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As the ruling party in the US Continues to degrade American society and undermine the country's allies, the magnitude of the challenge before us can feel exhausting to contemplate. That was actually the only thing I thought was good in this whole fricking stupid speech that they wrote. Yet people here at home do take action every day to protect their neighbors. Snap benefit changes and delays have potentially cut off hundreds of thousands of Arizona families from food and aid. Well, that's why the Community Food bank of Southern Arizona is expanding its hours. In past episodes, I've also looked at movements in other countries like South Korea, Hungary and elsewhere. Former Brazilian President Naya Bolsonaro is under house arrest. He is barred from campaigning after being convicted of that pesky little habit of his. You know, where he tries to plot against democracy that have managed to block authoritarian power grabs. South Korea's president declared martial law basically in the middle of the night, effectively accusing the opposition of trying to destroy the country from within. But in the most memorable examples that I've mentioned overseas, then, almost as quickly as the declaration had been made, Parliament, including members of the president's own party, pulled the rug out from under it. Events had already taken their most dramatic turns by the time I covered them, with national leaders stepping up with the public backing them all, leading quickly to reversals of fortune for aspiring or established despots. In South Korea, a court sentenced former President Yoon Suk Yeol to life in prison after it found him guilty of leading an insurrection. But again, when war and invasion aren't involved, successful movements that get rid of would be tyrants tend to emerge from more complex conditions than just the dramatic end game in which a leader is arrested, convicted or removed. Per Bolsonaro was was convicted of plotting to overturn the 2022 election. Yet over the weekend, he appeared at a campaign rally. The man wasn't there. His AI generated avatar was. Today I'll look at two examples that are smaller boar for now that are in process, yet still significant. Thousands of flamingos nest and breed in Albania's Nata Lagoon, the largest and most biodiverse delta in the region. But it's endangered. In recent months, Albanians have risen up in outrage over plans for Jared Kushner and, by association, Ivanka Trump to acquire and develop ecologically valuable land that's also part of the country's national heritage. Why are tens of thousands of young Indians suddenly calling themselves cockroaches? And in India just days ago, thousands of students who have been protesting for the last several weeks. Action must be taken against the police officers who attacked us shockingly won all demands from the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi. It's a victory for the people of India and the defeat of the dictator. I want to talk about what these two sets of protesters are doing and how they set the stage for deeper change in their society. We decided to love life and you can't be the life. And what we might be able to learn from their examples. Foreign. But before I consider the Indian and Albanian examples, I do want to mention some recent gains that have happened on the mainland U.S. does anybody understand this? After local organizers fought back, ICE was forced to give up plans for two rural detention facilities in Pennsylvania. This represents a very important victory for our communities. Plants facilities were met with complaints showing that the population in detention would far larger than the numbers of actual local residents and would unavoidably stress the area's infrastructure. We know for example in Tremont that if this is built, they will literally run out of water within 24 hours. That means that they literally won't be able to turn on the water in their kitchen and fill up a pot of water. They won't be able to flush the toilet. Miguel Andrade of the Shutdown Detention campaign told why that the 207 million doll dollars that the federal government had used to purchase the warehouses quote should have been invested in people, not detention. Over $207 million that were wasted around these like warehouse facility purchases. And we know that the infrastructure in these different parts of the state is still lacking. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection prohibited the Department of Homeland Security from using the sites for detention. The Berks county facility was purchased for $87.4 million and was planned 1500 detainees. The proposed facility in Schuylkill county carried a 120 million dollar price tag and was planned to hold up to 7500 people. Between the doubling of the area population and the burden on local sewage and water systems. The department also argued that the facilities would be a threat to the health of the community and local residents in other ways. We reach out to ICE to ask what led to the decision. How much money had been invested so far and what will happen with the facilities now. They did not answer those questions all the way back in February. Governor Josh Shapir bureau told federal officials that the state would not issue required permits for potential ICE detention facilities in Berks and Schuylkill counties. I've obviously been very outspoken about the violation of constitutional rights at the hands of ice. At the same time, Bucks county commissioners voted unanimously to block ICE from opening a detention facility in that area. And the vote had bipartisan support, with the lone Republican commissioner saying Bucks county is not a county that needs or wants a detention facility. And let's pause a moment too to note that the Everglades concentration camp that the administration named Alligator Alcatraz has formally been closed. The closure itself happened a month ago, but now the site has been returned to the control of Miami Dade, where officials have said the airstrip will return to its role of letting pilots of small aircraft train for landings and takeoffs. The facility were undocumented immigrants were once held is coming apart piece by piece. Historically, when concentration camps close, it's important to undo the physical structures of detention as well, because camps are often resurrected for similar or worse purposes at a later point. There are no more detainees in the facility. But those protesters and environmentalists tell me the fight isn't over. It's gratifying. I wish it was happening quicker. So not only closing the camp, but returning control of it to municipal authorities is an important part of the dismantling of authoritarianism. Estimates show that the state spent $1.2 billion of your tax money to build and operate it. The governor says the state detained 21,000 people on average. They spent 16 days there. Now we need an investigation of the abuses there from both environmental and human rights perspectives, something that the Miccosukee tribe and Florida immig immigrants rights groups have been calling for for some time now. That's 336,000 states divided by 1.2 billion or $3,571 a day on each detainee. Do you earn that much in a day? No. No, far from it. Now moving on to other places in the world where people are taking on strongmen. Lets start In Albania, private security guards violently detain an activist protesting against a luxury development in a protected nature preserve that is a home for the iconic pink bird. Part of the Soviet sphere of influence after World War II, Albania remained communist until 1990. In the decades since, it has struggled with mercenary capitalism, preventing actual democracy from taking root in many cases in ways that that we've seen also in modern Russia. The plans didn't generate a lot of international attention until recently when Ivanka made an appearance on a podcast that angered the citizens of this economically struggling Balkan nation. Recent protests there over commercial development of Sazan island, the westernmost part of Albania and the country's largest island. This is just the newest chapter in a history of pushback against the current government. You know, it's not even a business for me, despite the scale of it. We have five minutes miles of beachfront directly across from the island. This beautiful peninsula with a lagoon on one side, the ocean on the other. Beautiful white sand beaches. In the wake of Albanian parliamentary elections last year, demonstrations alleging election shenanigans were held separately by various political opponents of the regime between last November and May of this year. What Albanian people and most of European people love about America is their principles. So the land of the free and democracy. These included everything from marches in the street to calling out specific officials to Molotov cocktails thrown by protesters and violent assaults by police. It is very sad to see the American government not stand up to them. In May, many disparate parts of the opposition were fused and subsumed in into a larger protest movement now known as the Flamingo Revolution. The biggest unrest since the collapse of communism 30 years ago. The movement began with a local demonstration near Sazan island and the site of the planned multi billion dollar Zvrnik Resort. Sazan real estate development. And the Albanian government say that an environmental impact assessment is underway and will be completed before any construction work begins. The one that Jared Kushner has cut deals with the government to develop. But our analysis of satellite imagery shows that wide swaths of land have already been cle cleared, a road has been upgraded and a new bridge has been built, raising serious questions about the impact that's already occurred. After protesters there were roughed up, outrage erupted and it led to demonstrations expanding to Tirana, the Albanian capital. One of the community members was dragged down by private security and a gun was held in his hand. And the police was not intervening, which shows where the stat the state's police loyalty lies. And it's not with the Albanian people and it's not with the law they became about much more than just the two months ago. It was very much focused on the environmental issues that I've been reporting on. Protesters are now demanding the resignation of the current Prime Minister, IDI Rama. The people I've been speaking to in the last few days, they've been talking more about corruption, about, they say, how the rich and powerful get away with breaking the law, about what they see as the dysfunction at the heart of government. They also want constitutional and electoral reforms with term limits for the Prime Minister. He's won three terms, he's talking about standing for a fourth. They're demanding reversal of existing statutes on foreign investment and development. Mr. Prime Minister, for seeing US protesters nearly 60 days now, how does it feel to have protesters outside your office for night after night after night like this. Though Adi Rama has been in charge for several years now, the main opposition leader, Salih Berisha, who is himself a former president and prime minister of the country, also has responsibility for the current crisis. Amazing for the country, for the society, because in the same boulevard not long ago, kind of 15 years ago, people were killed with real bullets by protesting peacefully. He inflicted tremendous damage on Albanian democracy during his rule too. As a result, protesters are crying a pox on both their houses and asking for more fundamental political reform. My guide, whose grandfather served as a soldier on the island in the 1960s, took me to the abandoned school which the children of military families used to attend. He says the government is selling the country to the highest bidder. I would rather be poor than sell Albania to anyone. Turning to India, the Cockroach Janta Party formed in May, mocking the name of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or Indian People's Party, headed up by Narendra Modi. With the largest youth population in the world, 367 million young people make up a third of India's working age population. But nearly 40% of graduates and 20% of those aged 25 to 29 are without work. And as multinational companies in India become increasingly shaped by AI, there is a growing shift towards doing more with less people. The original aim was to make a satirical point about the government's response to leaked questions from the national exam for entry to medical school. India's hyper competitive entrance exam is can determine the future for millions of students and offer a means of upward social mobility. As a result of the reported leak, the exam was canceled after students had taken it. And that was the end point of a process of grueling preparations that many test takers had been working on for years. It began with an insult when students complained. The Chief justice of India, Surya Kant, compared the young jobless Indians to cockroaches who go on social media and whine. Boston University graduates Abhijit Dipke posted on X what if all cockroaches came together? A real movement formed. A manifesto on their website is also pushing for increased representation of women in Parliament, a more independent media system and the arrest of the chief election commissioner. If votes are ever erased. Deepke came back to India. He had been in the US at the time, and physical protests over the crisis began in June. In New Delhi, Anjali Kamet has spent the last several years working on a documentary film about India's rightward shift. Officials moved to shut down more than a dozen metro stations and Access to mobile data at the main site of the protest. You just returned from India. Could you have predicted what took place but their efforts backfired, leading to additional demonstrations in several other large cities? No. This is absolutely, you know, unprecedented the scale of protests. I mean there have been mass protests for many years in India in the past, especially during the past 12 years of the Modi regime. But this, the number of people who came through to these protests, young people who weren't necessarily politicized, who weren't organizers, who weren't activists, but who just felt compelled to come out. An established activist supported the student movement and led a hunger strike. We can now bring in Aneesh Gawande, spokesperson of the ncp. It's one of the opposition parties in India which lent their support to the Cockroach Janta party in an attempt to break the will of the students. Protesters were tear gassed and beaten by Police. On the 20th of July, you saw police brutality of unspeakable proportions unfold on the streets of New Delhi. Sticks with nails stuck onto them, pellet guns which have been used for the first time in the national capital. Protests expanded even further across the country and authorities tried to detain protesters even as vigils were kept around the clock. Slept on the cold hard floor at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, braving 45 degrees Celsius weather, braving the rain, braving the threat of police repression. Protesters had long been demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. And late this month they finally succeeded in their goal. For the first time in 12 years we've managed to secure accountability from this government and the resignation of a sitting minister. Mahdi had tried to placate them with other smaller concessions but was unable to cajole or break them. Young people aren't happy with breadcrumbs anymore. We want the whole meal. When the government was forced to meet their demands, instead a public announcement was held with government ministers and student protesters present as peer power holders at a table. Government representatives reassured that the five point charter presented by CJP will be considered. Officials agreed to drop attempts to prosecute protesters and to the students charter for exam reform in the country. I certainly hope the Cockroach Janta party will become a political party in its own right. I certainly know that there is appetite for a party led by young people that disrupts the status quo. After public acknowledgment that Education Minister Pradhan would go, the leadership of the Cockroach party called off the protests and celebrated their victory. This is Abhijit Dipke at the main protest site in the heart of New Delhi. Jantar Mantar shortly after receiving news of Pradhan's resignation. It's a victory for the Constitution of India. Commenters noted that it was a sharp reprimand to Modi's heavy handed government and a win for popular action and resistance. Remember, these voters are critical for the future and Modi, he's already had, he's already seen his parliamentary majority. He's slimmed down. He doesn't want to lose those voters going forward. This example shows the way that political change takes time to develop and often begins with specific demands by one community. When leaders who have portrayed themselves as invincible are forced to reckon not just with the wealthy or with corporate power holders who might be seen as their peers, but instead with everyday people and mass movements, it opens new vulnerabilities that can be exploited to eventually remove the authoritarian from power. However, what has followed that resignation has been disheartening at best, and you can be sure that Mahdi will not go easily. The new bill that was introduced was nothing but an amended version of a 2024 piece of legislation that had various previous lives. It brought in no significant measures to curb cheating or to curb the kinds of exam malpractice that you see around you. Nearly as soon as the deal had been made and student leaders had told their followers to go home, reports began to spread of the arrest of hundreds of protesters far away from New Delhi, where Mahdi has a stronger grip in the country. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court of India passed an interim order allowing the government to proceed with existing cases against students. The students have since been working on how to respond. Leaders of the movement have decried the detentions as a witch hunt and vowed to resume the protests. The question of state violence is something that has come up again and again with mass student protests in the US and elsewhere. Mahmoud Khalil is filing a lawsuit alleging a conspiracy to suppress critics of Israel with With isolated exceptions, university leadership in the US has deeply damaged democracy through its treatment of protesters who tried to call attention to genocidal actions by the Israeli government in Palestine. The lawsuit says the Heritage foundation created Project Esther, which became a blueprint for a public private partnership to weaken the growing pro Palestine movement by targeting prominent non citizen activists and smearing them as anti Semite. Instead of separating out legitimate concerns about antisemitism on campus from scaremongering and political scapegoating, many university presidents and boards turned on their own students, subjecting them to a whole array of discipline by the universities themselves and in some cases, harm at the hands of law enforcement. He was arrested by ICE agents in his campus apartment in March 2025 and spent more than 100 days in a Louisiana immigration jail, missing the birth of his first child. Before a federal judge in New Jers, he ordered his release. These harms include prosecution, abuse and deportation. This lawsuit comes as Khalil's ongoing deportation case appears likely to be heard before the Supreme Court administrators simultaneously undermined their university's role in independent thought by caving to Trump and his minions, letting the US Government strong arm them into claiming things were anti Semitic that clearly were not, and agreeing to roll back efforts to integrate the academy racially and culturally. This case is about far more than what was done to me. It's about a coordinated, ongoing campaign to punish, silence and intimidate anyone who dares to speak out for Palestinian liberation. The result of all that is already being felt in falling enrollment of several minority communities in numerous colleges nationwide. The lawsuit was brought under the Ku Klux Klan act of 1871, which is a Reconstruction era law to restrict government coordination with vigilante groups like the Klan. Of course, there are exceptions to that. But the broad swath of university administrators have not brought glory on themselves. Columbia University is disciplining at least 70 students who participated in campus protests last year. Now the university is going as far as a expelling some of those students. In addition, some campus protesters in the US Currently face federal charges that could bring significant jail time. Let's get live the Fox News Dave Kitchen. He's in Ann Arbor with the very latest. Just last month, prosecutors secured an indictment of eight people with ties to the University of Michigan that include felony charges against all eight. The raid and the indictments came at such a close proximity. A lawyer coordinating the defense. They say that the clients that they're representing, they were really shocked. The charges appear to combine activities of permitted protest with actual vandalism, rolling them up together and presenting them as a larger conspiracy. If people who organize are being threatened and arrested, then that diminishes all of our opportunities to express ourselves and make positive change. Student protesters have been targeted both by their own administrations and now by a government keen to shut down dissent. The Michigan chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations says that while allegations of criminal conduct should be addressed through the judicial process, charging documents should not blur the line between alleged unlawful acts and constitutionally protected political expression, peaceful protests and advocacy on matters of public concern. This inability to organize on campus in some traditional ways has done real harm to the student protest movement across the US but many have nonetheless persisted. Chanting students walked out of Dallas ISD high schools to protest ICE immigration actions. Walkouts were planned at at least half a dozen schools for today. High school students around the U.S. in Texas, Virginia, Washington State and elsewhere have in some cases received more support for their right to protests than university administrators have offered today. It's just really important to be here for vulnerable communities in the United states. In the first half of 2026, thousands of high school students left class to speak out publicly against ICE detention. They protest on the weekends or at night. No one cares. It's by doing it during the day you get attention. But some state governments, like Texas's, are trying to shut that down too, by investigating school principals, districts and superintendents. Attorney General Ken Paxton announced investigations into Dallas isd, Northeast ISD in San Antonio and Manor ISD near Austin following student walkouts in protest of the actions of ICE agents. There are a series of ideas I want to get across in this episode. Spring 2000 Angry, angry young Serbs have declared a non violent war against a man they say has stolen the best 10 years of their lives. His name is Slobodan Milosevic. First is that smaller things can become really important symbols of larger things. Their symbol, the clenched fist. Their name otpor, the Serbian word for reserve. Sometimes it's just that the little things come together and then add up to one big thing. On Milosevic's birthday, they make a cake. The cake signifies our country which fell apart as like all those pieces of cakes are falling apart and they are eaten by slow boat at other times. The small thing is what finally fuels outrage. Visibly enough for people to do something about the bigger issues. In the morning, the city discovers its best sources of independent news have been cut off. So it's fine to focus on a local crisis, whether it's a detention facility near you or a policy you want your city or town to cancel. During the day, thousands of protesters assemble at the city Hal. It's often easier for people to get informed and understand and even get mad about something close to home. Especially if it's not already automatically slotted into national debates where people think they know everything. With this latest escalation, Milosevic has aroused thousands of people who have never before taken part in political protests. At 10 o', clock, the regime has had enough. The small thing like Trump interests fusing with local officials, corruption in Albania, or a satirical protest over the leaking of exam questions in India. The small thing can be the vehicle that allows big issues like ministerial accountability and education reform to take concrete form in the minds of those who might not be tied into existing groups or feel capable of forcing significant changes in their society. The main mistake of the regime was that they spread the circle of those who were under the repression, and that's why this repression was counterproductive. And sometimes it's the small joke or coming together on social media that allows a big movement to grow. It is like the third Newton law of action and reaction. When you raise the level of repression, the resistance goes up as well. The New York Times reported that the Cockroach People's Party social media accounts ended up in some cases eclipsing the social media presence of India's established parties. The CJP Instagram page amassed more than 24 million followers, more than twice that of BJP. Millions of followers on social media do not guarantee social change, but in this era, one can be a means to achieving the other. It's fine to fight for democracy against the power of ice in a more abstract way and to tackle the biggest problems that we have. But in addition to connecting to national groups, look for something specific, a change you can demand in your town or your state, something you actually care about. I think we succeeded because we simple loved life more than them generally. Those guys were the preachers of the death. If it matters to you, you'll be more convincing talking to others about it and it has a better chance of mattering to them. We were a group of fans of life and this is why we succeed. And if you make a specific demand about it, you can open doors to connecting with others who are making similar or related demands. You never know what will trigger the next Cockroach Party victory or Flamingo revolution, or what might come after that. Thanks for listening to Next comes what. Please share this with one person who's looking for ways to survive this message to support this podcast, please become a paid subscriber@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving NextComes what a five star review where you get your podcasts and that's it.