Journalism is reverting to a pre-kindergarten state in the face of Trumpism, but we can still get the word out.

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Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/see-no-evil

This week's episode considers how coverage of Trump's second administration by journalists and public intellectuals is failing Americans on an institutional level. Andrea Pitzer walks through recent coverage that refuses to analyze the framework offered by the president for sending the National Guard to DC. Flashing back to her years teaching martial arts and self defense, she explains how she coached pre-kindergartners to "spot the con" in dangerous situations, even though their minds weren't yet developed enough to be able to rely on abstract thinking to connect the dots on a higher level. She laments how some veteran journalists appear to be afflicted with the same limitations today.

Sharing historical examples of betrayals by journalists who refused to see what was happening right before their eyes, she describes Soviet writer Maxim Gorky's betrayal of concentration camp detainees held at the Solovetsky Islands in 1929, and the passive collaboration of Walter Lippmann and other journalists with the whitewashing of correspondent George Polk's death in Greece in 1948. Criticizing the response made by Semafor's Ben Smith to a question about whether democracy is currently in danger, Andrea runs through a whole series of examples in which the press seems to be willfully blind to the present threat. The episode closes with a list of news outlets that are meeting the moment and need support, as well as some concrete ways listeners can themselves get the word out to their fellow Americans.

A look at the ways that lives of tyrants come to an end, and how that might shape what you should be doing now.

Watch this episode: https://youtu.be/t0Trm8k1lgc?si=mZGNVV8-UrAB-PdX 

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/when-trump-is-gone

Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes What and read Andrea's posts first: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/subscribe

This week, Andrea Pitzer looks at Trump's recent signs of mental and physical decline and addresses the long history of authoritarians hiding infirmity and the resulting costs of their deception. She considers how the last Shah of Iran misled nearly everyone about his cancer, destabilizing his country, the Middle East, and a U.S. election in the wake of his lies. Andrea recalls officials' obsequiousness toward a series of late-Soviet leaders from Brezhnev to Chernenko, and the comic ways that leaders have lied to the nation.

As Trump continues to dismantle so much of what's good about the U.S., with old outrages grinding on while new ones seem to arrive hourly, running from crisis to crisis can feel like using a thimble full of water to put out a forest fire. Considering the Miccosukee people of Florida's recent victory against the concentration camp in the Everglades, Andrea uses their focus on their values and their way of life to suggest an approach for people nationwide to find meaningful and effective paths to respond to Trumpism. One day, he'll be gone. What do you want to bring into being in the world that will outlast him?

The ways that concentration camps get closed down and how we can make that happen.

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/how-does-this-end 

Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes What and read Andrea's posts first: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/subscribe 

Watch this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRXkA4kF-9Q 

This week's "Next Comes What" explores patterns in what's forced concentration camp systems around the world to close in the past. Andrea Pitzer mentions a few larger systemic issues present in most countries where concentration camps are able to take root, but spends the episode focused on how camps themselves get shut down. She explores examples in which defeat in war, the death of a "cult of personality"–style leader, international pressure, court intervention, or internal dissent have been the triggering force.

Andrea reviews the administration's stated goal of detaining and deporting tens of millions of people currently in the country, and notes the logistical impossibility of any humane detention and deportation project of that scope. Even when peak detention levels have been reached, and the population held by a given country in camps is on the decline, she notes, it frequently takes years to dismantle any large system. Analyzing the role that various triggers might play to halt or reverse Trump's rapidly expanding detention network, Andrea emphasizes that in the U.S. more than in many of the countries she's studied, it's likely to come down to everyday people taking action. The episode closes with suggestions on how to do that.

What history best explains the authoritarianism surging in the U.S. today?

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/the-origin-story-for-a-villain

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This week's "Next Comes What" considers where the expanding oppression in the U.S. comes from. America has centuries of experience with genocide, incarceration, and racism to rely on as the government embraces authoritarianism. Yet Trump and his most fervent followers also mimic the rhetoric and actions of twentieth-century fascist movements in Europe and elsewhere. Andrea Pitzer looks at the roots of the misery being deliberately inflicted on vulnerable populations in the country today.

She recalls a Kurt Vonnegut line about villains and society that suggests one way to think about what's happening now. The truth is that there's no hard line between domestic and international political violence against civilians. In fact, technology over the last century has evolved quickly and led us to a place where these movements are cross-pollinating and global, even as local and national culture still shape violence in critical ways on the ground. Andrea turns this around to note that the repetition of these abuses in many places and times also sparked countless forms of resistance that have worked in the past and offer hope for us going forward.

A step-by-step list for assessing your community's relationship with ICE and learning how to end it.

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/de-iceing-your-town

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Watch this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzYHpKiiv5I&feature=youtu.be

This week, Andrea Pitzer answers a request she's been getting from many readers and listeners lately: figuring out ICE's involvement in a given community and what to do about it. To get some expert advice, she talked to Oliver Merino of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

Oliver is from Alexandria, Virginia and has been involved in addressing mistreatment and abuse of immigrants for more than a decade. In this episode, they discuss concrete ways to find out what level of cooperation ICE currently receives from your local law enforcement. Oliver lays out specific actions everyday people can take to reduce both official and unofficial partnerships. He also covers a number of other ways anyone can help their neighbors who have already been targeted by the government. The situation on expanded ICE funding on the federal level is grim, but there's still a lot that most of us can do to change policy and reduce harm at the local level.

What if we already have what we need to do what has to be done? An unlikely story of magic and surprises, with receipts.

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/pity-the-person-who-needs-something-from-me

Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes What and get Andrea's posts first: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Watch this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh4yh7-efyc 

This episode of "Next Comes What" is a strange and magical story about coincidence and connection. Andrea Pitzer steps away from the current crises in the US to talk about needs and expectations that we have about one another and the tendency to want to believe someone somewhere else has more answers and will be more ready to lead, or at least more ready to act. Andrea recalls a passing exchange on Twitter from more than a decade ago that's become meaningful to her, and discusses it with her husband, who suggests she write about it.

Meanwhile, she goes off to a cabin in the woods for a week for a solo writing intensive to work on a book, and tries to put off the many requests people make on her time, so she can focus on her work-in-progress. She somehow ends up interrupted anyway, and the connections between the tweet from twelve years ago and someone entirely different who is interrupting her at the cabin form a startling closed loop—and a good reminder that we're bound together in ways we barely notice. All this winds up being a map for finding a way to invent the world we hope to live in.

Listening to the voices of the disappeared who have come back is a first step toward changing what's happening all around us.

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/the-voices-of-the-returned

Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes What and get Andrea's posts first: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Watch this episode: https://youtu.be/DfFEA-3d8GU 

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/next-comes-what/id1779885475

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7lUaIWeKl0oET2DJVTWhy4

This episode of "Next Comes What" looks at the recent departure from El Salvador of hundreds of men President Trump deported last spring to the CECOT camp there. Andrea Pitzer remembers seeing a Peter Greenaway production in the 1990s that used an actual historical ledger of the dead bodies pulled out of the Seine in Paris two centuries ago, and thinking about accountability to history. Underlining the importance of preserving events, she talks about a Paris protest in 1961 when the historical record was deliberately muddied, and the French government tried to censor and cover up a massacre. More than a hundred Algerians were killed while protesting peacefully against a curfew targeted directly at them. Many bodies fell into the river; others were thrown in to drown. Unlike the corpses in the 19th-century ledger from the Peter Greenaway film, these bodies and the lives they represented were erased for decades by the authorities.

Andrea then looks at the reappearance in recent days of the men the US government tried to disappear into a black hold of detention in El Salvador. Addressing the importance of logging the vanished and the dead and listening to the voices of those who return, she begins to address how we might interrupt the cycle.

Concentration camps perpetuate themselves, but the fight against them shapes the future, too.

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/choking-on-the-cruelty

 Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes What: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Watch this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6XoJL6puGU&list=PLijFVcbACdeU0Zk5DeB1R_CHwCHjPJ5lF 

This episode of "Next Comes What" looks at how concentration camp systems grow, how the existing institutions choke on them for at least a while, and what that means in terms of trying to stop those who want to expand our concentration camp society. Andrea Pitzer explores how some camp systems have been influenced by those created in foreign countries, while others rely more strongly on a country's own preexisting internal history. Sometimes immigration, as with Nazis to South America in the wake of World War II, shifts the political or detention environment. In each case, there are usually both foreign and domestic influences.

Andrea looks at how everything from camps for Japanese Americans during World War II and immigrant detention at Guantanamo in the 1990s shaped the Everglades concentration camp and the constellation of similar camps the Trump administration is working to create now. Listing ways to block and undo this drive toward detention, Andrea includes networks of demonstrations and training opportunities that can connect listeners to concrete ways to help.

A guide to understanding our new concentration-camp era and how to fight it.

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/what-s-in-a-name 

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Watch this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhvb9PfUw2U 

In this episode, Andrea Pitzer lays out the definition of a concentration camp and breaks down each part of it. She looks at international trends in concentration camps across the last century and the specific U.S. history that has made the country vulnerable to propaganda demonizing immigrants and others.

Addressing the advantages and disadvantages of comparing modern detention facilities to concentration camps and even Auschwitz, Andrea explores why what we choose to call these places matters. Coming to the conclusion that the new camp in the Everglades is a concentration camp and signals a massive expansion of extrajudicial detention that threatens all Americans, Andrea offers listeners a big-picture plan for how to strategically insert themselves into efforts to combat the concentration camp trend, from local projects to national movements.

The budget bill unleashes a detention system that threatens every American, but we can still act.

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/america-s-not-so-secret-police 

Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes What: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/subscribe 

Watch the video of this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oldNLnCJy5w 

Police-State Blues

This week, Andrea looks at how police-state tactics are increasing across the country, not least with the debut of a new concentration camp in the Everglades. She draws parallels between the US and Nazi Germany (this is what people are always asking about) and shows how, in fact, our tilt toward authoritarianism now has many more echoes from that era than existed in the U.S. during Trump's first administration.

The episode also considers the effects of the budget bill and how such massive funding for ICE detention and related projects could lead to repetition of another part of history in a different country: 2016 Russia, where the creation of an army-size National Guard under Putin's control marked the point where internal dissent and any significant opposition to his rule became almost impossible. Andrea suggests that we may be rapidly approaching a similar lockdown, but we aren't there yet. She lists a dozen things you can do to stop the ICE power grab.