Next Comes What

India and Albania reveal how small protests can transform into big movements, creating possibilities for massive change. Support Next Comes What + Get Andrea's posts FIRST: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/subscribe Read the post: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/roots-for-real-change WATCH YouTube: https://youtu.be/CRVe4pVKoIM TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@degenerateartnews Listen everywhere: https://pod.link/1779885475 This week's Next Comes What considers what can be learned from overseas movements for political change. Andrea Pitzer reviews a few big examples she's discussed before, from Brazil and South Korea to Hungary. But she points out that these countries, which were able to prosecute and or expel corrupt authoritarians from power, are examples of the end stages of political movements. For today's episode, she looks instead at countries that are earlier in the same process. In Albania, she traces political protests and dissatisfaction that rose in the wake of parliamentary elections last year. This generalized anger found a flash point and a symbol with the attempts of Jared Kushner and Invanka Trump this year to develop an environmentally fragile part of the country as a high-end resort. Anger over what appears to be government corruption in opening the region to development has galvanized the people and led to what is being called the Flamingo Revolution: massive protests of a kind not seen in the country in decades. In India, student anger of a lack of jobs and opportunities for the country's young adults exploded after a chief justice described them as cockroaches. Seizing on the nickname, the students formed a Cockroach People's Party. The online movement expanded into physical protests in New Delhi. After police violence against protesters, demonstrations multiplied across India, eventually securing the resignation of the education minister and other promised concessions. Both movements are still in the early stages, but Andrea highlights the examples they offer for everyday people on ways to make a stand against authoritarian government. The episode closes by outlining how a focus on local issues can be a potent force for fighting Trumpism here in the U.S.

• 00:00 – Everyday Resistance & The Limits of Authoritarian Power

• 03:30 – Defeating ICE: How Local Communities Blocked PA Detention Facilities

• 06:45 – Dismantling Authoritarian Infrastructure: The Closure of Alligator Alcatraz

• 10:00 – Albania's Flamingo Revolution: Resisting Jared Kushner's Island Development

• 15:30 – India's Cockroach Janata Party: Youth Uprising Against Exam Scandals & Modi

• 20:45 – Student Activism Under Fire: ICE Arrests, Columbia Expulsions & UMich Indictments

• 25:00 – Symbols of Resistance: Lessons from Serbia's Otpor! Movement

• 28:30 – Organizing for Long-Term Political Change

Every day, people are showing how we can stop Trump's dismantling of our laws and norms by using both to fight back.

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Our episode this week looks at how the current administration has violated both laws and customs on every front to try to profit from government positions and maximize Trump's power across the board. Andrea Pitzer shows how, from business corruption to ICE detention and the war in Iran, it's nearly impossible to keep track of the ways in which the president is destroying the rule of law and any willingness to respect precedent, in and out of courts. Exploring the use of the rule of law as a weapon against vulnerable and targeted groups since the country's founding, Andrea outlines why the law itself has often been a force for wrong. She nevertheless argues that the history of authoritarianism shows that when existing law is ignored or dismantled through dictatorial power grabs, it consistently exacerbates the crisis faced by vulnerable groups, and others as well.

Andrea then goes through recent broad reviews of everything from ICE detention practices to court cases brought by the DOJ. While precedent is being ground down, and the legal system remains under tremendous strain, Andrea points out how the law is still being used successfully to deny Trump and his allies the unlimited power they want. She looks at how communities are establishing and upholding norms as well. From a refusal of a New Jersey town council to do business with a bank partnering with major ICE contractors to a Baltimore rugby team that is standing by its trans players, there are examples everywhere of everyday people finding effective ways to push back against hatred and corruption.

00:00 — Executive Corruption & The Kazakhstan Mineral Deal

02:30 — Alien Terrorist Removal Court & Iran War Casualties

06:15 — Human Rights Violations in ICE Youth Detention

09:40 — ACLU Report: Law Enforcement Liability & Abuse

12:20 — Supreme Court Forces E. Jean Carroll $5.6M Payout

14:50 — Federal Judges Block DOJ Voter Roll Seizure

17:15 — Failed DOJ Prosecutions: Marimar Martinez & David Hern

20:00 — Holding ICE & Stephen Miller Accountable in Court

22:10 — Grassroots Victories: Montclair $91M Bank Divestment

24:30 — Local Resistance: Communities Protecting Trans Athletes

A new U.S. government call for contractors aims to set up a global network of concentration camps, and your representatives likely don't know about it yet.

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This week's episode of "Next Comes What" looks at a new U.S. government document seeking private contractors for disturbing partnerships. A lot of the "statement of work" describes maintaining an air fleet and permits to support deportation operations, but the document also makes reference to 1,000-bed sites, "detention facilities," and "detainees" in other countries. Andrea Pitzer walks listeners through key passages in the document, first discovered by Charles Davis, and shows how it will lead to the creation of a global network of concentration camps run by the United States.

Recounting the Trumpist use of third-country deportation networks, Andrea explains how the improvised partnerships are hardening into trafficking relationships with other countries, soon to be followed by dedicated detention facilities. She explores the history of prior offshore camps, from Guantanamo to Australian payments to other nations for detention on Manus and Nauru. In each case, the lack of oversight and direct access resulted in tremendous harm. The U.S. appears to be up to a year away from executing this plan, giving everyday people a chance to intervene and stop it. The episode closes with suggestions on how to take action now.

0:00 Introduction: ICE's Secret Plan for Global Detention Camps 2:05 Breaking Down the SAM.gov Contractor Solicitation 5:32 What Are "International Staging Areas" (ISAs)? 8:58 The CECOT Blueprint: How El Salvador Became the Template 14:50 Third Country Detention: 21,000 Deported and Counting 16:04 Lessons from History: Guantanamo, Australia's Nauru, and Operation Condor 19:10 The Privatization Problem: Who Profits from Offshore Detention 22:42 How to Stop This Before It's Too Late

Support for authoritarianism can spread person to person, like a disease. Here's how to stop it.

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In this week's episode, Andrea Pitzer looks at recent research suggesting that support for authoritarianism spreads socially from person to person. Researchers from the University of Oslo in Norway and the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment surveyed recruits before and after boot camp and found that those assigned to peers with greater support for authoritarian rule would end up adjusting their views to support strongmen too. The authors also surveyed Norwegians outside the original military setting, as well as 25,000 others from nearly 30 countries.

Andrea considers the results in light of other ideas about authoritarianism and ponders how the reverse effect might work—whether making others aware of one's rejection of authoritarian rule might likewise be "contagious." The episode closes with a list of ways to think about reestablishing democracy and better safeguarding it in the US.

Get ONE LONG NIGHT: A Global History of Concentration Camps by Andrea Pitzer https://bookshop.org/p/books/one-long-night-a-global-history-of-concentration-camps-andrea-pitzer/ea53c06c993f6ad0?ean=9780316303569

0:00 Why Trumpism Is Contagious: Democracy Under Siege 0:25 Rush Limbaugh, Fox News & The Collapse of American Democracy 1:40 How Propaganda Shapes Authoritarian Movements Worldwide 2:26 The Study: Is Support for Authoritarian Rule Contagious? 3:29 Norway Boot Camp Experiment: How Peer Pressure Spreads Authoritarianism 6:32 The Psychology Behind Why People Support Strongmen 8:54 Cultural Backlash: Pippa Norris on the Rise of the Authoritarian Right 13:33 The Three Components of Authoritarianism Explained 16:01 How Populist Rhetoric Destroys Trust in Democracy 19:58 How to Fight Back Against the Authoritarian Contagion

Trump's goons got the oppression flowchart backward. Now they're trying to fix it, but we can foil their plans.

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This week's episode looks at the typical arc of concentration camp societies, laying out how authoritarian governments use violence against both scapegoated communities and their political opposition. Andrea Pitzer outlines how strongmen often start with destroying the ability to dissent before rounding up whole communities of scapegoated groups. Then she discusses the ways in which the second Trump administration has reversed this order. Coming out of the gate in 2025 with massive roundups of immigrants into camps, his team didn't successfully clamp down on protests and free speech beforehand. As a result, they revealed their weakness and the strength of the majority of the country that disapproves of their mission or their tactics.

Andrea describes the shift in tactics as Trump's allies try to reverse this error, moving from scattered, mostly incompetent attempts at prosecution into a more targeted and dangerous phase. Their best hope lies in ending dissent before the November elections, so the coming months will likely become even more dangerous. The episode closes with ways to respond, underlining the importance of showing up and speaking out.

0:00 — How Trump's Second Term Tried to End Democracy—and Where It Went Wrong

0:41 — The Speedrun to Authoritarianism: Why Trump's Power Grab Is Failing

2:53 — Mass Deportations, ICE Violence, and the Overreach of Trump's Second Term

5:58 — Ideologues vs. Mercenaries: The Split Inside the Trump Administration

6:14 — How Concentration Camps Get Built: Lessons from History for Today's America

7:52 — Why Crushing Dissent Requires Crushing Opposition First—and Trump Skipped That Step

11:34 — The Crackdown on Protesters: From Sandwich Guys to Terrorism Charges

12:51 — Media Censorship, Algorithmic Suppression, and the War on Free Speech Under Trump

19:47 — The Most Dangerous Moment in Decades: What Comes Next in Trump's Power Grab

24:52 — How to Resist the Trump Authoritarian Project Before the 2026 Elections

We are in the midst of the deliberate worsening of every aspect of existence. But we don't have to accept it.

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This week, "Next Comes What" considers the enshittification of the world. Andrea Pitzer lays out Cory Doctorow's theory of how the internet got ruined and then extends that concept to the deliberate destruction of nearly every aspect of modern life by government and tech companies globally. (You can read more about the concept in Doctorow's book, Enshittification.) Andrea considers the enshittification of detention in the U.S., and the parallel destruction of any functioning parts of immigration in the country. Together, those have led to the expansion of concentration camp detention through ICE campaigns and DHS policy.

She also takes on the enshittification of health care and climate policy, and discusses how these shifts make the public more dependent on authoritarian leaders just to survive. People become reluctant to demand more, for fear that the system will unleash even more punishment. Andrea considers the ways that the unmasking of secret meetings under the auspices of tech giants reveal how the stage is set for further disempowerment and enshittification of daily life. The episode closes with a look at the importance of radical hope and ways to imagine a better world, which can begin with tackling specific, concrete policies close to home.

0:00 – What Is Enshittification? Cory Doctorow's Term Explained

1:27 – Google's Enshittification: How Search Results Got Worse

2:44 – Enshittification Beyond Tech: From Politics to Daily Life

5:51 – Fascism and Enshittification: A Century-Old Playbook Returns

9:06 – Policing, Detention, and the Weaponization of Concentration Camps

11:17 – Immigration Policy Enshittified: Refugees, Detention, and Global Crackdowns

17:09 – Climate Crisis, Water Bankruptcy, and the Manufactured Supercrisis

18:11 – Healthcare Under Attack: DOGE Cuts, Medicaid, and the NHS

19:14 – Propaganda, AI, and the Billionaire War on Reality

24:35 – How to Fight Back: Civil Rights, Renewable Energy, and Demanding Better

Concentration camps using forced labor are alive and well today in America. But there's a lot we can do to put an end to them.

Support Next Comes What + Get Andrea's posts FIRST: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/subscribe Read the post: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/forced-labor-in-concentration-camps WATCH YouTube: https://youtu.be/Y1NNhzA9cT8 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@degenerateartnews Listen everywhere: https://pod.link/1779885475 This week's episode of "Next Comes What" tackles the use of forced labor of detainees at ICE facilities around the country. Andrea Pitzer looks at the massive expansion of profit from the country's two largest detention contractors, GEO Group and CoreCivic, and details the hunger and labor strikes detainees have been conducting nationwide. She also considers the history of forced labor in concentration camps around the globe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning with German genocide on Shark Island in what is today Namibia, she also describes how mandatory work was used in Soviet Russia, under British rule in Kenya, in post-Revolutionary China, and elsewhere. In each country, the international trend of concentration camps fused with preexisting local history and culture to create different models of forced labor. In the case of the U.S., Andrea suggests that mandatory work in ICE detention rises out of the long use of prison labor. Noting that the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution left in place a slave-labor exception for convicts, she traces the way that arrests and convict leasing continued the work conditions of slavery for many Black men and boys in the wake of the Civil War, despite emancipation. Yet forced labor in ICE detention adds another layer of injustice, in that the vast majority of people held in immigration detention don't even have charges filed against them, let alone a conviction. Andrea closes the episode with a look at ways that people have fought back under extraordinary conditions in the past and are resisting now--including ideas for those looking to eliminate forced labor in the US and to abolish ICE.

0:00 Introduction – Delaney Hall strikes & forced labor in ICE detention today

3:13 Overview – A survey of forced labor in concentration camp settings

5:45 Nazi work camps – Forced labor from 1933 through WWII

6:55 Why detention makes forced labor worse – expendability, punishment, profit

9:44 Pre-Nazi precedents – Shark Island / German Southwest Africa (early 1900s)

10:33 World War I – Ukrainian Canadians interned as "enemy aliens" in Alberta

12:09 The Russian Revolution & Gulag – Forced labor under the Bolsheviks

12:26 The Gulag system – Expansion, quotas, starvation rations, the Dead Road

15:01 Post-WWII & the Iron Curtain – Western vs. Soviet models of camp labor

18:00 US domestic roots – Slavery, the 13th Amendment exception, convict leasing

22:01 Scale of deportation – The administration's 15–20 million target

24:46 Resistance – Gulag uprisings, Free Alabama Movement, the Menocal lawsuit

27:42 What you can do – Calls to action, spotlighting strikes near you

30:21 Outro

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Race nostalgia has infected nearly every political argument made today. A look at what it is and how to stop it.

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This week, Andrea Pitzer considers the prioritization of white South Africans in US refugee policy, noting that they make up literally the only refugees currently being admitted to the United States. She explores how that policy is part of a larger map of racial grievance that has already led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people of color around the globe--a choice enthusiastically embraced by the current administration. Laying out a theory of the angry daddy as the model deliberately adopted by Trump and his fellow travelers, Andrea explores how it gets injected into politics as a promise to not only provide for the chosen followers of the leader, but also to punish those deemed less worthy.

Walking listeners through the ways that solidarity with racially aggrieved white communities frames the entire political enterprise running the government today, Andrea then turns to the ways the same concept likewise animates the strategies adopted by those who see themselves as opposing Trump. She questions the tendency to seek macho white male candidates, as if these are the only politicians capable of securing democracy. Looking at the recent expanded damage to the Voting Rights Act inflicted by the Supreme Court and the frenzy of gerrymandering it has unleashed, Andrea explains how the tendency to raise up white men as savior candidates on the left will only speed and amplify the disappearance of candidates of color from office nationwide. The episode closes with some way to think about taking action to address the corruption and crony networks that make this kind of resegregation possible.

0:00 White South African Refugees and Trump's Race-Based Immigration Policy

1:16 The $100 Million Taxpayer Cost of Afrikaner Refugee Policy

3:27 White Solidarity and the Roots of MAGA Race Nostalgia

7:22 Strict Father Politics: How Authoritarian Psychology Drives Voter Behavior

12:25 Strategic Racism: How Politicians Use Dog Whistles to Divide America

17:26 USAID Cuts and the Hidden Cost of White Refugee Policy

20:42 Andrew Sullivan, Demographic Change, and the Eugenics Trap

23:41 Democrats Adopting White Solidarity Tactics to Win Back Voters

28:18 How to Fight Corruption and White Supremacy at the Local Level

Why are elected Democrats punishing the very people who voted for them?

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This week's episode tackles the tendency to criticize Democrats when Republicans are the principal drivers of authoritarianism in the U.S.right now. Andrea Pitzer tries to answer the perennial question "What do you want Democrats to do, if they don't control any branch of government?" Her response boils down to giving examples of harmful actions from several Democrats voters had hoped would do more.

She considers Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer's recent appearance with Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has endorsed genocide against Palestinians and encouraged violence in the West Bank. She also considers recent actions taken by three governors: Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, and Jared Polis of Colorado. These Democratic governors have undercut their party and democracy alike—in one case by pardoning an unrepentant criminal election denier who betrayed her office, in others by inviting the state police to brutalize demonstrators or by ignoring the will of the people and the legislators of her own party.

0:00 – What Do Voters Want From Democrats Right Now?

1:18 – Democrats Acting Like an Opposition Party: Early Examples

5:35 – Chuck Schumer's Failure to Lead

7:18 – Schumer at the Israel Day Parade With Bezalel Smotrich

8:59 – Virginia Governor Spanberger's Veto Spree Against Her Own Party

12:53 – Colorado Governor Polis Frees Election Denier Tina Peters

15:33 – Delaney Hall: What's Happening Inside the Newark ICE Detention Facility

21:27 – Mayor Ras Baraka vs. Governor Sherrill: Who's Actually Fighting Back?

26:23 – Why Democratic Politicians Must Oppose Authoritarianism — Lessons From History

Four hundred years of propaganda is way too much. Here's how we can push back.

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This week, Andrea Pitzer traces the introduction of the idea of propaganda and its role in nearly everything bad that's being sold to the American people today. She begins with the pope's recent encyclical warning of the dangers of AI, and then steps back to another pope, one from the seventeenth century, who introduced the idea of propaganda to the world. In between, she looks at Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who created wartime propaganda and then made a killing using the same tactics to sell cigarettes to women.

From misrepresentations to stunt marketing, the half-truths and open lies of propaganda are still very much with us. All these tactics boil down to treating human beings as things, cheating people, and dividing humanity. Andrea considers the useful tool that machine learning could have been if the billionaire class had been satisfied to develop it for use in the big-data, tech, and science worlds that reflect its actual usefulness. Instead, they've sought to maximize profits by selling humanity a lie about how it can be a companion, a therapist, and a creative genius. Andrea closes with how to recognize the dangers and build a world that's more resistant to propaganda.

0:00 – AI, Propaganda, and the World Being Built Without Your Consent

0:40 – Pope Leo's Encyclical: What the Catholic Church Gets Right About AI

1:57 – Edward Bernays: The Father of Propaganda and the World He Made

5:52 – Cigarettes, Coups, and Corporate Manipulation: Bernays' Real Legacy

8:04 – How Social Media Primed Us for a Concentration Camp Society

16:16 – AI Is the New Propaganda: Tech Billionaires and the Myth of Intelligence

23:08 – Father Coughlin to Trump: A Century of Demagogues and Groupthink

26:24 – How to Think Beyond Propaganda and Build the World You Actually Want

26:46 – The AI Resist List: Global Movements Pushing Back on Big Tech

28:36 – Say What You See: Anti-Propaganda as a Radical Act