So You Want to Be a Dissident?

On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and a former White House senior advisor, a deeply reported manual for how individuals can resist America's slide away from democracy, based on original interviews with more than 100 dissidents, activists, and theorists across the world. The United States has crossed into a new and unfamiliar realm--one in which daring to challenge the state carries real danger. Ordinary Americans now face a government that feels more like foreign autocracies, with a White House stretching the powers of the presidency beyond recognition. The sitting president wields fear as a weapon, punishes political enemies, intimidates sitting members of Congress, bends private businesses to his will, and disappears student protesters off the streets. Based on their acclaimed The New Yorker essay "So You Want to Be a Dissident: A Practical Guide to Courage in Trump's Age of Fear," Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin and former White House senior advisor Ami Fields-Meyer deliver a guide to courage in America's age of fear. On Courage is a captivating collection of stories and lessons from the front lines of the fight for the future of the free world that invite action and rouse hope. Step into the room where the world's new dissidents--ordinary people, in the U.S. and around the world, who never aspired to be activists--are writing the playbook for courage, risk, and resistance in the age of authoritarianism and unprecedented digital surveillance. On Courage simplifies the calculus of activism by making more accessible than ever the fundamentals of taking political risk. It's a handbook that is equal parts practical and spiritual, a valuable resource and a powerful message for anyone, anywhere, who feels the walls of history closing in on them.

Courage isn’t about facing our fears, it’s about facing ourselves

A moral philosopher examples his own experience and the views of philosophers, psychoanalysts and Hollywood in an effort to understand courage.

How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself

There are Enemies, and then there are Cowards.

Solitude and Leadership - The American Scholar

If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts

Since 9/11, Fear Has Driven Our Politics. Don’t Let It Drive The Next 25 Years.

Twenty-five years ago today I was woken up by a phone call from a close friend, who, like me, grew up in New York and, like me, was now living in California. She told me that something horrible had…

Opinion | I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration (Published 2018)

I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

Fighting Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Resistance

Ordinary people have more power than they know.

I’m Loyal to Nothing Except the Dream

There is much I take for granted in my life, and the normal functioning of American government is one of those things. In my 46 years, I’ve lived under nine different presidents. The first I remember is Carter. I’ve voted in every presidential election since 1992, but I

Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Regime Change is exceptional. It transcends its genre...the book is packed with news that will stay news...This is reporting of consequence.” —David Remnick, The New Yorker “A flabbergasting feat of political reporting.” —Tina Brown “Riveting and richly textured...What the authors add is the vivid detail that makes these events feel actual. They wrest reality itself back from the distorted world of entertainment, illusion, fantasy, and denial that Trump has generated around himself. It is this flood of provocation, atrocity, self-dealing, and fabrication that makes Haberman and Swan’s counternarrative so vital.” —Fintan O’Toole, The New York Times A riveting, intimate, and revelatory account of the most radical and consequential presidency of our time.From the two reporters who have covered him more closely than perhaps anyone else over the past decade comes this definitive portrait of Donald Trump in the White House. Regime Change covers the first year of Trump’s second presidency—a term liberated from every constraint that defined his first. The generals who once told him “no” are gone, and the lawyers who remain have learned to pick their battles. His administration has flouted court orders and he has claimed powers that Congress once checked. What remains is a President willing to take enormous risks that have upended global markets and toppled heads of state; an imperial President operating almost entirely on instinct alone. Based on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented reporting from deep within the administration’s most closely guarded rooms, Regime Change takes the reader inside the Situation Room and into the secret Oval Office deliberations that have launched a new war in the Middle East and seen Trump seal the border, surge National Guard troops into cities, and send immigration agents into deadly clashes with protestors. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan bring us behind the scenes of a presidency that has transformed the culture, turned the Justice Department into an agent of retribution against the President’s enemies and the office itself into a brazen vehicle for profit. They reveal a second term propelled by a historical irony that Trump himself has come to understand: that the indictments, the convictions, the assassination attempts, and four years of exile made him not weaker but far more powerful, more vengeful, and more willing to gamble than any President in modern history. This is the story of how Trump has used that power, who has tried to stop him, and why nearly all of them have failed. It is also the story of something American journalists are more accustomed to chronicling in distant capitals than in their own: a President who has fundamentally altered the nature of the office he holds—and, with it, how the rest of the world understands American power. It is an account of Regime Change right here in America—a landmark real-time history of a modern presidency like no other.

Why I Was Part Of The Neoreactionary or Dissident Right Movement In 2020

And a few things that happened while I was there

Daniel Trilling | Masks Off

The emergence of Patriot Platform is not necessarily a sign that the far right is getting its way. Radical right-wing...

Dark personalities in the digital arena: how psychopathy and narcissism shape online political participation

This cross-national study investigates how psychopathy, narcissism, and fear of missing out (FoMO) influence online political participation, and how cognitive ability moderates these associations. Drawing on data from the United States and seven Asian countries, the findings reveal that individuals high in psychopathy and FoMO are consistently more likely to engage in online political activity. While narcissism is also linked to participation, this relationship emerges in only three of the eight countries. Conversely, higher cognitive ability is uniformly associated with lower levels of online political participation. Notably, the relationship between psychopathy and participation is stronger among individuals with lower cognitive ability in five countries, suggesting that those with both high psychopathy and low cognitive ability are the most actively involved in online political engagement. These findings underscore the nuanced interaction between dark personality traits, FoMO, and cognitive functioning in shaping digital political engagement across diverse socio-political contexts.

Masculist pushback: the threatened extinction of the great, white Judeo-Christian male

A political ideology rooted in fear is remaking the world in its own image and dragging us with it

Epistemic Courage and Open-Mindedness

Epistemic courage requires me to sometimes adopt a belief even in the face of doubts. Open-mindedness requires me to be able to reconsider my beliefs. It is generally assumed that we should have bo...

The Arc That Rarely Bends

On Revolutionary Optimism and Its Victims