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Gal Beckerman is an author and a staff writer at The Atlantic. His latest book is HOW TO BE A DISSIDENT.
Before coming over to The Atlantic, whose books section he also ran, he was an editor at the New York Times Book Review for six years. He also served as the opinion editor at the Forward newspaper and a staff editor and writer at the Columbia Journalism Review. His writing has appeared in a number of places over the years, including the Washington Post, The New Republic and Bookforum.

His previous books include The Quiet Before, which was a New York Times Notable pick in 2022, and When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone, which won two major book awards and was chosen as a book of the year by The New Yorker and the Washington Post.

Over the years he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon, lived in Berlin as a German Chancellor Fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and broke his arm almost in half while biking across France.

We spoke with him via Zoom on May 18, 2026.

Articles pertinent to this interview:

Our show with U. of MD Law Professor, Leigh Goodmark, from 2023 is about women in US prisons for murdering their abusers. https://forthright.media/2023/03/09/leigh-goodmark-imperfect-victims-criminalization-and-the-promise-of-abolition-feminism/

Trump and His Advisers Clearly Haven’t Actually Read Thucydides https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/opinion/trump-xi-iran-war.html

Sarah Wynn-Williams and Virginia Giuffre jointly win freedom to publish prize at British book awards https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/may/11/sarah-wynn-williams-and-virginia-giuffre-jointly-win-freedom-to-publish-prize-at-british-book-awards

A mask can’t hide you from God’: can you shame an ICE agent into quitting? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/16/ice-agents-quit

I.R.S. to Drop Audits of Trump and Family https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/us/politics/trump-irs-doj-lawsuit-audit.html

Exclusive: FBI Files Counter Government Argument om Texas “Antifa” Trial https://inthesetimes.com/article/prairieland-antifa-trial-protest-repression-fbi

We were especially grateful and delighted to interview Henry Giroux in this last minute conversation, because he generously agreed to join us with mere hours notice beforehand, when our originally scheduled guest had to postpone due to illness.

Author and public intellectual, Henry Giroux, is Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy and Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest at McMaster University. He has written more than 65 books since his first book, Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling, was published in 1981. He has always been generous with us with his time over the years, as he published books such as Zombie Politics in the Age of Casino Capitalism; Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories, and the Culture of Cruelty; The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine; Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle; America at War with Itself; American Nightmare: The Challenge of US Authoritarianism; and The Terror of the Unforeseen.

He last joined us when his book, INSURRECTIONS: EDUCATION IN AN AGE OF COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS, was published by Bloomsbury Press in January, 2023.

Bloomsbury will be re-releasing in updated form two of his earliest books: Theory and Resistance in Education, originally published in 1988, and Teachers as Intellectuals from 1983. We began our conversation by congratulating him about this.

Articles pertinent to this conversation can be accessed here:

The neoliberal university faces a crisis: This generation could change everything https://www.salon.com/2024/06/08/the-neoliberal-university-faces-rebellion-this-generation-could-change-everything/

Mainstream Media Obscure the Threat Posed by Trump’s Authoritarianism https://www.laprogressive.com/law-and-justice/disimagination-machines

Poisoning the American Mind: Student Protests Against the War on Gaza in the Age of the New McCarthyism https://www.laprogressive.com/progressive-issues/poisoning-the-american-mind

Silence Is Dangerous in the Current Age of Rising Fascism in the US https://truthout.org/articles/silence-is-dangerous-in-the-current-age-of-rising-fascism-in-the-us

Assassins of Memory: Lessons from the Attacks on Biden’s Forgetfulness https://www.laprogressive.com/election-reform-campaigns/assassins-of-memory

Trump told donors he will crush pro-Palestinian protests, deport demonstrators https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/27/trump-israel-gaza-policy-donors/

Ruth Ben-Ghiat Discusses Project 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnjdKuQAuq8&t=5s

Heather Cox Richardson’s Politics Chat: June 11, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EvFEjedw-8

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Henry Giroux: Expanding Democracy or “Unified Reich?”