Juliette Sellgren 

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. Hi, I'm Juliette Sellgren and this is my podcast, the Great Antidote named for Adam Smith, brought to you by Liberty Fund. To learn more, visit www AdamSmithWorks.org. Welcome back. Today's date is March 27th, 2025, and I am excited to bring on a very special speaker today to be talking to us. Her name is Grace Bydalek, like Bedazzle. She is the director of the Dissident Project, which if you haven't heard of it, it is a project of nonprofit Young Voices that is dedicated to educating American high schoolers against authoritarianism. We're going to be talking about why high schoolers, how does educating work? It's very active relative to a lot of thought work, especially in this space. And so what does that mean? Why? I have a bunch of questions. She's also a visiting fellow with the Independent Women's Forum. She is a ministry apprentice at a church called Redeemer, and she is pursuing a master's in theology. I'm hoping to have her on again to talk about all the rest of that stuff because it sounds super awesome. She's also an actor, so Grace has a lot going on. Thank you for taking the time to come on the podcast,

Grace Bydalek 

Juliette, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Juliette Sellgren (1:38)

So first question, what is the most important thing that people my age or my generation should know that we don't?

Grace Bydalek (1:46)

Yeah, that's a great question and I'm glad that you ask it consistently to all of your guests. I think what people your age should know that you don't is that politics are boring. They're really deeply unimportant if they're not connected to and even more deeply entrenched value set. So I think we see, and we talked about this a little bit before we hopped in, but I think we see a lot of very ideologically convicted young people nowadays whose political ideas are not necessarily attached to a deeper set of values. And that is really, it's actually dangerous. And I think another podcaster that I really admire named Allie Beth Stuckey says, politics matter because policy matters because people matter. And that's the only reason, in my opinion, to be involved in politics. They're a necessity, but they're boring is what I would say to that question.

Juliette Sellgren (3:01)

Yeah, I mean, the way you've described it is kind of the, I don't even want to go so far as to call it a necessary evil, but it's the necessary drudgery that you have to do sometimes, and that's probably the best framing of it I've heard. Because if you think it's interesting, if you think that it's more than just, I don't know, something you can kind of hop in or out of at any time and the issue sure changes, but the thing itself is the same, then are you really moving the needle? Is that the best way?

Grace Bydalek (3:39)

It makes you boring as a human being? It bifurcates your thinking. It polarizes your thinking in a way that's actually totally counterproductive. It makes you less of a critical thinker. It makes you unable to view the person across the table from you as a fully-fledged human being. If you are totally in ideological lockstep with any one political party, you have lost the thread. And I wish that we as a population had had more perspective on that.

Juliette Sellgren (4:13)

I think in practice, a lot of people do, but then there also seems to be kind of this guilt or even I want to call it what we think civic responsibility looks like, where you need to be involved or you need to know what's happening when in practice that's really hard and it's not necessarily good for you or helpful to the actual process. I think in practice, most people really don't know or care or can know everything that is happening in this one part of life all at once, and so they don't, and then it's still fine. How did you learn that? Has it always just been something that has been evident to you or was there a process by which you kind of realized more and more this reality?

Grace Bydalek (5:07)

That's a really great question. I grew up with really thoughtful conservative parents. So parents who, and man, I could wax poetic, but my parents won't do it, but I could. Parents who were raised with very little means, they had wonderful and earnest parents themselves, but really were bootstraps people. And the way that I saw my parents interact with any given person had their interactions with them, had no bearing. My parents interacted the same way with plumbers that they did with bankers, that they did with conservatives, that they did liberals, that they did with what everybody was a child of God in my house growing up. And there was a real imago vision of people. My dad had deeply held political convictions, but it would never have had any bearing on the way that he treated people. And then I went to Michigan, University of Michigan for musical theater actually in creative writing, which is a whole other conversation to enter into a whole other cultural conversation to enter into. And many of the people that I was in school with, a boy that I dated, had never met a Republican, had never met a conservative person because you're entering this very liberal bubble. And so the

Juliette Sellgren 

Bubble of all bubbles arguably like the epitome of the bubble.

Grace Bydalek (6:58)

And so what I recognized was, oh, these people are wonderful. They've just not been able to put a relatable face to an ideology, which seems very scary to them, to a set of ideas, which seems very scary to them, to a life experience, frankly, which seems very scary to them. And so I was pretty open about my background, about where I'd come from and about what I believed. And then those ideas were really tested by fire, I think. And then I came to the city, there was sort of a political fallout, if you will, during the 2020 election in particular where a lot of that community sort of receded, and that was painful in its own way, and I'm sure we can talk about that more at a later date. It was painful. And just to keep myself honest, I think in this podcast, I can say I really started, especially 2020, 21, 22, 23 when I started to be very politically involved and politically minded, and I stepped into the liberty space, if you will. You find yourself slipping into that polarized mindset really, really easily. If all that you're consuming is political content and you are sort of detaching yourself from reality, like the experience of reality. For example, going home to Nebraska and reminding myself where I came from or having conversations with people on the other side of the aisle, not only do you harden and are you unable to express your positions in an intelligent way anymore because you have no idea what the other side is thinking, but you become boring. You really do. You really do. If you're just focused on podcasts, you become boring. 

Juliette Sellgren (9:13)

On podcasts, podcast listeners, ignore that. I had this kind of weird moment. I was in this politics of the Holocaust class with this fabulous professor, and it's not politics like politics, it's like how do we understand the forces in society and in culture and in government that allowed this to happen? Super fascinating. But there was something my professor said, and I don't remember what it was, but I remember this image that popped into my head of Mean Girls. It is very, now, if anyone heard that and has no idea what I'm about to refer to, you need to watch it. But the moment when Katie is unable to relate to her old friends because she's become a plastic and she word vomits and all she can think about is herself and what she's wearing and the social dynamics of the people around her, and she's not thinking about the people behind all of that stuff, switching the place of who's in the forefront, the political dynamic, not in this case, political as in politics, but political as in interpersonal, social, whatever. When that comes before the people, you word vomit, you become this awful, maybe not awful, I don't even, they’re soundbites.

Grace Bydalek (10:45)

All you have to offer to the conversation are soundbites that you've heard from a political podcast or a commentator or whatever. You lose your ability, you seed your ability to think critically, and that is scary

Juliette Sellgren (10:59)

Because you can't go deep into a thought or into a relationship with someone. And so then what happens is you also literally pick up on the littlest things and the shallowest most unimportant little bits of events. Oh, she was wearing these really ugly, how could you believe that? Or they were talking behind closed doors about passing this one thing and so-and-so said this, or someone donated a bunch of money in this direction. And it's like at a certain point, you don't even know who that person is.

Grace Bydalek (11:36)

You become a caricature of yourself. And I think mean we've had conversations about femininity and how on either side of the political aisle are these ideas about what femininity should look like that are dehumanizing. Frankly, they separate the person from their God-given talents and proclivities and tastes, and they're really anti-human, in my opinion. And so we as women, as critical thinkers, we should be talking about this. We should be talking about this more than we are.

Juliette Sellgren (12:19)

I totally agree. We're taking the first step here. So the dissident project to me is very clearly related, but it's so much more extreme in a sense because it's not how we deal with each other and the problems we have within a relatively free country. It is explaining to young people, I mean young people that are younger than I'm, that this whole extreme that is almost unimaginable is real and possible and needs to be guarded against. So to kind of wade into this relatively slowly, why does it exist? How did it start and how did you get involved? What was kind of the origin story of the project and your involvement in it?

Grace Bydalek (13:17)

Yeah, so we're really comfortable here in the Western worlds. We're very comfortable and to an extent we have a sort of concerning historical amnesia, if you will. I think we know very little about authoritarianism. We tossed that word around Nellie Bowles talked about this in her recent book [Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History] with the word racism, how you sort of slap the label onto everything until there is this sort of semantic overload, which strips the word of any meaning at all. And so I think young people have been inundated with this concept of authoritarianism so much in the sort of cultural discourse that the meaning of the word has been distorted or diluted, if you will.

The Dissident Project, however, was founded to combat both of those cultural phenomenon. So the Dissident Project, as you said, it is a nonprofit speakers bureau. We work with young people, young meaning anywhere from 21 up through 35. And then we have some very specific stories that we wanted to tell about places like Cuba and USSR where we sourced older speakers who could really speak to certain moments in time. But we send these young people into American high schools to tell their stories. And the first 30 minutes of the speech is of course about their experiences in their home countries, their experiences immigrating to the United States, comparing and contrasting their lives in both locations. And then the last 30 minutes of the presentation is discourse with the students, which we find is actually the most exciting part of any given speech. The students are, from what we've seen through the Dissident Project, the students are really engaged and really curious and ask great questions, bring great points to the table. And not only are we trying to combat historical amnesia, not only are we trying to ensure that young people understand what authoritarianism really is, but we're trying to instill a sort of gratefulness for our American freedoms that is bipartisan, right? It should be totally apolitical to do this work. And yeah, we were founded by a Venezuelan dissident named Daniel DiMartino, who… he's

Juliette Sellgren 

He’s been on the podcast.

Grace Bydalek (16:16)

Fantastic. We love him. He went up to a school in Boston in 2022, and he was working with a high school teacher. Her name is Gina. She's wonderful. She's become a great friend of the program. And it turns out he only found out later that she was having to front the money for his travel, for his honorarium, for any of his food, for any cost associated with his speech. And he thought that that was a tragedy. And so he was like, we should ensure that these stories can be told for free, and that's what we do. We provide these speeches for free to American high schools. How did I get involved with it? That was your next question, right? 

Juliette Sellgren 

Yes, but he thought of how it arose is just so touching.

Grace Bydalek 

Yeah.

Juliette Sellgren (17:18)

It's super important. I feel so lucky even just without even hearing one of these stories right now, just hearing about you talking about how important it is.

Grace Bydalek (17:30)

Yeah, I have the best job. I work with the most extraordinary people. If I dwell too long on it, it really does make me emotional that I get to do the work working with these young people who have, in some cases, been shot at, been assaulted, have put their lives on the line in order to make something new for themselves, and then come to the states and are patriots. They're patriots.

Juliette Sellgren 

They're Americans by choice.

Grace Bydalek (18:07)

They're Americans by choice. And what's everything in perspective to do this work on a daily basis and to work with these young people? So I'm very grateful.

Juliette Sellgren 

So how did you get involved?

Grace Bydalek (18:24)

Sure. So this is sort of a circuitous, I dunno, it's a circuitous story. I was a professional actor in the city. I again, majored in musical theater, graduated. I got the agent showcased and was working in that industry. And having been ideologically at odds with most of the people at my school, I knew that musical theater was not the only thing that I wanted to do forever. I knew that eventually I would branch into this world if I was blessed with the opportunity to do it. I was going to. And I remember during Covid just seeing the absolute insanity that was sort of engulfing the world and our cultural discourse and authoritarian lockdowns being instituted. And so, yeah, I was looking around and then Bari Weiss actually posted her resignation letter on her website when she resigned from the New York Times. And I remember thinking, oh man, that's so brave. That's so brave. And that's the sort of person that I'd like to be. I think it's time to find a way into writing and just see what happens. So I actually found Young Voices and became a contributor, and through that program was able to write a lot about theater and the sort of cultural dynamics surrounding it and the conversations that were being had or weren't being had. And my mentor was Daniel DiMartino. And so we got very fast and he started the Dissident Project as I was finishing the Young Voices Contributorship, and he was just looking for somebody to come on as a project manager of sorts. And so I interviewed for the job, I got it. And then in January of 2023, I was promoted to director of the organization.

Juliette Sellgren (20:48)

Wow. So you were talking about how, I mean, it's some of the most extraordinary people you've ever met from what you've said, we kind of know why and how, but what have been some of the lessons that these people that you get to interact with and that you get to send to high schoolers? What are they bringing? What are some of the major takeaways? I mean either in conversations you've had with them or when they go give speeches, what jumps out other than authoritarianism is pretty much bad for people. What else that we wouldn't necessarily think of or expect that maybe to you seems obvious now because you've been surrounded by people who have experienced this sort of stuff and who talk about it. Yeah,

Grace Bydalek 

That's a really good question.

Juliette Sellgren 

Or maybe even an anecdote of an experience one of them has had that was just super shocking as someone who grew up here.

Grace Bydalek (22:11)

Well, the one that comes to mind, and I'm trying to put it into words, but the one that comes to mind specifically is Grace Jo, the North Korean. And again, I'm trying to think about how to verbalize this. She grew up under obviously the leadership of the dear leader. She was raised to believe the quote, gospel of the Dear Leader, which is what they call it. It is sort of a bastardization of the Bible, a bastardization of faith of the Christian faith in particular. ]

Juliette Sellgren (23:01)

And it tells you how powerful it is that authoritarians love to take it and appropriate it and turn it into their own thing, right? 

Grace Bydalek (23:12)

Exactly. And so she came to the States and really had to sort of untangle what she had understood about God and faith and these transcendent conversations and recognize that she didn't even have the vocabulary to vocalize the fact that she did believe in God. There was no, she wasn't given the vocabulary as in North Korean to understand what it is she believed in, but she knew that there was a higher power, which is, it's a crazy thing to think that regardless of whether or not people have the capacity to verbalize belief, they have it, you have the yearning for something beyond your own station. And I think authoritarians recognize that as well. There's a really concerted effort to just keep uneducated people from self-actualization, keep people hungry so that they're focused on their basis needs with the understanding that we also have a base need for belief and for connection. Connection and for a relationship with a higher power. And these are base needs. And so even just Grace Jo talking about being able to come to the states and put words to the things that she'd always felt, that's crazy.

Juliette Sellgren 

Words exist. Yeah.

Grace Bydalek 

That's amazing.

Juliette Sellgren (25:09)

That's amazing. It's so weird to think, I mean, I joke because France has kind of this centralized bureau that puts out this dictionary every year of words that are French words, and they've started having to, against their will really add Americanized English words that French people use, but they tried for the longest time to basically centralize the language. But the thing is, language can't be constrained like that. But even that is not the furthest extent of control in this realm. The fact that we make up words all the time, that we have the freedom to even attempt to make a sound, to express a thought or a feeling or a desire or a concern, it never occurs to us at all, even when I joke about it.

Grace Bydalek (26:04)

Yeah, the oppression runs that deep. And that's something that I don't think people understand is the oppression runs down into the deepest corollaries of what it means to be a human. And I think Grace does a great job of showing young people that whenever she speaks

Juliette Sellgren (26:29)

Well, and so this is what's weird is whenever you talk about stuff like this, not you, but just generally there's kind of this like, oh, well, but they have really high literacy rates. What does that mean in the context of the fact that you can only read propaganda, you can only learn certain things. Does it matter missing the point that a language that doesn't have a word for God, that doesn't have a word for, well, I mean I guess it probably has a word for love, but familial love probably on the outs too,

Grace Bydalek 

That don't have a word for rape.

Juliette Sellgren (27:05)

Yeah. I mean, how do you deal with the best and the worst of what it means to be a human, to experience life on earth and life beyond earth? How do you even parse out what that would mean?

Grace Bydalek (27:22)

That's the question. It can feel very cut and dry and something that you can wedge into a curriculum given the appropriate context. It can feel that way. But what we're really trying to do at the Dissident Project is to catalyze these sorts of conversations. If people leave a speech by Grace Jo or by Daniel, or by one of our, actually two guys named Alvin from the People's Republic of China, or if somebody leaves a dissident speech and is prompted to ask these deeper questions, and we know that we've done our job.

Juliette Sellgren (28:11)

So why high school and what has the success been? I'm guessing after hearing something like that, there would at least be someone, but how has it been doing this and doing this with the audience of high schoolers?

Grace Bydalek (28:26):

Yeah. It’s been awesome. It's been awesome. I think high schoolers are inherently curious. The reason that we chose high schoolers as a demographic is because you look at the modern college campus and you recognize that colleges, and we've talked about this a little bit, colleges are no longer for ideological exploration.

Therefore, oftentimes, and I hate to use this word because a lot of semantic overload associated with it, but therefore indoctrination, you've been ideologically entrenched by the time that you get to college. And there are wonderful campus groups working to bring, working to bring dissidents in front of these students. And so that is number one, a market that is, again, more difficult because of the ideological entrenchment, but also saturated. And we thought to ourselves, there's nobody doing this On the high school level, there's nobody that is focused specifically on this really, really crucial time where young people are actually seeking, they're forming their deepest opinions, they're forming their belief systems, they're coming into contact with people for the first time maybe that have different ideological systems. And before they encounter these sort of major concepts, socialism, authoritarianism, whatever it might be, we want them to have this seed. We want to plant the seed. We want them to have this in their back pocket so that if on a college campus they're presented with an idea like this, they can pull back into this experience and say, actually, maybe that's not right. I've heard from somebody from one of these countries we're discussing and this was her experience. So it's really, we're trying to fill a hole in the market, and we're also trying to reach young people before they have their sort of belief system set in stone.

Juliette Sellgren (30:48)

So this is kind of a tricky question, especially when we're running low on time here, but how do you tow the line between planting this seed of critical thinking and curiosity with or from, I guess, indoctrination because you don't want to indoctrinate them, but at the same time, why do you go to high school and not to college because of indoctrination? And so what is the subtle difference? It seems like a little gray area where it could become something that it wasn't intended to be or that it's not meant to be and that it tries not to be. Yeah. So how do you intentionally make sure, I don't know, it just seems like a question worth asking.

Grace Bydalek (31:42)

Yeah, I love the question. I love the question, and I think we're really just sharing personal experience. So we are sharing one dissident’s personal experience in their home country and personal experience I understand is not always an objective barometer of a sort of broader reality, but I think personal experience in these situations is very difficult to argue with, and also just provides context. So it's not going into schools to share a political idea. We're going into schools to share an experience, which is where I think our organization differs from. For example, Young Americans for Freedom or whatever other sort of ideological campus organization you can think of. There are plenty. It's really just about sharing experience.

Juliette Sellgren (33:03)

As someone who is not in high school and unfortunately can't have a dissident come to their school, what do you think? If you could put one word to what it feels like to be in the room to hear from one of them?

Grace Bydalek (33:23)

Yeah. I mean, one word, I hope it's expansive. I hope it's expansive. I love the word aperture. I heard it as an eighth grader and I've just sort of clung to it. But I hope it widens your aperture as a young person, and you're able to contextualize your own existence and your own blessings, frankly, in and deeper way. You're able to put yourself in context. And I know it's certainly something that I would've really loved as a high schooler, and I really wish I had the opportunity to see. But yeah, I think that's why we do it.

Juliette Sellgren (34:15)

That's phenomenal. I mean, especially, I was just thinking about how you said it's not an objective barometer, but we are so flooded with data and statistics and they can kind of say anything, but at the same time, we have a lack when it comes to all these places. That's one of the characteristics of authoritarianism. You don't let things out. You don't let people in. You don't let people out. You don't let information flow. And so we don't actually know. There's not much we can do to show it.

And arguably, this is the most effective way anyways, to communicate something that is so opposite of what these sorts of rulers and regimes want from you, which is again, the removal of the basis of what it means to be a human being, which in part is the emotional response. Okay. One last question very quickly. I love it. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it and would love to have you on again. But what is one thing that you believed at one time in your life that you later changed your position on and why?

Grace Bydalek (35:32)

I think at one point in time, this is maybe silly and sort of off topic, but at one point in time I had a lot of pride, and this also relates to the first question you asked. I had a lot of pride in being a loner and being heterodox and being a, I don't know, a subversive thinker and being whatever

Juliette Sellgren 

Heterodox people need a home.

Grace Bydalek (35:55)

Didn't join a church, didn't find a community, just refused to buy in. And I think if there's anything that has transformed my life from the bottom up, it's being a joiner. It's just, again, it's seeing the humanity in the people that might annoy you or on some level disgust you or be completely different from you, specifically in a church body or a religious institution where you wouldn't, I don't know, you wouldn't buy in before. I'm just thinking about my own experience. You wouldn't buy in before. And forcing all of that sort of prideful nonsense to the side and saying, I'm joining in and I'm investing in a community, and I'm making a home. I'm putting a stake down because it's good for me and because it's good for society, and it's transformed my life from the bottom up. So I would say be a joiner.

Juliette Sellgren 

Once again, I'd like to thank my guests for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to the Great Antidote Podcast. It means a lot. The Great Antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at Great antidote@libertyfund.org. Thank you.