We’re a little over halfway through January and already it's been...well, a lot. The Trump administration kidnapped the de facto Venezuelan president. The chairman of the Federal Reserve announced he’s being targeted for prosecution because the president wants to control monetary policy. A queer mother in Minneapolis was shot in the head in broad daylight by ICE, who is occupying the city, and the government has been trying to portray her as a terrorist. And etc.

Andrea Pitzer is one of my favorite political analysts right now, and I asked her how we might make it out of this mess. She explains why the current moment feels so destabilizing, how mass detention becomes normalized, why exhaustion and disengagement are themselves political dangers, and what history tells us about stopping things before they get worse.

This is a conversation about realism without despair, urgency without panic, and about how ordinary people can still matter. Especially when the future feels uncertain.

Full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org. 

Andrea Pitzer is a journalist and author, known for her books One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, and Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World (2021). She hosts the popular podcast Next Comes What and writes the newsletter Degenerate Art.