← Next Comes What
Next Comes What
Do the Right Thing — Ukraine, Russia & How to Push Back
00:37:41
Russia and America have more in common than their betrayal of Kyiv, and we need to push back on this shift. Read the post that inspired this episode: Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes What: This...
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- [00:00]
Andrea Pitzer
You're listening to. Next comes what from Degenerate Art. This is Andrea Pitzit. Be sure to stay to the end for concrete things that you can do. And subscribe@Andreapitzer.com so that this podcast can remain free for everyone. Today I want to talk about what happened in the US Last week when Donald Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
- [00:27]
Unnamed Contributor
You're right now, not in a very good position. You've allowed yourself to be in a very bad position and he happens to be right about it. From the very beginning of the war. You're not in a good position. You don't have the cards right now with us, you start having cards.
- [00:41]
Andrea Pitzer
I want to explain why that says as much about the American domestic situation as it does the grueling, tragic plight of Ukraine. Russia has amassed 100,000 troops near its borders with Ukraine, leading to grave international concern and to several European countries reinforcing NATO's military presence in Eastern Europe. President Putin has demanded that Ukraine be stopped from ever joining NATO. When Russian tanks invaded Ukraine three years ago, I was asleep in a friend's guest room in Moscow, Ukraine.
- [01:16]
Unnamed Contributor
Woke to explosions around the capital, Kiev. It was the same across the country. These pictures from Kharkiv in the east, enormous blasts. Also in the city of Dnipro.
- [01:31]
Andrea Pitzer
I had just visited another friend in St. Petersburg, doing research for a book on a long ago Arctic voyage that had ended in disaster. I had headed to Russia to finish that research because I believed that the invasion was imminent and I thought that Putin would spend the week after the Olympics ended bombing Ukraine before sending tanks across the border.
- [01:57]
Unnamed Contributor
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, says he doesn't want a war in Ukraine and is willing to negotiate an end to the crisis. A crisis, mind you, he's created.
- [02:08]
Andrea Pitzer
Unable to prevent the war myself, I wanted to finish research for the book I'd worked on for a year already and to say goodbye to friends who had welcomed me into their homes and helped me on multiple projects, people I thought I might never see again.
- [02:33]
Unnamed Contributor
The International Criminal Court is investigating crimes committed in Ukraine and may ultimately decide who to charge. But the evidence in Bucha is clear. Russian commanders and soldiers from at least one military unit killed civilians for weeks, assuming or perhaps hoping that no one was watching.
- [03:05]
Andrea Pitzer
Those of you who've been tuning in to Next comes what? For a while you'll know that we've talked about Russia before. In the very first episode that we did, a very long episode, how to survive this mess. We talked about Putin's first run as president and then he left the office and came back and what that meant for Russia. I was at that point suspecting that we could expect a similar pattern, and I think that is what we're seeing now. And also in the episode America Goes Rogue, I talked about that in some detail with former interrogator from Guantanamo, who was the first person to tell me about his belief that America in fact had already gone rogue and was in a great deal of danger of going much further. And here we are today.
- [03:57]
Unnamed Contributor
Have you said thank you once? No, in this entire meeting, have you said thank you?
- [04:02]
Andrea Pitzer
I had traveled to Russia for the first time in 2011 in the midst of reporting my first book about Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov.
- [04:13]
Unnamed Contributor
Why do you live in hotels? Simplifies personal matters, eliminates the nuisance of private ownership, confirms me in my favorite.
- [04:23]
Andrea Pitzer
Habit, the habit of freedom. During the decade that followed, I'd sailed on two expeditions high in the Russian Arctic. When I first went in 2011, the country had been less on edge, with Putin still in control, but out of the presidency for a little bit longer.
- [04:41]
Unnamed Contributor
Vladimir Putin says he's ready to return to the Russian presidency after being proposed for the job by current head of state Dmitry Medvedev.
- [04:52]
Andrea Pitzer
It was his return to that office in 2012 that would unleash even worse demons on his country and on other countries.
- [05:00]
Unnamed Contributor
This was a clear message that it's.
- [05:02]
Andrea Pitzer
Over, you've had your fun, it's done, it's over, the election's over, I'm the President.
- [05:08]
Unnamed Contributor
You are not toppling me. I am the law.
- [05:11]
Andrea Pitzer
I was aware of his actions, but experienced only small glimpses of the police state in action. During my visits, people built in extra time on planned events or getting permits in order to accommodate the officials who would inevitably throw their weight around threateningly or people who would need to be placated. Occasionally, someone with whom I got along well would suddenly be put in the position of bullying me on orders from a superior at an airport. I was once taken into a separate room by security forces and questioned, but only for moments, over a matter that was quickly resolved. Of course, after Brittney Griner's arrest, I thought of that moment many, many times.
- [05:56]
Unnamed Contributor
ABC News has learned that WNBA player and two time USA gold medalist Brittney Griner is detained in Russia for allegedly having vape cartridges.
- [06:04]
Andrea Pitzer
Russia's main state run news channel is now showing this, but even so, the threat of worse things hung over everyday life there.
- [06:17]
Unnamed Contributor
They started enacting searches, arrests, detentions, actions against opposition leaders persecution in the mass media. And they launched individual persecution that applied to tens of hundreds, maybe thousands of people in the country.
- [06:33]
Andrea Pitzer
It felt to me like this took a tremendous amount of energy from Russians. One Moscow acquaintance joked about how even those who would say that everything in Russia was perfectly fine knew very well how impossible it would be to stand on a crate and read Russia's own constitution aloud on the street corner without being arrested.
- [06:56]
Unnamed Contributor
Independent journalists, anti corruption campaigners, opposition activists, opposition leaders, many people have died, some in strange and unexplained deaths, others in just straight out assassinations.
- [07:08]
Andrea Pitzer
While some of my Russian friends kept well informed, others didn't have much idea what was happening in the world. People had to make an effort to know things. And by slowly suffocating independent media, Putin made that harder and harder.
- [07:26]
Unnamed Contributor
Most of Russia's homegrown free media has now been silenced. Most Western outlets have stopped reporting from Russia. This comes after that country enacted a new law that promises punishment of up to 15 years in prison for frankly reporting the truth about Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
- [07:43]
Andrea Pitzer
They didn't know anything that they didn't make an effort to know. And even then it could be hard to pin down reality because there was so much garbage clogging the information arteries of the nation.
- [07:55]
Unnamed Contributor
You know, Putin has been in power for 22 years. One of the things he's worked on very much is making sure that there are no independent poles of power in the government. Basically everyone who has power in the Russian state owes that power to Putin.
- [08:12]
Andrea Pitzer
A low grade corruption permeated everything. Extremely sophisticated people could sometimes spout conspiracy theories out of the blue. Bizarre ideas about secret machinations sat alongside facts and even incorporated them occasionally.
- [08:29]
Unnamed Contributor
I want to play you a clip of a segment that aired on Russian state controlled TV station NTV over the weekend. It was a segment about the completely false conspiracy theory that there are U.S. funded biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine. Part of the Russian network's evidence for the existence of these weapons labs were clips from Fox News with US elected officials like the Republican Senator Ron Johnson and the former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard claiming that the US hasn't been telling the full truth about this issue. Here's another Russian TV segment from this weekend where a different Russian TV network just played a huge chunk of Tucker Carlson's Fox News show translated into Russian.
- [09:14]
Andrea Pitzer
For the subset of friends and acquaintances who had been captured by them, it was often impossible to unravel the knot into which their thinking had been tied.
- [09:25]
Unnamed Contributor
Actually, when I was younger I wanted to go to usa, but I think I do not want to go there right now. But after the elections, Trump won. I really like that. I really like the ideas that the.
- [09:35]
Andrea Pitzer
Term has these on my last trip to Russia in February 2022, I had told friends explicitly that I was coming to see them, but that I would have to leave within a few days after the Olympics ended. I explained that I would need to leave before the invasion began. And one or two of the people I know well had serious worries, too, but most were confident that there was just nothing to worry about. Vladimir Putin has always denied invading eastern Ukraine since the start of the conflict in 2014. He also claimed that the buildup of troops along all accessible borders with Ukraine this year were simply military exercises right up to the moment of invasion. One Moscow friend, like a very dear person, mocked me for days, saying, you have been watching too much US News. And though my guess about the timing of the invasion was a few days off, in fact, of course the invasion did happen. Residents were woken by the sound of helicopters and bombings. They were not told that an offensive was coming. I woke up in Moscow to the sound of a television showing tanks crossing the border. It was a very grim morning. And because Ukraine had been part of the Soviet Union for much of the 20th century, several of my Russian friends and acquaintances also had Ukrainian grandparents or cousins. And whatever illusions they'd managed to keep about their country, they were seeing them smashed in real time.
- [11:18]
Unnamed Contributor
The thing I see is not just narcissism, which has always been there with Putin, but a growing sense of messianic purpose that he's been sent by God, by history.
- [11:31]
Andrea Pitzer
I was thinking that day of the Ukrainian whale scientists that these Russians had introduced me to. Her hometown of Kharkiv lay just 15 miles across the border with Russia. I didn't know it yet, but she had left her Moscow apartment and had gone back to see her mother the day before. I would soon learn that she was in Kharkiv with only a backpack, with no way or intention of returning her apartment, her belongings, her friends position, and work as a global expert on whales. All of it had been erased overnight.
- [12:09]
Unnamed Contributor
I think the polls show that something like half of Russians trust state tv, and half is a lot. About half is less than it was eight years ago during the annexation of Crimea. And I mean, you know, if you look at what has happened in those last eight years, in 2014, when the Ukraine crisis began, when Putin annexed Crimea, there was real, genuine jubilation in the streets and among Russians, Even people who were critical of Putin were very positive about that. In many cases, that's not happening right now.
- [12:45]
Andrea Pitzer
As distressed as my friends were to find their country incontrovertibly the aggressor responsible for an invasion causing untold harm against another country, as horrific a price in lives of his own people that Putin had thrown into the maw of war, in the end, it's Ukraine that has paid the biggest price for all this, whose very existence is at stake. Now, over time, none of my friends but some acquaintances held to the view that this escalation and invasion were the fault of the us. Friends in Estonia, in parts of Europe or in the U.S. told me, on the other hand, that Russians were simply brutes and monsters and that what we were seeing was just the core Russian character laid bare.
- [13:44]
Unnamed Contributor
The Russians have a strain of brutality which comes from centuries of brutality, Mongol invasions, and almost in a sense, an approach to civilized, you know, any form of warfare which demands, requires, in their view, mass strength, but utterly merciless. Merciless.
- [14:15]
Andrea Pitzer
Now, these beliefs are similar to those that I encountered often while writing my history of concentration camps. One long night. Each time a party or a government wanted to create camps for the mass detention without any real trial of civilians based on identity, this was the argument they used. They would say, well, sure, those other camps in other countries had been bad, but this particular group in our country is so dangerous that these kinds of measures are required. This group of people are truly subhuman and deserving of removal from society. When I was writing this book, my brother said, it must be really depressing to realize this is just where humanity goes. This is just who we are as a species. And it's like, no, no, no. I said, did you read my book? In the case of my research, those authoritarian voices and propagandists had been condemning those who would be victims in the camps. Because the answer is, actually, it takes a lot of training. It takes a lot of propaganda. It takes years of work to get people to accept it and to maintain those systems. When Nazis rolled into France, they tried to make a mini Kristallnacht in France. And there's these amazing letters where they're like, the French seem to hate the Jews, but they don't tolerate. Like, they won't kind of get on board with, like, doing really, really bad things to them. And they. It was like, we're really baffled. But if you flip the tables and you say it about aggressors, it still confirms the idea of inherent badness in a people, and it leaves open the possibility of it being true about some group or other, those who could be victims in a different scenario, it still lets you put people in camps. That hypothesis, that idea that there's an inherently bad group of people, it's either true or it's not. And across more than a century of camps I studied, it was never true, not once. Whole collectives of people, whether they're divided along racial or ethnic, political or religious lines, they're people with the same capacity for doing evil or doing better. Culture can encourage aspects of behavior. Institutions definitely can prod people toward rapaciousness or toward restraint. But humans are humans. What's more, believing Russians are inherently bad leads to a false kind of comfort that some fundamental difference exists between us and them. But I believe that delusion of difference keeps us from seeing the ways that we ourselves are capable of just the same kind of violence. President Trump, if the cartels are now.
- [17:13]
Unnamed Contributor
Going to be seen as foreign terror.
- [17:15]
Andrea Pitzer
Organizations, would you think about order U.S. special Forces into Mexico to take them out?
- [17:21]
Unnamed Contributor
Could happen. Stranger things have happened.
- [17:26]
Andrea Pitzer
Which brings me back to Zelenskyy, Trump and Vance at the White House last week.
- [17:31]
Unnamed Contributor
The premise was that we are working towards a peace arrangement between Russia and Ukraine. But thus far, all we have done is make concessions to Russia. That's all we've done. And then the second thing we've done now is we brought the Ukrainian president to the White House and tried to humiliate him.
- [17:51]
Andrea Pitzer
Trump and J.D. vance broke with past foreign policy to belittle and taunt Volodymyr Zelensky. The event was ostensibly a meeting of heads of state, of leaders who are peers, but it was clear that what was intended by the current elected officials of the US Government was a ritualized hazing of someone with lesser power, a public humiliation of a country in need.
- [18:17]
Unnamed Contributor
Now, the main ways Russia engages with us is by stealing our technology and by hacking into our infrastructure. The Russian economy is smaller than Canada's, but we are nevertheless going to trade 80 years of alliance with reliable partners that are 15, 16, 17 times bigger than Russia as an economy for an alliance with Russia. There is no way that that is a show of strength in any other than perhaps some kind of distant psychological way that I'm afraid I can't really understand.
- [18:46]
Andrea Pitzer
Belittling Zelensky did two things. It reinforced the current Republican idea of power as entirely zero sum, the idea that if I take something from you, it makes me more powerful. An idea that is often not true. It also serves Trump's drive to realign US Foreign policy in A way better suited for his own personal grifts. And for those of Elon Musk.
- [19:18]
Unnamed Contributor
You know, I'm a bought asset of Putin. I'm like, he can't afford me. Yeah, I think you're worth more than Russia.
- [19:27]
Andrea Pitzer
Think about it. The idea of Ukraine as the aggressor in this war isn't one that the majority of Republicans now serving Trump actually believe. We know this from the extensive footage of people like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham.
- [19:50]
Unnamed Contributor
We're on the verge of having someone take over the conservative movement and the Republican Party who's a con artist. He's out there telling people that he's fighting. He's going to. You know, his target audience is working Americans who are really struggling over the last few years in this economy. But he has spent a career sticking.
- [20:06]
Andrea Pitzer
It to working Americans, people now allied with him who have not only said in the past that Trump is a grifter and a danger to the country, but who have also said in recent years how critical defending Ukraine is to global security.
- [20:22]
Unnamed Contributor
These are people that are basically saying, we refuse to be Putin's slaves, we refuse to live under tyranny, and we're prepared to give our life and die.
- [20:33]
Andrea Pitzer
Their willingness to go along with Trump today is just a sign of moral bankruptcy. Thank you so much, Secretary Rubio, for being here.
- [20:40]
Unnamed Contributor
We just heard from.
- [20:41]
Andrea Pitzer
From President Zelensky. He said he does not think that he owes President Trump an apology for what happened inside the Oval Office today. Do you feel otherwise?
- [20:50]
Unnamed Contributor
I do.
- [20:51]
Andrea Pitzer
To say they were born evil is to excuse them. They're choosing to do these criminal acts for the advantages of the moment. We need to create a system that makes those choices less possible and punishes them more consistently. We also need to create a system in which it's harder for the kind of disinformation that allows what is known as competitive authoritarianism to thrive. The US Is now far more like Russia than we were when I first visited in 2011.
- [21:30]
Unnamed Contributor
Jamie Dimon's been talking to the president, JP Morgan, for weeks. He used to be somewhat of a critic. And then you see Elon Musk, who had walked off the President's Business Council after what he thought was a controversy in Charlottesville. He is now firmly on board. And those two are bros. It seems now he's working for him. The latest one to come aboard is Jeff Bezos of Amazon, saying nice things yesterday. Yeah, he said he was optimistic about.
- [21:55]
Andrea Pitzer
Working with a calmer Trump and he can help him reduce regulation. But we've long been on a similar trajectory. We've had four decades of capitalism on steroids, promoting business interests over people and expanding income inequality, pauperizing whole sections of the population and destroying faith in government.
- [22:16]
Unnamed Contributor
Awed by the possibilities of progress and the promise of limitless growth, our political leaders have allowed corporate power to go unchecked for decades. This didn't just happen. Our courts have ruled that corporations should be treated like people, while everyday people should be increasingly treated like things.
- [22:37]
Andrea Pitzer
We have a super rich class of people that did not exist before in the way they do now, and they seem to live outside legal accountability.
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Unnamed Contributor
In the richest nation in the history of the world, poverty has become an epidemic as the fourth leading cause of death. 800 people a day dying from poverty and low wages, 250,000 or more a year.
- [22:59]
Andrea Pitzer
We have disinformation on a massive scale that promotes the idea nothing can be done, that it's better to lie low and keep from provoking anything that might disrupt your job or trigger actual violence against you.
- [23:13]
Unnamed Contributor
His name is Peter Schwartz, and a jury convicted him of assaulting police officers on January 6th. That's him with pepper spray and a baton.
- [23:22]
Andrea Pitzer
He found an opportunity to go and.
- [23:26]
Unnamed Contributor
Be violent on January 6th. Yes. Holton, a factory worker who doesn't want to reveal where she's living, dated Schwartz back in 2019. That's when she says Schwartz beat her.
- [23:40]
Andrea Pitzer
That man thrives on violence. These are the kinds of things that allow figures like Trump to come to power and despots like Putin to arrange better ways to keep it. While Trump has admired Putin for a long time, when I went to Russia.
- [23:57]
Unnamed Contributor
With the Miss Universe pageant, he contacted me and was so nice. And, you know, I mean, the Russian people were so fantastic to us. I just say this. They are doing. They're outsmarting us at many turns, as we all understand. I mean, their leaders are, whether you call them smarter or more cunning or whatever, but they're outsmarting us. If you look at Syria and other places, they're outsmarting us.
- [24:21]
Andrea Pitzer
And Putin has certainly attempted to interfere here in the U.S. russia, if you're.
- [24:25]
Unnamed Contributor
Listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if that happens. That'll be next.
- [24:40]
Andrea Pitzer
Trump didn't need Putin's encouragement to aspire to running a modern, brutal mafia state.
- [24:46]
Unnamed Contributor
I went in yesterday and there was a television screen and I said, this is genius. Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine, of Ukraine. Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that's wonderful. So Putin is now saying it's independent. A large section of Ukraine. I said, how smart is that? And he's going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That's the strongest peace force. We could use that on our southern border.
- [25:16]
Andrea Pitzer
When you cook the same ingredients up, you end up with a similar dish. And now we're seeing attempts to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to smash neutral evaluation of scientific discoveries and medical devices to demolish the weather service. The very definition of critical public knowledge that establishes our common reality. There's a reason the Putin fans in Russia are cheering on what happened in the Oval Office on Friday. Trump and Elon Musk don't need Putin to tell them what to do. They already want the same things. They're trying to create the same kind of society, one that is too ignorant to see clearly what's happening in time to stop it, and one that's so afraid that they will believe there's no point in even trying. I've traveled widely enough in Russia that I've met people in a lot of different cities, in a lot of different settings. Some of them strangers, some friends or acquaintances of friends. Many of them spoke to me in ways that showed me how little they knew about current events. Some of them even talked about how they'd cut themselves off from following politics of any kind because it was a waste of time. I met a propagandist who had relocated from North America to Russia for a nice paycheck, who seemed to believe the lies she spouted for Russian media. I met people who were not over 60 and not mentally disabled, who praised Stalin and made complex arguments for his accomplishments as a great leader.
- [26:56]
Unnamed Contributor
The largest human catastrophe of Stalinism was the famine of 1930-1933, in which more than 5 million people starved.
- [27:05]
Andrea Pitzer
Of those who starved, the 3.3 million.
- [27:08]
Unnamed Contributor
Or so inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine who died in 1932 and 1933 were victims of a deliberate killing policy related to nationality.
- [27:17]
Andrea Pitzer
Others outline international conspiracy theories that made no sense to me, even though some of them used information from familiar Fox News stories to try to prove their point. I met ardent defenders of Putin who believed that a strong leader, above all, guaranteed a steadiness absolutely necessary to Russia and missing in the US I even heard from some after the invasion who claimed that, given the cabal threatening the country and that was dedicated to Russia's destruction, Putin had no choice but to invade Ukraine again. These are not my friends, but they're people in larger circles that I spoke with. And weirdly enough, seeing it all at a remove outside my own culture has helped me to accept my own acquaintances and relatives who have been captured in many of the same ways.
- [28:13]
Unnamed Contributor
And I think we should probably take the side of Russia if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine. Has Putin ever called me a racist?
- [28:19]
Andrea Pitzer
It's one thing to conclude after historical research into concentration camps that people are people and vulnerable to propaganda and social pressure and weak institutions that fail to protect society from the worst public figures. I don't think humans naturally just do this. I think they have to be coached into it. It's entirely another thing to see it in action in real time abroad and then in my own country. Do you love illegal aliens more than you love your fellow countrymen?
- [28:51]
Unnamed Contributor
I love all the residents of the city and county.
- [28:53]
Andrea Pitzer
Now Trump is doing his level best to ally us with Russia. Now the bad guys are us. To be clear, I'm not invoking any kind of superior knowledge or magical insight here. Anybody who knows even a little domestic or international history could easily list ways in which the US has been the bad guy in different ways for centuries. From Native American genocide to slavery and Jim Crow, to covert operations in Central and South America in the second half of the 20th century, to unquestioning delivery of weapons to the Israeli government as it killed countless civilians in Gaza, the United States has had a hand in monstrous wrongs as long as it's existed. We have to address those wrongs too. And when the country takes a step to introduce new and significant harms, it's important to call attention to it and where possible, to stop it.
- [30:01]
Unnamed Contributor
A deal which is a result of being intimidated and the precedent of being publicly humiliated can't be in the interest not only of the President, but of the country. Of course President Zelensky should be open to peace process led by the United States. But if we are leading it by openly humiliating him, that is a bad sign which a wise leader can't fail to recognize.
- [30:25]
Andrea Pitzer
Last week's betrayal of Ukraine and the current administration's attempt to destroy long standing US European alliances fall into this category now. What does this all mean going forward and what can we do about it? First, at the heart of all this is that the most vulnerable people are the ones who pay the price in this scenario. Ukrainians have lost so much already. Homes, safety and most horrifically, tens of thousands of lives, including both civilians and.
- [30:58]
Unnamed Contributor
Soldiers in the areas that Russia has occupied. Churches have been closed, evangelicals persecuted for their faith. Civilians have been Torn, tortured, killed and tossed into mass graves. Children have been kidnapped, at least 20,000 and are being brainwashed to forget who they are and adopt a Russian identity where they now live.
- [31:27]
Andrea Pitzer
It's critical to balance two dire needs, both of which we can do something about. The first is that we need to continue to support Ukraine, both to do what is still possible to protect the country as the war there continues to unfold and to foil the current government's attempts to make the situation worse. The second is to take responsibility domestically for our own country and to stop politicians who have become both a domestic and an international threat. In terms of helping Ukraine, showing public support is simple. There's some easy things to do. Fly a Ukrainian flag. Show up at demonstrations that have happened all around the country supporting Ukrainians, as happened in the wake of Friday's debacle. I spoke to Ukrainians who saw how J.D. vance was treated in Vermont on his ski trip and celebrated everyday American's rejection of the Vice President's tantrum in the White House.
- [32:25]
Unnamed Contributor
This protest is just the latest in a series of rallies taking place across.
- [32:29]
Andrea Pitzer
The state over the last two days.
- [32:31]
Unnamed Contributor
Demonstrators are hoping to draw attention to decisions made by the Trump administration, including.
- [32:36]
Andrea Pitzer
The recent exchange between Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
- [32:41]
Unnamed Contributor
This is Vermont. I mean, you don't hate, doesn't have a home here.
- [32:44]
Andrea Pitzer
This provides moral support. You can call your governor, your representative or your senator, whether they are Republicans or Democrats. Many Republicans are very vulnerable on this front. Whatever their party affiliation, if they support Ukraine, praise them for it.
- [33:00]
Unnamed Contributor
The Ukrainian people want this peace because that's best for them as the entire globe. But just like their Baltic friends before them, Ukrainians will never concede their sovereignty and they will never give up on their countrymen who are currently under brutal occupation. The question is, what will make KGB Putin give up his imperial dreams of reestablishing the Soviet empire?
- [33:39]
Andrea Pitzer
If they don't, tell them that they need to. And you expect them to. Fourteen governors came out in support of Ukraine after the Oval Office incident. So in the case of your governors, you can ask what state initiatives they will spearhead to offer. What support is still possible to extend Despite Trump's actions, The Trump administration confirms.
- [33:59]
Unnamed Contributor
It has stopped intelligence sharing with Kyiv. Now this suspension follows the White House's decision to also put a pause on military aid to the war torn country.
- [34:09]
Andrea Pitzer
For now at least, you can still donate to a wide range of relief and supply efforts in Ukraine. I would encourage people to give now, while it is still straightforward and legal to do so now. The other half of what has to be done is harder. As I've mentioned before on the podcast, we have to change the kind of ignorance we have here. A direct parallel to the disinformation that I saw in Russia. During his campaign, candidate Trump saw massive untapped potential to reach young male voters by appearing on podcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience.
- [34:44]
Unnamed Contributor
These are just general men's interests, sports, comedy, things like this, looking at pictures of attractive women. But if you dig a bit deeper into some of these communities, there are critiques about modernity, women's liberation, women joining the workforce.
- [34:58]
Andrea Pitzer
Citarella has been researching and tracking how online spaces, including the so called manosphere, can shape young people's political beliefs. That will require new information networks that are more effective than legacy journalism is right now. We've seen a lot of good independent outlets making a start of it. We need a bigger vision to help tie that together. But still you can be a part of it in small ways by supporting what is working.
- [35:24]
Unnamed Contributor
From New York to Texas, activists are urging boycotts while Tesla faces vandalism and plummeting stock prices. Here's more from across the country. It ain't funny. President Musk is stealing your money. A storm of protests swept across the US On Saturday.
- [35:49]
Andrea Pitzer
Making this change will also require the public and politicians to put forth a new vision that stands not for mealy mouthed accommodations to hatred and resentment that Trump takes advantage of, but instead offers a real future and better lives for all Americans together. It's critical that this happens sooner than later, before the economy and democratic institutions are further stripped for parts, and before the more violent aspects of a police state have time to grow even larger in the vacuum created by the loss of our best institution.
- [36:25]
Unnamed Contributor
Our public health system in the United States is incredibly fragile. For example, a lot of people don't realize that 90% of funding to local and state public health departments come directly from the cdc. So say we cut for example, the center of injury, which is actually on the chopping block right now in the congressional budget. That means states won't get funding for the opioid crisis, which means lack of education or resources. And we just got that epidemic started to decrease again.
- [36:56]
Andrea Pitzer
So we have a lot to do, but we are capable of it. And unlike so many countries that have fallen to authoritarianism, for now we have the freedom and the means to act. Every action matters. So pick one thing and do it. That's it.
- [37:20]
Unnamed Contributor
Thanks for listening to Next comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking.
- [37:23]
Andrea Pitzer
For ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, Please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.