Next Comes What

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
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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.
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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