, Vatsav Havel, who you referred to in the beginning, is, of course, written the most beautifully on that. He says that authoritarianism is built as a web of lies. And that web is actually very fragile. and the truth is how you pierce it.

15:39And his writing, The Power of the Powerless, is sort of the best description, I think, of that thing that you see in every one of these regimes, right? They tell you that the economy is doing great and we're winning all the wars and all of the things that they need to tell you to prop up this myth of the regime. Ami mentions Soviet authoritarianism and the reaction to it more recently. Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. He survived a nerve agent poisoning in 2020, spent months recovering before eventually returning to Russia. He was later imprisoned in that gulag that you mentioned. Ami died in a penal colony.

16:19An investigation by European and UK allies determined he was, in fact, fatally poisoned. In an interview with 60 Minutes, just after the attack, he talked about what scared him most, which in this case was the risk to his family. That is the toughest part. Yes, I don't feel any fear, but children, what is kind of really horrible thought, if they will try to use this Novichok somewhere around my apartment, where my children is coming, like, you know, this door or something, everyone can touch it. But anyway, we should fight these people, because they will never stop. They will poison someone else.

17:00They will poison more people. Julia, the stakes couldn't be higher personally than getting poisoned by your government or fearing for the safety of your family. What did dissidents you spoke to for the book say about the personal risks that they took on? Yeah, I mean, it is really shocking, right, to know what you're up against when you're facing a regime, especially like a Putin, where they choose to do these types of poisonings actually because it's so terrifying. and you don't have to do that many of them to scare a lot of people, right? So there's a high return on investment for authoritarians to do sort of dramatic violence against dissidents because that way you can get everyone else to be quiet because of the fear.

17:48And the only way, unfortunately, to combat that is for there to be too many of you to do that too. And I know that sounds really gruesome, but that's the reality. That's the calculus. That's the math of dissidents, is that you need an enormous amount of people to be standing against the regime in a way that makes it overwhelming for them. Well, we have to take a quick break now. Before we do, we got this from Elena in New York, who says, This is so personal to me. As I was interrogated by the Chinese secret police in 1993, when I was teaching English in Hubei province, it made me clear that I have few rights and how important it was for me and others to protect them.

18:28I simply didn't imagine that this kind of work would need to be done at present in the country of my birth as I'm a U.S. citizen and a first-generation Chinese American. Even so, this nation has more than once oppressed their own citizens, for example, Japanese internment. So it reminded me not to take any of our rights for granted. Elena, thank you for that message. It's if you can keep it still to come, when and how dissidents can really make a difference.

18:58Everyone wants to know if AI is conscious, but consciousness is really hard to define. It's the experience we're having right now. What it is like to eat chocolate or to look at the blue sky. So how do we know who or what is conscious? Check out the new ways scientists are finding to measure the elusive phenomenon on Shortwave. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Every episode of It's Been a Minute, NPR's What's Happening in Culture podcast starts by asking three questions. Who? How? Why now? If the culture's asking it, we're talking about it. At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and indulge your cultural curiosity.

19:39Follow It's Been a Minute wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll break down the zeitgeisty topics that are filling your feed. This week on Newsmakers, Hunter Biden. I was seven years sober, and somebody asked me if I wanted to drink. And 10 years later, I woke up in a motel with a crack bite. The spiral of addiction and his father's legacy. If my dad had won, he would have kept his word. He would not have pardoned me. Hunter Biden, this week on NPR's Newsmakers. Watch or listen wherever you get podcasts. Let's get back to our conversation with another message that we got from one of you. My name is Lucy.

20:16I have been doing that since 1975. And I'm still doing everything. I work for a U.S. congressman in California now, and I am dissenting and doing small and large acts of resistance every single day in every single way. Well, one form of dissent and protest we've seen across America recently, I think with some significant risk to the dissenters, are protests against ICE on streets all over America. Ami, you already mentioned masked agents on the streets of our country. ICE protests surged in the past week in the aftermath of two more shooting deaths at the hands of ICE officers. You guys spent a lot of time last year reporting outside an ICE detention center.

21:09Julia, what did you learn on the ground about resistance when it comes to ICE and its impact here in the country? Yeah, I spent a bunch of time reporting outside of the Delaney Hall Detention Center in Newark, New Jersey. And what I was surprised, I actually went there expecting to see protests, people with signs yelling, and there were definitely some of that. But actually a huge amount of the work that was happening there with the volunteers was taking care of the families who were waiting in line for hours and hours to try to see their loved ones in the face of absurd institutional cruelty, right?

21:47They don't list the times that the place is open. They don't tell you when you can see the person. They have to know the unit number they're in, but they won't tell you the unit number. And so families end up waiting on this sort of industrial driveway next to like an 18-wheeler barreling by for eight to 10 hours in the hot sun. So the volunteers provide water and shade and snacks and coloring books for the kids. There's many kids trying to see their parents in there and accompanying kids who are alone trying to visit their parents. And so a huge amount of the work they're doing is actually trying to make it humane for these people who are detained because the entire project is to make it so painful for the detainees and their families that they just self-deport.

22:39The goal is to get people, once again, to comply with the regime wants people to leave, but they don't always have actually the legal arguments that are necessary to make that happen. And so they just try to make it so awful for the families. And these volunteers are trying to fight back. That's their collective stubbornness is they're not going to allow it to be so terrible. They're going to ease the pain as much as they can. We saw a lot of collective stubbornness in Minneapolis as well, Ami. That's one example that comes to mind. Where else in America that you would put your finger on where the type of dissent that you're describing is manifesting itself at this moment?

23:17well we're describing a lot of different kinds of dissent and part of what we are trying to do with the book is to tell lots of stories of what collective stubbornness can look like the the we we open the book actually with a quote from leonard cohen who famously says there's a crack a crack in everything that's how the light gets in but people forget the other part of that quote that lyric which is he says um forget your perfect offering and then goes says there's a crack in everything. And that's the buffet menu of options that both we're seeing across the country and that we talk about in the book.

23:50So for example, there are people across the United States who have chosen at great risk to themselves to testify. There was a lawsuit. I mean, there are lawsuits constantly happening. This is one way to gum up the works of the authoritarian state. But there are, For example, we profile in the book a woman named Najah Ali, who is a green card holder, a non-citizen of the United States. But when there was a lawsuit trying to stop what they call the ideological deportation policy, the policy that was allowing people to be deported for their speech, generally for Palestinian, you know, in pro-Palestinian speech, she testified at great risk to herself, at risk of deportation on her own, about the chilling effect that had happened on her campus, Brown University, but also that had happened to academics and students all over the country.

24:44She says that she was able to do that in part because she had this sort of moral collision that we talked about that Paulo Sedebe and others had, but also because she felt that she was able to tap into a broader strategy. So that's one thing that we see people doing. We see people tapping into a broader movement strategy and finding a place for it. I'll give one other example that's happening in the United States right now, which is that another example of what we would call collective stubbornness and sort of deciding to tie your fate to somebody else, even at great risk, which is that across the United States, there is what is functionally becoming a trans refugee crisis.

25:18There are states across the country where elements of trans life are being functionally criminalized. And what we see is a network of people who have chosen to do the work of helping to get people out of where they are, people who are now living at great risk. They either can't get a job, they are at economic risk, or in some cases real physical risk or being socially isolated. And there are networks of people who we profile in the book who are ferrying people to safety. This is the kind of creative reevaluation of people's circumstances but also creative organizing work where people are tying their fates to one another and deciding to be involved in something much bigger, this form of collective stubbornness against the conditions that are being posed by the authority.

26:10Is this what you were talking about, Julie, what Ami's talking about? Is this what you meant? I think you wrote in the New York Times that American resistance is stronger than we might realize. Is it this kind of thing? Because a lot of people, you talk to your friends and neighbors, sometimes they don't see it. Yeah, I mean, probably the first question we get from almost everyone is no one's doing enough, right? There's not enough happening. I don't see protests in the street every day. And the argument that I make is that there's a lot happening that you don't see, and a lot of it is effective, right?

26:45The boycott of Avalo Airlines, which will force them to cancel their ICE deportation contract. The boycotts of Tesla that basically, I think, led to Elon Musk's departure from government. That, you know, there's the protests that universities have put up, right? They're no longer agreeing to the coercive terms of the administration. and the lawyers that are fighting all of these illegal orders in court. So there's a lot that's happening. I think the argument I make to people who bring this up to me and say not like they're disappointed is, A, what are you doing? You could do something. And B, we are doing the right thing.

27:27We just need to do more of it. And when I say the right thing, I just want to point out that the data of studying history of movements by Erica Chenoweth shows that nonviolent resistance is twice as effective as violent resistance. And one thing I'm really proud of for the U.S. is that the protesters in Minneapolis and other places have been really disciplined about being nonviolent in most cases. And that is actually a really important sign because the moment that there's any tiny bit of violence, the administration uses it to discredit the entire movement. There are lots of authoritarian movements of the right, of course.

28:03There are also authoritarian movements of the left. Latin America comes to mind, other places as well. And Ralph emails this question, is dissent only the province of the left? Ami? Well, there's an argument to be made that the people in the White House right now began as a dissident movement, a movement that was sort of found itself in opposition to politics in general. They certainly found a prophet for themselves who didn't deliver on many of their grievances. No, dissent is not only a province of the left. We write about our context, but we write about folks all over the world. And I think it is really important to say authoritarianism can happen from anywhere, as you mentioned many of the Latin American dictatorships.