This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 27th, 2003. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Dissident Project seeks to bring high school students into direct contact with people who have suffered under repressive

regimes.

Grace Badalek directs the project, Francis Huway of Hong Kong is a speaker at the project.

I am the director of the Dissident Project which is a

speaker's bureau for young dissident speakers from around the world to talk about

their experiences in American high schools. We are under the umbrella of young voices and our whole

mission is to provide these stories to American high school students for free in

order to sort of shake the apathy that were that were noticing out of American

high schoolers and to reinforce that they are so lucky and so blessed to be

citizens of the United States. And it seems immediately clear to anyone who's familiar

with the story of somebody like Jimmy Lye

or wholesale oppression that governments regularly undertake even in our modern age.

But young people, you know, their connection to that is books, videos,

precisely.

Meeting an actual human being who has experienced this and who has, you know, suffered because of it is probably pretty stunning.

What has been the experience thus far? Yeah, I mean

young people we write about this at the Distant Project have a sort of historical

amnesia and we're seeing this more broadly. We don't understand our history, right?

We don't understand where we've come from as a country and why it is we performed as a country.

And so it's incredibly important for students to come face to face with people who have

experienced real oppression and you know real authoritarianism and you know in addition

...