Next Comes What

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We can send the people pushing fascism on us back into their holes without buying into hate.
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The latest episode of Next Comes What opens with a reminder to get to a No Kings event this weekend. Andrea Pitzer then considers how some authoritarian element is always bubbling away in any society and will crawl out given the opportunity. But sometimes you have to pay attention to see it. She notes how easy it is for millions of Americans to not notice ICE operations now that senior officers aren't making a big national spectacle of everything they do. Nonetheless, arrests and detentions have never stopped--and in many places have gotten worse. On a global scale, Andrea notes the moment she realized the same rhetoric and ideas used to defend the 2003 war in Iraq had come from the Vietnam war decades before—and are now being used to support Trump's war in Iran.
When trying to defeat the fascist impulse seizing so much of the country right now, we do have to think strategically. But being heartless isn't the same as being strategic. Noting the increasing number of Democratic politicians supporting anti-trans bigotry, Andrea argues for learning how to talk to voters who have bought into propaganda without further entrenching the bigotry inherent in that propaganda. The episode closes with thoughts on how to buckle up for the long haul in changing our institutions, while recognizing that the November 3rd election holds the possibility of a tidal shift. Andrea encourages everyone to get out and vote.


00:00 Mass Deportations & ICE Arrest Surges
03:10 USAID Cuts & Global Food Security Crises
05:30 Authoritarianism, Protests & the Midterm Threat
09:20 Russia Dealings, Putin, & Zelensky Tensions
13:10 Parallels to Vietnam & The Costly Invasion of Iraq
15:45 U.S. Aggression vs. Iran's 92-Million-Person Civilization
19:15 Elon Musk's DOGE, Starlink Shutdowns & Political Spending
22:30 The Transgender Rights Battleground & Political Retrenchment
26:15 Building Pro-Democracy Movements & Distinguishing Cowards from Enemies
28:00 Closing Thoughts & Call to Action

The roots of everything that ails the country go deeper than Trump, so we need to think beyond November 3rd.
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This week's episode considers three recent news events and how they reveal the larger challenges facing the county. But first, Andrea Pitzer turns toward the November 3rd elections and the No Kings march coming up October 17. She encourages listeners to plan for both and so as much as possible to help defeat Trumpism at the ballot box. Victory there is critical, she suggests, but not sufficient. Andrea then looks at the botched execution of Christa Pike last week, the horrors of the Cornell Seven assault case, and the revelation that U.S. Senator Dr. Roger Marshall, an obstetrician, sued hundreds of his own patients and had them arrested. The instigating events of all these instances of deep animosity toward women in our country happened when Trump was not president.
Andrea then turns to the recent elections in Brazil, which in recent years saw its institutions hold against the rise of authoritarianism. The judicial system acted against president Jair Bolsonaro, barring him from running for office until 2030, due to his attempts to subvert elections and foment a coup. Last weekend, his son ran in his place, and won the first round of voting. The runoff will take place later this month. Andrea discusses the ways that the authoritarian-industrial complex is hard to eradicate, in part because the real movers behind the politicians are those with money and power. And they want more of both. The episode closes by looking beyond November 3rd to the greater changes we'll need to make, and a nod toward the value of performative actions in long-term success.
0:00 Keep Your Hands Off Our Vote
3:15 The Lame Duck Reality in DC
5:40 Roots of the Crisis: The Reagan Precedent
7:20 Botched Executions and State Cruelty
13:10 Women as the Social Safety Net
16:45 The Breakdown at Cornell
20:30 Predatory Medical Debt and Systemic Inequality
23:15 The Orange Wave and Brazil's Global Far Right
28:00 Why Ending Trump Isn't Enough
31:30 The Authoritarian Industrial Complex

Authoritarians reveal themselves, even to followers who prefer not to see. And that leaves an opening for change.
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This week, Next Comes What looks at the disillusionment that eventually takes place for most people who succumb to the cult of personality in an authoritarian society. Andrea Pitzer looks at events in recent weeks that are providing the spark for that awakening among many Trump supporters. With higher gas prices driving the point home, we also see everyone from next-door neighbors to judges and Republican politicians beginning to stand up against Trump, or at least to edge away from association with him. 
Andrea compares this growing repudiation of the president and his policies to the case of Mitsuye Endo, a Japanese American U.S. citizen who was fired from her state job in California and detained in camps with her family during World War II. In other cases brought by Japanese Americans, a majority of justices on the Supreme Court rubber-stamped the bigotry of the day while rationalizing actions they understood were wrong. But when it came to Endo—a U.S.-born Christian with no ties to Japan or even the Japanese language—the judges could find no pretext at all to provide cover for what was, at root, a detention program based simply on racial exclusion.
Seeing many recent examples of people recognizing that their faith in Trump was wrongheaded or even immoral, Andrea suggests that we've come to a similar moment in which Americans are being forced to choose. Not everyone will walk away from Trumpism, but many will, for reasons that may be ethical or practical—or both. The episode ends with suggestions on how to respond to those who do.
00:00 Introduction: Shifting Public Opinion & Political Dynamics
02:48 The Rising Costs of Living and Cracks in the GOP Coalition
05:36 Institutional Capitulation and the Defense of Democratic Norms
08:24 Leaving MAGA: Personal Realities and Disillusionment Stories
11:12 Human Toll: Immigration Crackdowns, ICE, and Affected Families
14:00 Legal Pushback: How Judges Are Challenging Federal Overreach
16:48 Historical Echoes: The Mitsuye Endo Case and Wartime Detentions
19:36 The Midterms and the Ripple Effects of Raging Unpopularity
22:24 Complicity, the Thanksgiving Table, and Long-Term Cultural Shifts
25:12 Conclusion: Guardrails for the Future and Continuing the Fight

Corrupt power will always inflict more harm if it can benefit from that additional suffering. But we don't have to let it happen.
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This week's episode of Next Comes What looks at an inspector general's report on Alligator Alcatraz, describing the uses there of a form of solitary confinement known as "the box"—a violation of the rules of detention. Andrea Pitzer gathers accounts of far worse use of the box than was described in the reports, explaining how detainees were beaten, shackled, and left in the cage alone in the hot sun. She then traces the use of "the box" in the early stages of other concentration camp systems, including Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and Vietnam during the war. The box, however, predates modern concentration camp systems. In the US, it has deep roots slavery, prisons, and the contract labor system that rose up to fill the need for workers after slavery was abolished. The box has been used in countless places across centuries, and Andrea shares a story of one prisoner, Arthur Maillefert, who died in "the box" in Florida in 1932. 
 
Despite the limitations of the inspector general's report, Andrea argues that its findings can be a vehicle for further investigation and accountability. And that accountability is crucial, because as long as corrupt powerholders exist, they will aim to have a new worst place to put demonized people and targeted groups to make examples of them. The episode ends with thoughts on how we can take action close to home to end a form of abuse that occurs daily around the country and around the world.

00:00 Inside "Alligator Alcatraz": The Reality of Modern Detention Camps
03:15 Why Every Lawless System Relies on Solitary Confinement
05:40 From the Soviet Gulag to the Box: A History of Camp Isolation
08:20 The US History of Solitary: From Quaker Experiment to Prison Abuse
11:10 The Dark Legacy of the Sweatbox in American Prisons
14:35 Concentration Camps as an End Run Around Due Process
16:50 The Business of Mass Detention: Private Prisons & ICE Contracts
19:10 Trump 2.0, Third-Country Deportations, and Stateless Detainees
22:45 The Gap Between Official Rationale and the Reality of Torture Boxes
25:10 The Danger of Normalizing Lawlessness and the Final Trap

Companies and agencies are spying on everyone they can.
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 Our episode this week gathers a series of recent surveillance scandals, in which everything from public cameras to your AI agent and even your television may be monitoring you. To put the current snooping in context, Andrea Pitzer looks at the history of mass political surveillance. In the Nazi era, Heinrich Himmler dreamed of having five men to track every individual suspect. East Germany hired or co-opted more than one in seven citizens to spy. And the U.S. has its own history on this front, with a massive surveillance operation put into place during the civil rights era, with the goal of targeting Black Activists, Native Americans, and feminists. 
In the modern era, Andrea notes that governments often have willing partners in tech companies, using tools that far surpass twentieth-century capabilities. Corporations are typically more interested in collecting data to increase their bottom line, while governments want surveillance to secure power and target public opposition. But in the end, companies are prone to collaborating with governments, especially if they can profit from it—even if doing so lets law enforcement take unethical or illegal actions. The problem of tech and AI isn't that they're aware or human (they're not). From China to the US, the real threat is the oligarchs and aspiring dictators who would happily eliminate our freedom for another dollar or an ounce of power.
00:00 Introduction and Recent Tech Surveillance
02:55 The Fallibility of AI and Stolen Discoveries
05:10 Human Contractors and Data Privacy
07:20 Historical Precedents of Authoritarian Surveillance
09:10 The Panopticon and East Germany's Stasi
12:00 COINTELPRO and the Erosion of Privacy Guardrails
14:30 China's High-Tech Xinjiang Surveillance Model
17:30 Historical Parallels of Surveillance
20:00 The Role of Tech Monopolies and AI in Modern Surveillance
22:30 Policy, Resistance, and Actionable Steps Forward