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Next Comes What
How to Defy a Death Cult
00:34:23
Trump's tariff mayhem fits a larger pattern. Death and destruction are the only things he's good at. Read the post that inspired this episode: Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes What: Do you have a...
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Andrea Pitzer
You're listening to Next comes what from Degenerate Art. This is Andrea Pitzer. Each week we'll look at one aspect of authoritarianism to figure out how we got where we are and how to fight back. Everyone's been very busy these days. Held hostage at gunpoint markets were forced to jump out of a plane at 42,000ft and go skydiving. Looming counterterroriffs bode badly, while intermittent finance rumors spark intermittent rebounds and flickers of hope that some solution will appear to prevent a global trade war. And don't let them keep telling you that this is a tax on our people. I hate that. You know, they say it's a tax. No. Meanwhile, millions of people showed up at protests around the country last weekend. We need mass mobilization in terms of what's happening in this country right now. People need to rise up and make sure that what's happening is not okay and that we're going to defend our democracy and we're going to defend our neighbors. Today I want to talk about where we're at, some precursors to this moment, and why. I think we're approaching a death cult kind of situation. Though there are definitely actions we can take to derail further momentum in that direction. First, let's start. Start with the hands off protests. Last weekend, Nationwide, more than 1400 protests took place from coast to coast, including Hawaii and Alaska, with millions of attendees showing up. I went down myself to check out the show on the National Mall. And on my way to the Washington Monument on Saturday, I ran into somebody I trained with back when I was teaching karate. If you end up going to a lot of protests, you'll inevitably start running into people you know. But I also met new people in the shadow of the country's most recognizable monument. Energetic masses came with signs, chants. I'm here because we all have to stand up for our rights and to defend against what this administration is doing. Hearing from prominent politicians who say they're frustrated with the new presidential administration, and if anybody was slow to wake up to this authoritarian takeover, nobody's sleeping now. And nothing is going to stop the forces of democracy and freedom in America. A man named Will told me, I am here because I'm dismayed with the way my government is treating people when it's destroying institutions that support people. I met a mother and a daughter originally from Massachusetts who shared a birthday, and it happened to be the day of the protest. The mother explained that she had come to the protest because of the video of the lady from Tufts that was abducted by those masked men and the assault on the law, the terrorists, the lies. The daughter pointed to her mother, saying her grandfather fought in the resistance in France and went to costume concentration camp and risked the lives of his whole family. And by the time it affects you, it's. It's too A circle of people marched around the monument itself while another set of demonstrators with signs circled the larger ring hundreds of feet away from the base of the monument. Tens of thousands more scattered along the Mall nearby, playing songs and raising call and response chants from the crowd. I'm here from Atlanta, okay? Yeah. And I believe that everything starts with these people right here. That's what we vote for, to put in to protect our rights. When they don't protect our rights, we have what's going on now that's happening to us. Ran into Pikachu, too. I knew he'd had a very dramatic role in Turkish protests recently, but then I wondered what he was really doing in D.C. that day. So I asked whether he just liked to show up places and be Pikachu or if he had come out to protest, protest, protest. A voice came from somewhere deep inside the head. As a woman, we see our rights floating away like dandelion fluff on the wind. But we are here whether you want to acknowledge it or not. I've been to a lot of events on the Mall, and my spidey sense of crowd counting on the scene fine tuned with opinions from others there that day was that probably more than 100,000 people showed up, but definitely less than 200,000. And where does that fall on my 40 plus years of national Mall going crowd spectrum? This was far beyond the number of people who had shown up in arenas and on the street for Inauguration Day earlier this year after outdoor events were canceled due to the cold. Yet it was far less than any I'd seen at a prior inauguration. And it was tremendously less than had shown up for the Women's March in 2017, which was so crowded it triggered countless medical events over more than a mile of terrain because the lack of room to move at points meant there was not even enough room to breathe properly. In Washington, the crowd was so big, plans to march near the White House had to be canceled by organizers, though they headed that way regardless. It was mayhem, but people who came on Saturday were fired up with signs about seeing better cabinets at IKEA than we have in the White House now and denouncing the Turd Reich, a lot of the ones that have become common lately. Still, I did wonder where some of the crowd I was accustomed to seeing at big events in D.C. had gone instead. And an answer came soon after I returned home and saw what was happening around the country. From California to Colorado, in Chicago and New York City, the crowds at hands off rallies had countless messages, but one shared mission to protest the policies of President Trump. It hurts a lot to watch what's happening to the country. The people who normally would have made their way to the District, I suspect, had stayed home to cause good trouble. Kaiser, West Virginia managed to get out dozens of people in deep Trump country, as did Maine, Montana and Texas. It was a great showing overall, with total estimates in the universe of 3 million demonstrators. And my guess is that in time those numbers will need to triple or quadruple and be coupled with more marches and demands for very specific concessions. The country needs to move quickly to build that kind of participation, and this is a big step in doing that, and we need to keep it going. It has to be constant. And remember what I said last week. Research seems to show that protests out in Trump country, the smaller, whiter and less educated the county the better, disproportionately has effects in winning people over, even on a strongly polarized issue. And we have plenty of actions to take issue with the administration over. On Friday, I talked about the role of malicious incompetence in the administration, from Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was sent to El Salvador by mistake, to the tariffs that have been an obsession of Trump's since the 1980s, which are now threatening to tank the economy. They laugh at us behind our backs. They laugh at us because of our own stupidity. There are countless more examples, like the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health Lab in Morgantown, West Virginia, whose research animals had to be mass euthanized shortly after they'd arrived as a shipment simply because after massive layoffs there would be no veterinarian to check on them. Humans aren't faring much better under Trump. The US Saw its second measles death this year, a school age child who was hospitalized in Lubbock, Texas and never recovered. Not content with abetting the first two measles deaths in 10 years in the U.S. rFK Jr. Is also looking at eliminating fluoride from the U.S. water supply. The mineral has been widely added to water in the US since the 1940s, preventing cavities, reducing oral health disparities and saving money for everyone. Though Republican representatives deny there will be any cuts to Social Security, its site has gone down repeatedly in worsening spirals for most of a day at one point, offices are being closed and firing more than 7,000 workers at Social Security Administration has been deemed inadequate, so layoffs of thousands more are currently planned. Elon Musk and his team want to rebuild the Social Security Administration's base code that's written in a computing language from the early 1960s. Something goes back to the 1950s to a base code that is more modern now, according to a new piece in Wired magazine. That planned source code migration, especially in the very tight time frame that Doge advisors are looking at, could at minimum, create some uncertainty and possibly tamper with the benefits received by millions who rely on Social Security. But the two biggest elephants among the herd of them in the room right now are the massive damage to global economy threatened by Trump's frivolously calculated enormous tariffs, and the plans to massively expand detention facilities targeting undocumented US Residents. In the first instance, the second Trump administration has enough momentum and authority to destroy the current global financial system. And in the second, they're looking to create a model that will mean the existence of facilities nationwide that dwarf our existing capacities for immigrant detention. We seem to be on the cusp of a death culture that's focused primarily on destruction. It seems to me that we have to acknowledge that the administration isn't likely to be able to stop itself. Whatever the imaginary line that people cross before they're trapped in a cult when they're unable to exit it, the Trump administration has passed that line. The people the president has appointed to his cabinet, the advisors he surrounded himself with, are looking at sunk costs and not making moves to turn back unless they can extract some kind of massive grift out of it without being bribed to. Trump is likewise incapable of stopping himself. He's certainly morally and legally responsible for what happens, but he's also only doing what he's done before, destroying business after business in the 34 years since his first bankruptcy. There's no reason to expect he's capable of doing much differently. Trump destroys functioning things, grifts from them where he can, and then lies about it. He ran on exactly the policies he's undertaking, dismantling government, imposing tariffs, and punishing the people he's portrayed as enemies. And while his actions are still shocking, they're not surprising, exactly. Any distress from his own camp comes only from people who wore blinders and let themselves see only slivers of his public Persona. If this is Biden, and he did some sort of scheme like this, a test scheme, what do you wanted? Tariffs. And he absolutely tanked the stock market, he would be getting crucified. In front of the line would be Trump. Some voters who pulled the lever for him to persecute minorities they disliked and along with CEOs who believed he would only act in their interests, are now realizing he has no interest in them at all. It is a tax paid for by Americans. So this is a massive tax increase on American consumers. The Washington Post reported this week that Elon Musk himself, whom some have portrayed as dictating policy to Trump I hate that. Has been unable to convince Trump himself to reverse tariffs that have been imposed recently. You know, they say it's a tax. No, often much of it is paid and instead he's been relegated to insulting Trump's point. Person on trade Peter Navarro America has a history of death cults in terms of a cult like Celebration of Death, think about lynching parties in early 20th century America that included picnics and souvenir postcards made of the murder. A willingness to do harm to outsiders and people of color at home and abroad has unfortunately been an American tradition. In her book the New Jim Crow, legal scholar, civil rights lawyer and advocate Michelle Alexander details the relationship between race and continued legal discrimination in the form of mass incarceration. Alexander writes, like Jim Crow and slavery, mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race. But another tradition Post World War II was a trade that the country made, providing material support, technology and food to a lot of places in exchange for its dominant position in the world. Sometimes these things were prizes for political competition with the Soviet Union while we were seeking influence. At other times they were closer to outright gifts, though at various points they came with economic strings attached and were sometimes structured to foster ongoing dependence in ways that were hard to shake over time. Nevertheless, they helped keep the US in its superpower role and help keep people alive. One billion children immunized 2.2 billion malaria cases prevented 26 million lives saved from AIDS. For 60 years, USAID, America's foreign assistance agency, has fed the hungry and prevented disease worldwide. 40% of total global humanitarian aid came from the US with 2/3 of that coming from USAID. Now the Trump administration is ending almost all that I mentioned last week that tens of thousands have already died from cutting off various USAID programs for those living with HIV or countries fighting chronic diseases. Yesterday, the White House announced it was ending American support for the United Nations World Food program, which feeds millions. 41% of that food was sourced directly from American farmers who were paid about $2 billion annually. $2 billion bought everything from Iowa soybean oil to Oklahoma wheat, Kansas lentils, produce from Virginia and Georgia peanut products. But by mid February, just days after the cuts began, $489 million worth of food assistance and over 500,000 metric tons of American grown food already paid for by USAID remained stranded in ports or in transit, with a significant portion at risk of spoiling. This is another step in Trump's embrace of the death cult. But today, in this jolly theme of thinking about death cults, I want to consider the kind that involve self immolation of a whole society, small or large. From the history of concentration camps I wrote, the example of the Khmer Rouge is the one that keeps coming to mind. For me, it was largely ideology that drove the decisions of the new government. Pol Pot believed in a kind of self sufficient agrarian socialism in the same style as his sponsor Mao Zedong, and he was hell bent on making it happen. A revolutionary group that seized power in Cambodia in the 1970s. One of the first things that the Khmer Rouge did was empty the cities of Cambodia, sending the urban population into the countryside to work on collective farms. When they reached these farms, individuals were told to write a short essay about themselves, their life, what they believed and what they had done before the Khmer Rouge came to power. The Khmer Rouge committed themselves to a radical and complete restructuring of Cambodian society to forcibly return people to manual labor and subsistence agriculture. A tiny minority with technical skills were sent back to the cities for industrial work. Those who were considered elites or had been involved in the previous governments were often immediately killed or sent to labor camps. They did it in such a way that the government sparked a genocide of its own people through violence and starvation, wrecking the country. The entire nation effectively became not only a police state, but a forced labor camp itself. A common statement to those executed was to keep you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss. And an example perhaps better known to people today. The Reverend Jones of Jonestown started as an effort by a charismatic preacher to build a new society. But it ended, of course, with the tragic deaths of more than 900 people in Guyana who took hundreds of Americans there as part of a religious cult, found a way to end his experiment. That wrapped up with a congressional delegation being fired on inside planes on a tarmac after they had come to investigate. He's convinced himself that he is some sort of superhuman Martyr. More than 900 of his followers would die after being given a fruit drink laced with Cyanide. We know from autopsies conducted later that a considerable number of people were held and forcibly injected with the poison. None of this is to say that the US is in the midst of a genocide that will take a quarter of its population, or that troops will begin firing at airplanes filled with civilians. Hey, look what happened during my first term. The parallel here is more the delusional nature of the bill of goods being sold and how widely it's adopted by both its salesmen and by its believers. And as usual, it's not necessary to even look at the overseas parallels to the kind of death cult in which we're finding ourselves today. The more relevant and influential precursor for an American death cult is the arrival of COVID on US shores in 2020. At first, the country grew alarmed at the appearance of a new, moderately lethal but highly contagious virus, and we responded with basic emergency health plans that had been put in place. Before long, the toll it would take on the American public became clearer. During the spring, it was evident that for safety reasons, many office workers would be told to stay home. This left first responders, medical staff, food service workers, and jobs with low wages predominantly on the front lines of exposure to the virus. For a time then, President Donald Trump alternately pretended the virus would vanish any day and somehow also still wanted credit for any development of a vaccine that might be effective that could come before the end of his presidency. We're also learning today that the Secret Service is being ravaged by the coronavirus. 130 agents either have COVID 19 or are in quarantine. The Secret Service outbreak is being linked to the whirlwind of Trump rallies in the days leading up to the election. But in the end, he would turn people against public health measures in definitive ways, promoting an anti vaccination agenda that caught fire with his followers and sabotaged the national, even parts of the global response. Along with the stunning death toll of well over a million people, the main result in the US was the refusal to reckon with what had happened. The President had made the pandemic into a political tool and demanded his followers ignore reality. Even as people drop like flies around them. The pump was primed for significant parts of the population to avert its eyes or even to disbelieve in the deaths of more than a million people. I cannot psychoanalyze the president, but we know that he has a tendency to be to believe he's the best at everything. He probably thinks he's better than the scientists. And you wonder. The press is in hysteria mode Fake news and the camera just went off. I think if he were practicing medicine, he would be negligent and he would be prosecuted. Even those of us who acknowledged what had happened and the role political leaders played in increasing that death toll or ignoring best practices for political expediency, there was a strange sense of simply moving on without acknowledging what had been lost and is being lost. An ability to tackle public health crises, a leading government role in that failure, and countless citizens gone. The President stepped into the Rose Garden late Friday to make his first public comments in eight days, following growing outrage over his silence as the nation grapples with an alarming surge in the pandemic. But he still didn't concede the election, although he came close. This recent history leaves us very vulnerable in a very bad place to assess and respond to the current threat. Trump's flexibility and willingness to backtrack is almost zero now, mind you, the tariffs are still in place at 10% on almost all countries, and the trade war with China has just intensified. If anything, what we saw today was that the uncertainty and the drama is going to be prolonged for at least 90 more days. What a Goldman Sachs executive said about Trump's financial bonfire is true across the board. Someone has to stop him. So don't expect the Trump administration to change its tack. He might be bribed into it, but he will not do it for no reward. He will not do it voluntarily. Can you walk us through your thinking about why you decided to put a 90 day pause? Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippee, you know, they were getting a little bit yippee, a little bit afraid. I don't think that changes the nature of the sort of death cult situation we're in. If you didn't do it, you wouldn't have a country. It wouldn't be sustainable. So I'm honored to have done it. And, you know, look, nothing's over yet. The example that is clearest that we've all seen in recent weeks is with law firms and with Columbia University. As soon as they accept his terms, as soon as they make those compromises, they are targeted in some different, different way. As with Columbia, where they are still found wanting and still under threat of punishment. Or as with Paul Weiss, the law firm, they have then committed to doing staggering amounts of pro bono work for causes that will effectively be determined by the Trump administration. Would you consider exempting some US Companies, maybe some larger companies who have been hit hard in the markets last few days during this 90 day, as time goes by, we're going to take a look at it. There are some that have been hard. There are some that, by the nature of the company, get hit a little bit harder. And we'll take a look at that just instinctively more than anything else. I mean, you almost can't take a pencil to paper. It's really more of an instinct, I think, than anything else. In the meantime, we, the public, have to find a way to remove those levers of power from the executive branch right now, and some of them, perhaps permanently, to end the Trump administration being able to run things like a mafia state. What they want is they want to have their cake and eat it. They want to devalue the dollar without jeopardizing the exorbitant privilege of the dollar. The reserve currency status of the dollar is this far fetched? No, it's not far fetched. They may succeed in doing it. I'm not saying they will succeed in doing it, but what I'm saying is that they have a rational plan, a fiendish plan, as they would say in cartoons. There are a lot of people that posit these really grand mast that somebody in the Trump administration is having on a particular topic, whether it's trade with China and tariffs, or whether it's how the government is secretly being restructured to certain ends. And while I do believe some of the people that Trump relies on as advisors and people who are in his cabinet do have their own particular obsessions and fascinations and are trying to carry some of those out in a way that's a little more complex than Trump himself could manage, the idea of this death cult that I'm positing is that as soon as any of those things run up against Trump's feelings or what Trump wants or what he hopes to extract out of a situation, Trump is going to win, that the advisors do not actually have sway over him. They can only try to manipulate him for a time to their own ends. It's really more of an instinct, I think, than anything else. What we saw in the first administration and what we've even seen a little bit in this last week with Musk is that that when Trump is tired of somebody, when somebody is no longer useful to Trump, or when they do not go with his own plans and his wishes, or they do not praise him even enough, sometimes he will carry out his own agenda, which is a fixed agenda that is always about power as a zero sum game and inflicting punishment on someone else and gathering toys for himself. So While we need to be aware what more complex strategies might be underway, when it comes down to Trump simply wants something else, those grand strategies can go right out the window. Right now, the administration is the out of control container ship headed for the bridge pier. We know that markets have been a little unstable. They want to know that Congress is on the job. And I'm here to tell you that we are the Article 1 branch of this government, that the U.S. house of Representatives and the U.S. senate are going to do our job. Still, we have a lot of levers to use to redirect that ship. Seeing the damage that's been unleashed, some Republican senators are willing to co sponsor legislation on tariffs, but in the end they'll need two thirds in each House to block a possible presidential veto. Representatives in the House are even more vulnerable, with less prospects of a cushy post government perch and more immediate fury directed at them, which could remove them from government altogether next year. Somebody had to pull the trigger. I was willing to pull the trigger. When it comes to the courts, the lower courts are still, as we've said in previous episodes, largely holding the line against lawlessness from the Trump administration. A unanimous decision from the fourth Circuit Appellate Court on Monday refused to stay a decision demanding the government return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was here lawfully and sent to prison in El Salvador by mistake. We do have some breaking news to get to the Supreme Court today, saying that the Trump administration must work to bring back a Maryland man who is mistakenly deported to prison in El Salvador. This is a rejection of the administration's emergency appeal. The court acted in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Salvadoran citizen who had an immigration court order preventing his deportation to his native country over fears he would face persecution from local gangs, the court said in an unsigned order with no noted dissents. Quote, the order properly requires the government to, quote, unquote, facilitate Albergo Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador. The current makeup of the Supreme Court is likely to deliver more losses than wins when it comes to protecting individuals and civil liberties. Thank you again. Thank you again. Don't forget, on Tuesday, the Supreme Court blocked an earlier order requiring Trump administration officials to return thousands of federal employees to work. On Monday, the court allowed the administration to send people to gulags and third nations under the auspices of the Alien enemies Act, a 1798 law intended for use in armed conflict, which we are not in right now, but we have to use the procedural guarantees the Supreme Court is claiming it will enforce for those the administration wants to deport. We can use that as a wedge to try to show how arbitrarily and unconstitutionally the administration is carrying out its programs of detention. We have more options when it comes to Congress, where we're likely to get further sooner by pressing the House and Senate to reclaim those constitutionally assigned roles of imposing tariffs. But we must also pressure Congress to stand up for civil rights and human rights of non citizens, though historically both Democrats and Republicans have not wanted to risk the political exposure that comes from doing so. But these rights are ones we will have to demand across the board for everyone. The arrest and detention of Ma'lu Khalil is a targeted retaliation for the expression of political views. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. Fascism thrives when people are scared to speak out. The bullies in Washington want us to roll over and shut up. We will not do that. We have already seen the government commit grave harm against people in the U.S. legally, people who were taken by mistake or people who had no criminal records. The $45 billion requested by the Department of Homeland Security to expand detention will likewise surely be used to build facilities where it will hold people the government targets, legally or illegally or by mistake, or whom it aggressively asserts it has authority over, even if it does not. We are living in the ashes of the COVID death cult, building the machinery of an even greater one. But as the Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit noted on Monday, contrary to the government's position upholding constitutional rights surely serves the public interest. What Trump is planning to do is not just contrary to American values, it's illegal. The Alien Enemies act can only be used in wartime, and discriminating against immigrants based on their place of birth or ancestry violates constitutional rights. Courts have the power to stop this, and so does Congress. Let's hope they do their jobs and stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law. So it's important to remember that those additional billions intended for detention facilities haven't even been allocated yet, let alone spent. We can do a lot to prevent all these machinations of death. Call your representatives about tariffs and about immigrant rights. Say to your congressmen to stop tariffs and to stop the massive expansion of facilities to lock up undocumented US Residents. Go to demonstrations so that we as a people can build public power and build more pressure behind our will. Protest is actually on the rise in the US My team at the Crowd County Consortium just today was able to put out some data that shows that the number of protests between February and March grew by like 60%. Donate to organizations that provide for or protect the rights of the most powerless among us because they are standing right now on the front lines for us. We have to continue to push non violently in all directions to protect the living through one small action at a time to stop Trump because he will not, he cannot stop himself. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, please subscribe at andreapitzer. Com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.