If you aren't sure what you stand for, you're going to get played.

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Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/you-don-t-have-to-swallow-frogs

Watch this episode: https://youtu.be/yVS10nrdWu8?si=okUVNHwIpOe98aTF 

This week, Andrea Pitzer considers the recent conversation between New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and author Ta-Nehisi Coates, and what it means for all of us as American authoritarianism expands. The two men shared very different thoughts about what the moment requires, including their doubts about each other's approach. Andrea summarizes the talk and suggests that Coates's emphasis on history and his intellectual heritage offers more possibilities for avoiding paralysis in the moment. She worries that Klein's willingness to barter away protection of some vulnerable populations leads to a lost state in which it becomes impossible to stand for anything.

Sharing a Czeslaw Milosz quote about a man who rationally convinces himself to swallow live frogs, Andrea suggests that Klein has lost sight of the fact that doing something unpleasant isn't the same as doing something effective. She closes with thoughts on how you can find your own moral or ethical center—one that might offer some clarity on how to take action today.

What if my telling you there's still time to save democracy keeps you from thinking you need to act now?

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Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/mind-the-gap

Watch this episode: https://youtu.be/YYqsM-LoYlM 

This week's "Next Comes What" focuses on the difference between staying on top of the administration's attacks on democracy and actually doing something to save democracy. Nearly a year into the podcast, Andrea Pitzer outlines the ways that Trump continues to overreach, even as he grows more and more unpopular. The federal government is in the process of hiring people who seem willing to assault Americans (documented and not) on the streets. Yet it doesn't have enough of them to silence the majority of Americans who oppose Trump. Now is the time to act. But Andrea wonders whether constantly telling listeners that there are still actions they can take is too reassuring. Do people get lulled into thinking things will just be fine, and they don't need to stand up?

In the last week, a Congressional candidate, a Chicago pastor, and elected officials have faced attack or arrest by law enforcement agents ostensibly carrying out immigration operations. But what most of us need to do in our communities is nothing nearly that heroic. Andrea looks at rising food insecurity and ways we can tackle the effects of immigration detention and tariffs close to home. She closes with a look at a study by university researchers who suggest that most U-turns—even those that radically reorient a country toward authoritarianism—wind up leading to greater democracy in the end. Authoritarian U-turns are often followed by counter-shifts that reverse the harms and result in the growth of democratic rights and institutions. But one key to these reversals is that they need to happen quickly. It's up to us to go to work in our communities today checking Trump's power and rebuilding our freedoms.

It only takes a few bad men to ruin scientific progress for everyone.

Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes What and read Andrea's posts first: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/subscribe    Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/bad-medicine This week's episode covers how RFK Jr. and Donald Trump are rejecting science and data to eliminate competing authorities in government. Andrea Pitzer looks to the past for the ways that science and scientists have been used to further dictatorial regimes. Touching on the example of Einstein, she addresses how his work was dismissed as Jewish science, and the Nazi tactics that eventually forced him into exile. She also considers the converse situation, when Joseph Stalin lifted up Trofim Lysenko, who rejected genetics in favor of unsound theories of agriculture. Soviet promotion of Lysenko's ideas led to a rejection of science and countless deaths, a situation with many looming parallels in RFK Jr.'s attacks on vaccines today.   Andrea considers how destroying public science helps aspiring and established authoritarians create their own mythic realities and forces their constituents to live in an alternate world, where all information and benefits flow directly from the leader. While Trump and his allies are deep in the process of enriching themselves and garnering more power, the president insists on rejecting facts on the ground at every turn. Andrea ends the episode with talking about ways you can help make sure your community accesses the health resources it needs, and offers some specific suggestions for fostering scientific reality close to home for kids and adults alike.

DC shows how to push back against a government clamping down on vulnerable Americans, and how to stand up for what we believe in. 

  Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes What and read Andrea's posts first: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/subscribe    Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/what-do-you-stand-for  [This week's episode was recorded before Charlie Kirk's assassination, so you'll find only one reference to it in a brief clip here. But Andrea Pitzer will cover it further in her written post on Friday for Degenerate Art: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/.]    This week, Andrea considers the value of letting others know what you stand for and building community together, in public. She outlines the ways that the preemptive caving we've seen from corporations, universities, and local governments is a response to the government's own vice signaling, which needs to be opposed. Narrating her afternoon at the "We Are All DC" march in Malcolm X Park in DC last weekend, Andrea describes the many groups that showed up and the ways people found to show what matters to them.   She addresses the symbolic value of Sandwich Guy's actions in August, which happened just a few blocks away. Pointing out that the mushy middle can never be represented by politicians looking to court that sector for votes, because it doesn't stand for anything, Andrea talks about the role of everyday people in establishing ethical norms for the country. It's possible to use virtue signaling as a spur to action and set an agenda for a new and true American democracy.

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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Watch this episode: 

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.