Hate cultivated over time becomes a tool to destroy everything, and it's happening in America today.

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/the-window-dressing-on-hate-2-0-b153 Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer's Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes What: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/subscribe This week's episode looks at the enduring bigotry of antisemitism, as well as how America's home-grown prejudices mirror and echo the damage done by antisemitism. Andrea Pitzer describes how the political usefulness of hatred of Jews in Europe became an all-encompassing conspiracy theory, in which Jews were both superhuman and defective, Marxists and capitalists. She traces how that conspiracy theory spread around the world. While the United States as a nation is much younger than these hatreds, the country has its own bigotries and exclusions that have been with us for centuries. Andrea looks at full citizenship and who gets excluded from it as a way to understand who gets demonized in America today. The Trump administration is binding all our conspiracy theories into one vast one, openly stoking hatreds to gain more power. The episode closes with ways to talk to people in your life who may be susceptible to these hateful (but for some, powerful) false narratives.