Next Comes What

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

Wild-eyed extremists running our government have resurrected hateful pseudoscience.
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This week, "Next Comes What" looks at the various ways that the administration has adopted discredited historical views on eugenics and turned them into policies that have already killed hundreds of thousands of people. From RFK Jr. undermining vaccine programs and environmental regulations here at home to DOGE cutting lifesaving USAID programs abroad, the US government is actively dismantling the nation's public health apparatus.
Andrea Pitzer talks about her reporting decades ago on the history of American eugenics and the legendary Buck v. Bell case that the US Supreme Court used to allow involuntary sterilization of people deemed defective. The episode has a cameo from someone Andrea met back then: Paul Lombardo, a leading US voice on bioethics and the history of eugenics. Lombardo frames the current administration's policy as not just influenced by our eugenic legacy but as actually adopting eugenics.
Andrea also addresses the ways that current obsessions with fertility, purity, and genetic superiority are reanimating discredited principles of eugenics. Though the federal government's footprint in public health is too massive a lift for local programs to replace through small-scale efforts, the episode closes with ideas on how to keep a record of what's happening, push back politically, and stem the effects of the current eugenic tide until this administration can be consigned to the dustbin of history.
0:11 — MAHA's American Eugenics: How Trump and RFK Jr. Are Reviving a Dark History
2:26 — The Origins of American Eugenics: From Francis Galton to Madison Grant
4:57 — RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary: Anti-Vax, Germ Theory Denial, and Public Health Sabotage
6:17 — Purity Culture and Pseudoscience: The Eugenic Logic Behind MAGA Health Policy
10:01 — Carrie Buck and Buck v. Bell: The Supreme Court Case That Enabled Mass Sterilization
12:27 — What a Leading Eugenics Scholar Says About the Trump Administration
14:40 — USAID Cuts and Global Eugenics: How Foreign Aid Destruction Fits the Pattern
16:50 — Pro-Natalism, Birth Rates, and the Billionaire Push to Control Who Reproduces
21:55 — Negative Eugenics in Immigration Detention: Disease, Neglect, and Population Control
28:59 — What You Can Do: Protecting Public Health in Your Community

When times get grim, it's tempting to resort to political violence.
 
But what if nonviolence packs a bigger punch?

 
 
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About This Episode
 
This week's episode looks at Cole Allen, who's facing federal charges after trying to bring weapons into the White House Correspondents Dinner at the Washington Hilton in April. Andrea Pitzer talks about the desperate times we face as a country and lays out why she chooses nonviolent responses. She walks through a handful of reasons that frame her decision to reject violence, from the effectiveness of past nonviolent movements at home and abroad to nonviolent tactics' greater precision as a tool. And she shares her personal conviction, after growing up in a violent household, that she doesn't want to inject more violence into a system already saturated with it.

Andrea also frames violence as hardly attention-getting in the US at this point. It's intended to be dramatic theater, but it's so omnipresent, it can become background noise to Americans. Considering the divide between Stephen Miller's ultraviolent approach on immigration, and Tom Homan's less spectacular violence, Andrea looks at how Trump embraces violence and has a solid understanding of how to use it for political theater. But what if nonviolent theater is more surprising and more effective in response?

The episode closes with ways to think about using nonviolent tactics in your own community and the larger world.
 
Chapters
0:00 Cole Allen's Weapons Arrest at the White House Correspondents' Dinner
3:20 Why Political Violence Tends to Backfire
3:47 Assassination, WWI, and the Unintended Consequences of Violence
5:37 Why Strategy and Discipline Are Essential for Real Change
8:26 America's Policed Society: How Violence Becomes the Default
17:58 Trump's Relationship with Violence: Rhetoric, Power, and Impunity
19:31 Why the Civil Rights Nonviolence Model Still Applies Today
22:09 Stephen Miller vs. Tom Homan: The Politics of Immigration Violence
24:34 Nonviolent Theater as the Most Powerful Counter to Authoritarian Power

There are a lot of ways to cure our ailing country. Here's how to convince the patient to cooperate.
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Here's a link to the Duke panel on public health and families in immigration detention that Andrea mentions in the episode: https://warpwire.duke.edu/w/MUoJAA/
This week's episode of Next Comes What considers our crisis of democracy through the lens of medicine. Andrea Pitzer looks at recent rulings by U.S. courts on the Voting Rights Act and mifepristone, as well as a billionaire purchasing his second copy of the Constitution and suggests that what's wrong with our society will take more than just elections to fix (though elections remain critical!).
Andrea uses a framework of public health to think about how improvements can happen. If diagnosis is understanding what's going wrong, what condition we're dealing with, prescription is figuring out what the best treatment options are. There's a lot of solid diagnosis out there from people doing incisive analysis of our democratic collapse, and a number of good suggestions on how to fix our systems and fireproof them from future authoritarian threats.
But the hardest part of public health work is getting individuals and communities on board--getting people to buy in. Andrea runs through ways that do and don't work, arguing that there's no need to coddle racists or endorse hate to meet people where they're at. She argues for creating a vision of a society that people will want to be part of, one that will deliver for them and invites them to come along. In the end, we'll have to get some people involved who aren't on board yet. Andrea closes by arguing that the patient is treatable, and that in fact countless successful local examples of organizing and successful change are already happening around the country.

A guide to understanding our new concentration-camp era and how to fight it. A re-release of a Next Comes What from July 10, 2025.
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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.