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

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: 

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

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=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 

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=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.

The Supreme Court uses the shadow docket to stick a knife into due process. But every toehold matters when you're taking back the country.

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/rogue-scotus-on-the-loose

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

In this week's episode, Andrea Pitzer looks at Monday's Supreme Court ruling, which permits the government to send immigrants from U.S. soil to countries they did not come from and to which they have no connection, places where they might be tortured or trafficked. The decision, on the shadow docket, included a dissent but no explanation of the majority's rationale.

Andrea considers what this means in terms of rights for immigrants and everyone else, and how—barring future decisions limiting it, clarifying it, or reversing it—this decision is likely to lead to violence, abuse, and concentration camp patterns of detention for those we deport abroad. She also explores how the time required to negotiate agreements with countries the US will need to bully or bribe into taking detainees will lead to even worse overcrowding in existing US detention facilities. With news of plans for a new Florida detention center nicknamed "Alligator Alcatraz", officials are emphasizing the role of pythons and other reptiles to keep prisoners on site. The episode finishes with some examples of local communities fighting detention facilities and ideas for what you can do to take action yourself.

Millions hit the streets last weekend to secure democracy and change America.

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/there-is-no-final-boss

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

This week "Next Comes What" focuses on the five million (or so) Americans who turned up in cities and towns across the country last Saturday for No King's Day. Andrea Pitzer looks at the arc of nationwide protests from 2017 and 2020 and connects 2025 to them as a way to think about what's unfolding: a mass movement capable of rejecting Trumpism and transforming the country. Framing the fight for democracy as an ongoing effort rather than any "one and done" phenomenon, she stresses the importance of continuing to show up between the big events. Andrea recounts her reporting from two Saturday demonstrations in Falls Church, Virginia, where she lives, and considers what happened in the rest of the country. Often hopeful, yet touched by tragedy, June 14 was a wake-up call made and answered by America itself.

People in the streets of LA and staff at NIH show all Americans how to stand up to power.

 Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/standing-up-to-power

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

In this week's episode, Andrea Pitzer looks at actions in Los Angeles and at NIH from recent days as models for how we might each be able to shore up democracy in our own communities. She runs through a timeline of how ICE arrests in California drew residents to protest, which was met with violence by law enforcement. After the Trump administration triggered then escalated the crisis, the president took the likewise unnecessary steps of deploying the California National Guard and U.S. Marines. Andrea considers the destructive nature of these actions and the threat to democracy that they represent, as well as highlighting a few ways that Californians found to resist this overreach.

The second half of the episode focuses on an interview with Rui Carlos Sá, a program director at NIH, whom Andrea first met at a "No Kings" demonstration in February. As one of the signers of Monday's Bethesda Declaration calling out the damage the new administration is inflicting on the National Institutes of Health, Sá talks about the importance of NIH and how he made the decision to stand up publicly. Andrea closes with a look at things we can do to follow in the footsteps of people speaking out in DC and LA, with an emphasis on the upcoming "No Kings" demonstrations across the US on Saturday, June 14.