Next Comes What

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

Here's how to take on the global right-wing nostalgia for the glory days of fascism.
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This week's Next Comes What looks at the victory of the authoritarian, reactionary party AfD in last weekend's election in eastern Germany. Andrea Pitzer considers a few of the regional specifics of that election, and considers other universal aspects of the global rise of neo-Nazi and Nazi-adjacent movements. What the twenty-first century models have in common is the open demonization of immigrants. There is no way out of the current political crisis, Andrea suggests, without addressing that demonization head-on.
 
Summarizing a recent Syracuse University study, she explores the ways that various kinds of media function, not only providing misinformation and disinformation, but also setting moral frameworks that make an argument about whether immigrants are seen as fully human. The Syracuse researchers found that fact-checking statements does not automatically adjust the underlying moral narrative the original misinformation was supporting. Andrea argues that defeating the authoritarian threat cannot happen through attempts to moderate a few of the right's most extreme tactics. A long-term solution requires friends of democracy to directly address perverse frameworks and messaging by offering not only substantially different policies but also a narrative that directly counters the one that fascists have been selling.
00:00 Introduction: The Arc of Right-Wing Sabotage and Fascist Ideology
03:15 The Role of Anti-Immigrant Paranoia in Modern Right-Wing Politics
06:40 Case Study: The Rise of the AfD in Germany and MAGA Parallels
10:15 Deliberate Propaganda: How Disinformation is Created and Spread
14:35 Incidental Propaganda: The Media's Role in Amplifying Far-Right Narratives
19:10 Moral Disadvantage and Partisan Media Exposure (The Syracuse Study)
23:55 Economic Anxiety, Tariffs, and Industrial Decline in the US and Europe
28:20 Historical Parallels: Nostalgia for Fascism and the Concentration Camp Tendency
33:10 The Global Wave of Apocalyptic Fever and Tech Oligarchs
37:45 A Long-Term Framework and Strategy to Defend Democracy

The data center revolt and the pushback against detention camps have something in common. The public is realizing it has power.
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This week, "Next Comes What" considers how the oligarchs driving the AI boom and the president of the United States are all driven by a desire not just for wealth but for unlimited power that gives them control over humanity itself. Andrea Pitzer looks at Donald Trump's attempt to use the entire apparatus of the federal government to make reality whatever he says it is, with disastrous consequences for the country and the world. The CEOs pushing the AI boom portray themselves as the saviors of humanity, but in reality are inflicting tremendous damage by steamrolling communities and workers with new tools of technology that cannot deliver on the disingenuous promises being made by the tech titans. Meanwhile, both the president and the CEOs are warping the global economy.
 
Yet what they demand is not inevitable. Just as with the local--and occasionally even bipartisan--pushback on ICE's attempt to convert existing warehouses into concentration camps nationwide, the data center revolution is now facing resistance from unhappy Americans across the political spectrum. Andrea looks at what it means when people wake up to the power that they have, considers the risks of any big social reaction, and explains why it's important for the anti-data center movement to become bigger than simple backlash. Before the current momentum can get diverted to benefit those who seek only more exclusion and control, supporters of self-governance need to harness this revolt and build a coalition that embraces democratic values, linking the health and stability of local communities to a bigger concept of what kind of country we ought to be.

00:00 - The Illusion of Power and Real-World Harm
03:45 - Manufactured Reality: Renaming Lake Ontario to Erasing Public Health Data
07:12 - Billionaire Philanthropy, Tech Oligarchs, and the Drive for Absolute Control
11:05 - The Reactionary Playbook: How CEOs and Politicians Conflated Cultural Grievances
14:50 - Gil Duran on The Nerd Reich, The Sovereign Individual, and Tech Governance
18:30 - The Grassroots Anti-Data Center Movement: A Cross-Partisan Populist Revolt
22:15 - Risks of Unchecked Resistance: Avoiding Scapegoating and Isolationism
26:00 - Corporate Encroachment, Public Resistance, and the Fight for Democratic Accountability