A Conversation with Natalie Kocab

Oct 7

Listen to the full episode:

Time Codes:
3:00 Cold War divide through a child’s eyes
6:50 Life in a dissident family
8:25 An American mother in communist Czechoslovakia
10:15 Life in the post-revolutionary 1990s
13:05 American hip-hop, movies and TV
14:40 Understanding the “greatest narrative shift” ever
15:35 From art to activism
16:55 Shock at the conspiracies that Americans believe
17:50 Translating America for fellow Czechs
18:20 What’s happening in the U.S. is very personal for Europeans
21:30 Do Americans get how bad things are?
24:20 Recognizing the impact of Russian disinformation
26:00 To fight bad regimes, make friends

Exploding into Activism

Natalie Kocab is a case study in attempting to combine the “uncombinable.” The daughter of an American mother from the southern United States, and a Czech father who was a leading dissident, rock musician, and advisor to former Czech President Vaclav Havel, she has, since childhood, been trying to reconcile two very different personal universes.

One universe is that of America, South Carolina in particular, a place she traveled to as a child from communist Czechoslovakia to visit her mother’s side of the family. It was a place full of color and abundance that she saw as a kind of “playground.” The other was her birthplace, communist Czechoslovakia, which was, in the 1980s, gray and drab on the outside, but also contained an inner energy and dynamism at the family level, because of her father’s role as a prominent figure in the Czechoslovak underground opposition. Natalie experienced life as a kind of double outsider. She felt like an immigrant when visiting the U.S., despite having American nationality, but she also didn’t fit in in her birth country, due to her father’s dissident activities.

After the 1989 Velvet Revolution, Natalie watched as democratic changes took hold in her father’s homeland and American consumer products flowed in. The arrival of things like 7 Up, McDonald’s, and hip-hop music seemed to be the final nail in the coffin of the totalitarian system she was born into.

As democracy returned in the 1990s and 2000s, and her country joined Western institutions like the EU and NATO, Natalie focused on her work as a musician and writer, and was not so politically active, something she says was probably a subconscious reaction to her father’s politically charged life.

That all changed, though, with the election of Donald Trump in 2024. The U.S. presidential campaign awakened a kind of sixth sense in her. Immediately after the inauguration, she began seeing red flags in the U.S. that recalled life in authoritarian Czechoslovakia, and she says she knew instinctively how bad things could get in America. Alarmed, Natalie “exploded into activism,” reading everything she could about the new U.S. administration and its philosophical underpinnings, from Project 2025 to the anti-democratic utopianism of some in the tech oligarchy. She started translating and sharing this source material for civically engaged Czech citizens, to help them understand what was happening in Washington D.C.

As 2025 has progressed, Natalie has only become more concerned. And more active. She says it’s time to fight back, and for allies on both sides of the Atlantic to join forces and unapologetically defend democracy and the lives we take for granted, before it’s too late.