The historian who understands tyrants — and how to beat them

Adam Hochschild

Historian Adam Hochschild has spent over five decades writing about power, repression, and the movements that fight back — and he says this may be the most perilous moment he's ever seen. He joins David Fenton to explore what history can teach us about surviving and resisting the MAGA crisis. Hochschild, author of eleven books including American Midnight and Bury the Chains and co-founder of Mother Jones magazine, draws striking parallels between Trump’s authoritarian measures and America's most repressive eras — from the Woodrow Wilson-era Espionage Act that jailed a thousand Americans for their speech, to the 1924 Immigration Act that helped seal the fate of millions of Holocaust victims. He also breaks down how the British anti-slavery movement built a 51-year coalition that changed the world, why the fall of Hungary's Orbán should give us hope, and the one mistake resistance movements can't afford to make: letting rigid ideology destroy the coalitions they need to win.