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Expedia, the one place you go to go places. Terms apply. So one of the jobs, one of the specific tasks in my line of work that is harder than you would think. Just it takes a longer time than you think it will kind of wipes you out in a way you might not expect. One of the unexpectedly hard things that comes around in the, the, the chore wheel in my job is the recording of an audiobook, which seems crazy, right? Like, it seems like such a cushy thing, but I'm telling you, it is weirdly exhausting. And I love audiobooks. I love listening to audiobooks. I like them in nonfiction. I like them in fiction. I like experimental audiobooks. I like, like full cast ensemble ones. I like ones with great actors. I like ones read by the author. I love audiobooks. And in my experience, I've got a lot of like, relevant sort of reps that I've done. I've done a lot of radio work. I've done a lot of podcasting. I've also got easy access to a really great, comfortable recording studio through my job. So I mean, for me, I probably have an easier time of doing this job than anybody else who does it anywhere. But still, it is weirdly hard. Even for a pretty short book. It takes days and days and days to do it. At the end of each of those daily sessions in the studio, you think you'll have time to like, hang out or do other work. No, you're totally pancaked. You need to like, lie down and pant for a while and not speak. I have no idea why it is so hard, but I know from experience that it is really, really hard. And still, still. I just volunteered myself to please, please, please do the recording for somebody's new audiobook for somebody's book. That is not my own book. It is this book. It's called On Courage by Julia Anguin and Ami Fields. On Courage. You know that little pocket sized paperback of Tim Snyder's On Tyranny that you've been carrying around for most of the last decade? That is On Tyranny. This is On Courage. The subtitle is how to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. Let me just give you a little sample of it and I think you will quickly see what it is about this book that made me act contrary to my own interest to volunteer to help record it. All right. This is from Encourage Quote it's nearly impossible to find accurate visiting hours for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey. The agency's website states that visit visitors are allowed on site between 8am and 9pm seven days a week, but families are frequently turned away during those times. Another website for the private prison company that owns the facility lists a whole different slate of time slots. But those slots seldom match the actual visitation hours, which change frequently. The changes are rarely announced or posted online or at the building. Sometimes guards at the gate share schedule updates with visitors. Sometimes they don't. Even when families get lucky and arrive on the right day, they still can't be sure what time they'll get in. Visits are allocated in time slots based on the unit number of the person they've come to see. The only way to look up a unit number is to call a phone number that is answered infrequently, so relatives often arrive at 6 in the morning and wait in line for 6 hours, 8 hours, 10 hours. Outside the gates of the detention center, they line up in the driveway, stooped over concrete barriers or beach chairs. In the summer, there is no shade, no water and no access to bathrooms while 18 wheeler trucks roll by every few minutes. Kathy O', Leary, a 58 year old mom from a nearby suburb who volunteers outside the facility, says, quote, the cruelty is the point. O' Leary sees her role as bearing witness to the unnecessary callousness of this waiting game. On visiting days, she and other volunteers in the coalition she helped build, which is called eyes on ice. They arrive at 6:30am they set up a tent on the sidewalk outside. They provide the visiting families with water bottles, snacks, umbrellas, sunscreen, extra clothes, and even art supplies for the kids who've come to see their parents inside. They do what they can to support the families navigating an inhumane bureaucracy. O' Leary showed up to protest as soon as Delaney hall opened its doors as an ice facility. Soon she realized she was witnessing a humanitarian disaster, visiting families lined up in the hot sun, wilting in the heat, being turned away for one petty reason after another. So she recruited volunteers to help her provide material, logistical and emotional support to the visitors. Most Americans will never see any of this, but o' Leary's crew present from the time the sun rises until the skies darken over, Delaney hall documents it all, quote, witnessing what they're doing, letting them know that we're not going to let them do what they're doing in the dark. I think that's resistance. It's from On Courage by Julia Anguin and Ami Fields Meyer Last spring, the New Yorker published an article titled so youo Want to Be a Dissident? It was by Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Julia Anguin and a former senior policy advisor to Vice President Harris named Ami Fieldsmeyer. The article was so youo Want to Be a Dissident? A Practical Guide to Courage in Trump's Age of Fear. And when that came out in the New Yorker, I have to admit I kind of jumped on it because I knew these authors by reputation. Julia Anguin, I had been following her work on data privacy and surveillance for a really long time. I felt like she was sort of better at explaining the stakes there than almost anybody else writing in that field. But this topic that they were on, this I mean, how to be a dissonant. I feel like I have infinite capacity for this kind of practical writing at this moment in American history. I mean, I feel like this is the central question of our time. This is the central question of how to live right as an American citizen right now because of our good fortune. Over the course of our history as Americans, though, I think we have tended to think of dissidents as very far away figures, right? The idea of being a dissident. We imagine a heroic, saintly figure in some far away, repressive foreign country. Or maybe we can imagine them in America, but it's definitely from sometime in the distant past, nothing like our current lives. But here Julia Anguin and Ami Fields Meyer are writing about our country crossing over into what they describe as new and unfamiliar territory where, quote, people who never aspired to be activists but oppose the new order are finding that they must traverse a labyrinth of novel choices, calculations and personal risks. Americans, in other words, are finding that we in our generation must now learn how to be Dissidents at home here. And now it turns out there's a lot to learn from on that score in the world. There's a lot to learn from, from other people in the world about how to do that. And those lessons are there for us and can help us if we are willing to look for those lessons, if we are really willing to read about them, or if we're just willing to listen to somebody else read about them. Shortly after that great New Yorker article came out, I asked Julia Anguin to be on TV with me. She came on and talked about new reporting she had in the New York Times at the time about the Trump administration being in the process of creating a sprawling domestic surveillance system. A domestic surveillance system that could allow the Trump administration to build a defining feature of, quote, many authoritarian regimes. Comprehensive files on everyone so they can punish those who protest. When I had Julia Anguin on the show to talk about that, we got a really big audience response to that interview. Just seemed to sort of strike a nerve for a lot of people who reached out to us in response to what they saw in that interview. I just think it's worth being blunt about my thinking about this. I think Julia Anguin and Ami Fields Meyer are writing about stuff that just couldn't be more timely, stuff that we need to be thinking about right now, and stuff for which I think there is really a huge appetite. And now Julia Anguin and Ami Fields Meyer have produced this book on how to be a dissident in an age of fear. It sort of picks up where that New Yorker article left off, and the methodology is exactly what you hope it would be to do the book. They said that they decided to, quote, call up people who had bravely stood up to authoritarianism around the world, call them up to see if they had any advice for staying safe and preserving democracy. And so this is a book on courage, is a book that is. I think it's helpful in terms of just being practical advice about what to do and how to do it. Very, very practical, nuts and bolts advice. I also found it helpful in terms of how to think about being a dissident, how as an American in the 21st century, to think about what it means to be a dissident, how it thinks to how you should think about deliberately becoming stubborn against what an authoritarian is trying to coerce you into doing. One of the reasons I wanted to do a big interview about this book is because I found in reading On Courage that the book really helped me think about some of my own unexamined prejudices, my own sort of self defeating assumptions that I didn't even know I was. I didn't even know I was constrained by them before. I wasn't aware that I had them. But once I started reading the book, I realized that in the back of my mind I have always thought that the most effective dissidents are basically magic, right? They're people who have skills that normal people don't have. They're people who are born super heroically brave and super heroically insightful. And I think I've always thought of the world's great dissidents as people who know that they're super heroically brave and superheroically insightful. And so they have confidence to do what other people would never have confidence to do. They sort of know from jump that they're destined to go out and slay Goliath because they have great insight into how to operate the levers of power and they have great bravery and they're just different than the rest of us. I didn't really know that that's how I was thinking about dissidents until I started examining those assumptions, which on courage really got me to do. And one of the points that Anguin and Fields Meyer make in the book is that nobody is born superheroically brave and superheroically insightful. Nobody's really like that. The great dissidents of the world weren't born that way. Most of the people, most of the dissidents whose stories, these heroic stories that gets told in the book, they found themselves becoming dissidents not because they were destined for it from birth, but simply because they were stubborn and because they insisted on paying attention to their own quiet internal moral compass that told them that what was going on around them was wrong and that they shouldn't acquiesce to it. Angwin and Fields Meyer described, quote, a conflict often faced by people in authoritarian societies. A collision between the head and the heart, between values deeply held and an outside world unfolding in dramatic divergence. It can happen over decades or in an instant. It comes of morality or it arises out of necessity. To dissent is to risk being wrapped in a kind of negative identity defined by what you're not, but the environment, the external circumstances that recast these individuals in oppositional terms. Dissidents don't choose to be dissidents, they simply choose to be who they are. That really, really resonates with me right now, particularly as I've covered the different ways that people have stood up against Trump's sort of attempted overthrow of the republic over this past couple of years, you see it when you cover these stories of resistance all over the country, people holding closely to their deepest values, listening to the internal voice, the voice inside them that is uncomfortable with what is going on around them. These are the starting points that are identified in On Courage for how people can be really effective as dissonance, how people can become how a whole people, a whole country, a whole nation can become collectively stubborn against the wishes of a dictator. How the people can find the courage to inconvenience and annoy and slow down and mock and ultimately topple an authoritarian government. They say, quote, beginning with small acts like showing up, telling the truth, searching for our options, and bearing witness to injustice, those can embolden us to do more. So, for instance, Kathy o', Leary, who I mentioned at the top, the suburban mom who keeps watch outside Delaney hall, she and the other volunteers there are offering just human level practical help to the families who are being hurt at that facility. And that's really important. But it's also really important that o' Leary and those other volunteers are consistently showing up and documenting what's really happening, making sure there's a record, often a video record, of everything that happens there. Anguin and Fields Meyer point out that historically in the former Soviet Union, for instance, getting the truth out about what was happening inside their authoritarian country was the job of journalists and writers and artists and anybody who could speak, smuggle physical paper, illegal newspapers and newsletters to the wider world. Today we don't have to do this with physical paper. Today, when almost everyone has a smartphone, the work of witness and documentation and recording the bad acts of the authoritarian government and spreading the word about them, that work is shared among everyone. And that work of witness is crucial in part because the victims and the perpetrators both need to know that justice is going to come one day. And justice can only come if these crimes are documented. So, for instance, in On Courage in the book, one human rights statistician who has spent his whole career cataloging perpetrators of state violence puts it this way. He says, quote, we will know who you are. You are not going to be anonymous. You can wear cute little balaclavas. It may protect you from a few minutes of social media shame, but people are never going to give up their pursuit of you because you've destroyed their lives. The things you're doing now will haunt you for the rest of your life. Your children will be ashamed. The promise of accountability Julia Anguin and Ami Fields Meyer say one other key to finding courage in a repressive regime is finding a political home, a group of like minded people to keep you grounded and sane and supported. They write, quote, none of us can be expected to absorb the shocks of authoritarianism on our own or to face rapid fire changes in laws, norms and institutions alone. But in order to find that political home, they point out that you need not start from scratch. Campaigns, movements and political efforts are built on the foundations of existing relationships, out of groups of people who have known each other in a different context and who decide to repurpose their relationships for a new, higher purpose. They say, quote, any network will do. From your colleagues to your book club to your theater troupe to your neighborhood association to your quilting bee, to anything. Once you have your political home and your community of support, Julia Anguin and Ami Fields Meyer write that you have to deliberately try to expand it, and that means taking responsibility for people in your community who you didn't necessarily think of as yours before expanding the idea of who you feel responsible for. It also means being willing to form big, imperfect coalitions to push toward your goals along Unlikely allies It means creating as many entry points as possible for those unlikely allies. And that can be something as simple as inviting someone in, inviting them to help, asking them for something mundane to contribute to the cause. In recent protests in Serbia, for example, against government corruption, student activists would ask their less involved classmates if they could contribute materially. If they could just bring some blankets for their friends who were out protesting on cold nights, that was an easy enough thing to say yes to. Those uninvolved but allied, sympathetic people would bring the blankets. But then that would commit them further, and soon many of them would be joining their friends in the protests as well. An earlier Serbian protest movement employed humor and theatrics to attract people to their cause. The Serbian youth activists who toppled Slobodan Milosevic once painted the authoritarian president's face on a metal barrel that they placed on a busy street. Passersby who donated one dinar could hit the barrel with a stick. Those who had no money to spare got to strike the barrel twice. When state police confiscated the barrel, the students put out a press release. Under Milosevic, nobody was safe. He had even arrested a barrel. When President Trump sent the national guard into Washington, D.C. last year, local activists responded by mocking the invasion mercilessly. They organized dance parties and drag shows and block parties. They said they were inspired in part by the Serbian protest tactics from 26 years ago. One organizer telling Julia Anguin and Ami Fields Meyer, quote, it was very important to make fun of Trump. It is an act of defiance to be joyful. It is an act of defiance to be joyful. Why do I feel that? The book is called on how to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear and it is really, really. The audiobook is just okay. But the book is great. Whether you read it or listen to me read it to you. I promise this book will make you think and feel differently about what it means to live in this country at this moment and what you are capable of as your country needs you. It will make you feel less alone in the world and less alone in history. It will give you concrete ideas of what you can do right now to help your country. It will make you feel more equipped for whatever is coming next. Couldn't recommend it more highly. Julia Anguin and Ami Fieldsmeyer join us here. Next. Stay with us.

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Jacob Soboroff

I just quickly say hello to you? For me, being a part of this place has always been about the people, not about the politics. Why are you holding this sign? You ever been to a protest before? Be safe. People that we cover who allow us to enter their lives. How's everybody doing? Everybody doing okay? How long you guys been in line? I love human beings. To spend time connecting with them is the biggest blessing that I could ask for.

Rachel Maddow

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Joining us now are Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Julia Anguin and former White House senior policy advisor Ami Fieldsmeyer. Their new book is called on how to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. I read the audiobook for this book. I think it is so important. I was trying to do my part to help spread it far and wide. Julia and Ami, thank you so much for being here and congratulations on this book. Thank you for writing it.

Julia Anguin

Thank you so much.

Rachel Maddow

Thanks for having us.

So I gave you a big wind up there in terms of introducing this. Let me ask you about sort of your elevator pitch for this book. When you are talking to people now about why they should read this book, about why you set out to do this project, about your basic findings, how are you summing up to people, the bottom line and what's important about this work?

Julia Anguin

Well, first of all, I just want to say thank you so much for your kind words about the book. Honestly, we're so grateful that you made yourself flat as a pancake to read it over days and days. I know that's a lot of work. So thank you very much. We really wrote it for the reasons that you were talking about, which is that people need inspiration, right? There's after the election, I think Ami and I were looking at each other kind of feeling like, what do we do now? And everyone we knew was like, what can we do? It all looks too hard, right? It's sort of like this idea, like you said about this dissident work is somehow special. People do it. And it's really brave and dramatic. And it mostly involves like standing bravely in front of a tank before it runs you over. And we wanted to show people there were a million different at ways that you can help throw sand in the gears of the authoritarian regime. And it can look as simple as bringing blankets to a protest or handing out water to families in front of Delaney Hall. And it can look like really courageous things, like even the judges who are writing really brave rulings that are protecting the Constitution. And it can also look like people doing things in other countries, smuggling tortillas to rebels in El Salvador. So there are a million ways that resistance can take place. And we wanted you basically to have a buffet menu. So this book is basically pick your entree. Do you like vegetables? Do you like dessert? You know, we have something, a story for everyone's taste.

Rachel Maddow

Ami, let me ask you about that sort of central premise. I find it very satisfying. It just meets with my own perceptions, both of how things have worked historically and how things are working now. I find it very satisfying. That analysis that Julia was just describing, that, you know, there's no silver bullet, there's no one thing that stops an authoritarian takeover. There's no one thing that saves a democracy. What you have to do is put sand in the gears, slow things down, be collectively stubborn, in that memorable phrase. But why is it that that works? What is it about a strategic approach that is sort of everything all at once, everybody just refusing to make it easy for them, that works against authoritarian regimes that seem to have all the energy in the world and the worst possible designs for everybody involved in what they're doing?

Yeah, it works. Because what we've seen all over the world is that the civil resistance movements that are the most effective are not the ones that only rely on the normative democratic processes, like voting, although that's important, while we still can, but also the ones that try to inflict the most, the highest cost and the most pain and just make it inconvenient to continue. And that's what we see all over the place. We see that either it becomes too costly for a regime, too politically costly to continue, but oftentimes what we see is that it becomes too personally costly for allies of the regime as well. And so when you weaponize inconvenience, it's sort of a continuum between inconvenience on one side and economic or political pain on the other side. We see this as certainly, as you say, Rachel, not a silver bullet, but as a slate of mechanisms that ultimately can be quite effective.

And, Julia, what about the other side of that? One of the things that I didn't expect from the book and that I found very moving, and actually it took multiple takes for reading those parts of the book as it's an audiobook, was when you wrote about the opposite of inconveniencing people, the opposite of inflicting pain and making things difficult. The work to simply comfort people and to try to mitigate some of the harm that they're being exposed to by the regime. You know, bringing blankets to the protesters, giving sunscreen to the families that are waiting outside Delaney hall, that just human level assistance. I think I had a really hard time thinking of that as a strategic thing rather than just a moral good, But I think you guys make a pretty good case that it's both.

Julia Anguin

Yeah, I think we didn't expect that either. I think the myth of the dissident is honestly, fairly male and heroic. And what we actually found was that the work of community care which is compassion, empathy, taking care of others, providing meals, providing water is a core part of building the community in solidarity that allows people to stand together against the regime. Because the truth is you can't throw the sand in the gears yourself. I mean, you can, but then they'll just run you over, right? The entire point of resistance is that there are more of us, right? They might have all the guns, but there are more of us. Literally just numbers wise. And so to build those communities, you actually have to build those human bonds. And so we explicitly called out care work as dissident movements. Because if you look at the past, how did the Montgomery bus boy, one of the most effective sort of dissident strategies that studied right in the history books and how did that work? It was people taking care of each other. They were like, look, these people aren't going to take care of us. They're not going to let us ride in the bus the way that we want. And so we are going to take care of each other. And they built up this whole community and it was people with checklists and carpools and who's going to pick up who when. And you know, that kind of work is just project planning. Today it would be Excel spreadsheet or something. But it's that work that actually is the fundamental sort of base layer, the sediment layer of resistance movements.

Rachel Maddow

I think that the, again, the sort of the opposite side of that is thinking about large scale demonstrations. And you write about that too. And we certainly have seen very dramatic large scale demonstrations, particularly those no Kings protests. But also I think quantitatively we've seen a shockingly large number of protests and a big wide range of them geographically and in what types of parts of the countries they've been in. What types of people have protested against Trump these past couple of years since he's been back in power with these designs that I think he has on, on the Constitutional Republic. You guys write, I think with some sensitivity about the three and a half percent rule about this idea that is very, that I hear all the time, people raise it with me all the time that this idea in political science, which is a well grounded, well researched idea, that if three and a half percent of a population is nonviolently protesting, that's sort of a magic number in terms of understanding the strength of a resistance but movement. But you guys write with some sensitivity that the popularization of that idea, that concept and that research has actually become a little bit of a headache too because people sort of misunderstand what that means. So maybe ami, you could jump in on that a little bit and talk about sort of both the truth of that, but also the way it's been kind of misconstrued.

The people who did that math that you're talking about, Erica Chenoweth, who I know that you've interviewed before, and Maria Steffen would be the people, be the first people, I think, to say that this number has become a bit of a headache. It's an extraordinarily empowering statistic for people, to the extent to which it's true. The reason it's become a bit of a headache and the reason that we try to contextualize it is because it's not a magic number. It's not just that if you hit 3.5% of the population, everything will be okay and we can all go home. What that number is is generally an indicator that your movement has taken all the laps it needs to take. And that can be a sort of victory lap. Once there are 3.5% of the population that's in the street that's involved meaningfully in some kind of civil disobedience work, what that indicates is the health of a movement. What that indicates is that you've done all the other things, all the other organizing work, which often is actually relational work that you've done. You've organized your community. You found, many people have found, to something you quoted before, a political home. And so it's the victory lap. We shouldn't pooh, pooh the number. Of course, it's an extraordinarily important statistic and comes from studying decades and decades and decades of civil resistance movements all over the world. But part of the reason that nonviolent movements work in the conclusions of those scholars who found that number is actually because nonviolence is more convincing than violence. And as long as we're doing this work, as long as we're trying to save a constitutional republic, the work is really to try to market democracy and to market nonviolence and to make people want that more than they want the violent teardown of any kind of country.

Right. And you want to reduce, as much as possible, barriers to entry, psychological barriers to entry, and any other kinds of barriers to entry to anybody who wants to see themselves as part of this polity, as part of the small d democratic mass of people in this country who want to save the republic. And violence is the biggest barrier there is in terms of people signing up. Juliet actually, to both of you, I'd be interested to hear an answer from both of you on this. Given what you've learned about successful dissident movements, successful resistance to authoritarian overthrows around the world and throughout history, given all of the research and interviews that you guys did going into this, how do you feel right now? Speaking in June 2026, how do you feel right now about the state of, of American resilience and resistance to what Trump is trying to do? I mean, I've been very open about the fact that I think he is a would be dictator. I think he is trying to dissolve the constitutional republic. I think he wants to rule indefinitely. I think he wants to get rid of everything that we think of as our constitutional inheritance. Whether or not he actually tears up the document. I think that therefore we're in an existential fight for this country. If, if, if that's the case, how likely are we to survive? How do you think we're doing?

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Jacob Soboroff

I just quickly say hello to you? For me, being a part of this place has always been about the people, not about the politics. Why are you holding this sign? You ever been to a protest before? Be safe. People that we cover who allow us to enter their lives. How's everybody doing? Everybody doing okay? How long has been in line? I love human beings. To spend time connecting with them is the biggest blessing that I could ask

Rachel Maddow

for from the field to the studio Jacob is finding the heart of the story.

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Connect with Jacob souboroff weekends at 10:00am

Rachel Maddow

Eastern on Ms. Now.

Julia Anguin

Well, we debate this all the time. And I'll start because I'm the sort of, like, the hope truther here. I'm always saying, like, I just believe in hope. I think what I felt when I was hearing all these stories from dissidents around the world and studying all the literature was that in the United States, we are doing the things fairly textbook. Right? It doesn't seem that way, obviously, because, of course, the assault comes every day. Every day, some new terrible thing happens. But the trick is that the most important things are to keep throwing sand in the gears and to do that nonviolently. Right. As AMI was saying, nonviolence is really crucial, not just because it compels other people to feel like the movement is safe to join. They would like to join the people sitting on the sidelines. But also, nonviolence is really key because the authoritarian regime, their whole goal is to make the resistance look like violent protesters so they can lock you up and they can sell a story about how this is a sedition movement, et cetera. And so I've been impressed. The Minneapolis nonviolent movement drove ICE out of their town. Boycotts are really effective. We've had the Avelo boycott, which basically caused this airline to cancel its ICE deportation contract. Right. We have been seeing effective movements. The Tesla boycott also cut their stock price in half and probably led to Elon Musk having to leave government to take care of that company. So what we're seeing is people organizing, doing things together that are textbook what you want to see in a resistance.

Rachel Maddow

What I will tell you, Rachel, in complete agreement with everything that Julia has just said, I'll tell you what makes me feel worried, and then I'll tell you what makes me feel hopeful, what makes me feel concerned, is that despite your best efforts, despite the best efforts of lots of people who are ringing the bells, I think that most Americans, and even most Americans of conscience, still don't quite understand where it is that we are. Liberal Democracy is now the least common form of government on Earth. Three out of four people in the world are now living under some form of autocracy. And the United States, according to the best metrics that we have from the V Dem Institute, is now at levels of democracy last seen in 1965, which, of course, is the first year that most historians and people of conscience would say that we were a democracy to begin with. And so there are real Alarm bells I don't think that people quite understand it yet. The reason that people, I think don't quite understand it yet is because democracy looks autocracy, authoritarianism looks different now than it used to. It's not your grandmother's authoritarianism, as I said to my family recently, it's not your bubbies authoritarianism, this is a different thing. It doesn't come in. It comes in through elections. It doesn't come in in the same way through the back of a coup in the way that it has in the past. What we've seen authoritarianism in this country has come in through elections. We've seen authoritarianism in Russia and in Hungary and in Venezuela all come in through elections. The reason I continue to feel hopeful is because of the gradual nature of the way that authoritarianism now comes in and competitive authoritarianism. That means we have off ramps because it's gradual. That means that we have more opportunities to drive off and to drive down an off ramp in the way that we just saw Hungary do and the way that we saw Brazil do in the last couple of years. So I think that I would frame this as because of what we're looking at, the United States has the opportunity to go down and off ramp. The question is whether we'll continue to do the things that we need to do in order to get there.

It's interesting because of the audiobook, I had a little bit of access to what was going on in terms of the publishing process and the timeline. And so I know that you guys had essentially locked the book text. You essentially had wrapped it just before Viktor Orban was voted out of office in Hungary. And Orban looms large in this book, I think, rightfully, because he is such a good template in terms of Trumpism in action. Certainly Trump has been operating on a different timeframe than Orban, but a lot of what Trump's movement has been trying to do, it explicitly cribbed off of Viktor Orban's homework, and they did that. So I wanted to ask youjuli. I'll ask you to lead on this. What you made of the movement that pushed Orban out and his being deposed after what he intended, I think, to be a permanent seat of power in Hungary.

Julia Anguin

I think there's two things that really stuck out to me about the Orban situation. One is that Orban was incredibly clever, right? He did not use violence to enact his authoritarian rule. He very carefully made it all look legal. He changed the constitution. He took control of the press and. And controlling the media. By the way, is 90% of the game for authoritarians. That is their number one, two and three priority is because if they can convince everybody that their story is the right one and those other people are just crazy, violent protesters, then they don't have to do much else work. Right? So controlling media is a big part of the project. And what he did was he just defunded all the independent media and turned all the other media into basically state propaganda. And so he did it bloodlessly, and that was very effective. But what also was interesting to me is that it was the existence of these independent media that were hanging in for dear life that also helped turn the tide. Right. They were just relentless with their $4, putting out YouTube videos and printing on websites and doing the best they could to get the message out about the corruption. And it really was the story of corruption that sold the. On throwing out Orban. Right. Because the truth is, authoritarianism is always about corruption. Right. The reason they want all that power is they can steal from your pocket and put it in theirs. Right? Like a very simple story at the end of the day. And it was One of those YouTube channels, this extreme documentary they did about his family and the wealth that they took, that really was helpful in persuading that middle ground of people. Because this is always a game where there's a bunch of people who are dissident, who are fighting, and then there are a bunch of true believers, but the vast majority of the people are kind of in the middle and kind of like, I don't know which side should I go on? Or I'm confused and they need to be persuaded. And so I think of the Hungary story as a very effective persuasion tale where they got those people in the middle to realize how it was affecting them and how it was wrong and it was taking their dollars.

Rachel Maddow

Yeah, I think. And what you just said about the simplicity of the corruption message, I believed it intellectually before we got to this point in American politics and history, but now I believe it with my whole heart and body every day. It really is. I mean, I felt like I studied that in terms of, like, you know, Alexei Navalny's work, for example, in Russia, about how important it is for people to understand that corruption is the point of the authoritarian overthrow and that that is a message that appeals to everyone who doesn't want to be robbed, which is everyone. But we're living through that now. And the challenge, I think, of the. What we've got in terms of remaining media independence right now is to tell that story in a way that is true, provable and gets through. Well, let me close with just asking you both one last thing here, and that is, I don't know if this is going to be a hopeful or unhopeful way to end this, but Ami, you mentioned the sort of peculiar modern themes of today's authoritarians and how it's not necessarily the way they don't necessarily operate along the same lines that authoritarians did in the past, and that they have other ways of both exerting themselves and fighting against people who would oppose them. Julia, I know your reporting work leading into this work has really been just seminal reporting and seminal expository and explanatory journalism about data security and surveillance. And one of the things I think about all the time is who's going to be better at marshaling technology to their side of this fight in terms of surveillance, in terms of sharing information, in terms of the democratization of information, is the resistance going to be better at it, or is the regime going to be better at it? And if they can use these miraculous supercomputers we've all got in our pockets against us, are we going to have to live in some sort of radically different way in order to effectively oppose them over the long run? So I guess I'd love to hear from both of you on that point. Technology, the sort of right wing billionaire tech lord signing up with Trump, the surveillance issues that we're already facing, the idea of them creating dossiers on Americans and going after them for protesting. How do you see the balance of power along those lines as we get deeper into this fight?

Julia Anguin

Well, I think it's a scary time, to be completely honest. Right. Because we've never, you know, we looked at history and all these authoritarian regimes, you know, you read about them and et cetera, and you look at the Stasi, right, the East German secret police, and they had 1 out of 10 people in East Germany was an informant, right. And they had dossiers on every citizen and they were really big in the surveillance business. But that, that just pales in comparison to what the state has now. Right. So we are in somewhat uncharted territory because we have not seen an authoritarian with such a close relationship to the companies that have more data and access to every single bit of human behavior than has ever been available before. So I don't want to understate the fact that we are up against an incredible police state like that could be turned on, is probably already switched on and is surveilling all of us and that is terrifying. But the thing is that I keep coming back to my hope. Truth or ness. But the fact is that in the end, they still have to do something with all that data. They still have to go after you. They have to bring a prosecution, and their prosecutions keep failing, right? And they have to gin up some mortgage fraud, and then those are failing. And then they have to get a judge to do something, or they have to just batch you off the street. But even then, months later, they have to let you out of detention. So. So I think that our hope here is that we need to be all together. We have to fight for each other, and the community is our protection. Sadly, I think that is what it is. We have to remember that just because they're going after those people and they don't look like us and they're not like we don't have their same values, that it's okay. We can't let that happen. Because that's how they pick off the different groups and then make it so we're too weak to fight back.

Rachel Maddow

The book is called on how to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. It's by Julia Enquin and Ami Fields Meyer. You guys, I do thank you for writing this book. I think it really is invaluable. I think it's a classic of our time, and I think everybody should read it. I am honored to have done the audiobook, and I thank you for letting me do that. Thank you both so much.

Julia Anguin

Thank you.

Rachel Maddow

Thank you. We're honored. Rachel. Thank you.

All right, thanks. Why have I asked my electrician I found on Angie.com to bury my pet hamster? I was so moved by how carefully

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