Andrea Pitzer (0:00)

You're listening to Next Comes what from Degenerate Art. This is Andrea Pitzer. Be sure to subscribe@Andreapitzer.com so this podcast can remain free for everyone. Last weekend, my husband pointed out a story in the Washington Post under a headline, Justice Department Examines Homeless Encampments, Options for the Mentally Ill. It had a quote he knew would piss me off, and he was right. It was about an email sent last week to workers in the Office of Justice Programs asking how to best use federal resources to deal with homelessness and mental illness, According to the Post, one line in the email read, what can DOJ do to more efficiently shift chronic vagrants away from the public square and into a more concentrated space so that order can be restored and resources and services can be deployed more effectively? You might already be guessing what set me off. Today. I want to talk to you about why this issue matters so much and how it reveals the heart of what is rotten in the White House, on Capitol Hill and across the country. It reaches into every crisis underway right now. We aren't going to be able to remain a democracy or reclaim our democracy until we find a way to deal with it. Call it the concentration camp tendency, the desire to exclude those deemed undesirable from society and carry on as if they didn't exist. It's the necklace threading through all the policies that are currently choking the country, and taking off one or two beads is not going to be enough to save us. What do Concentration Camps have to do with this? Remember that a concentration camp is the mass detention of civilians without any real trial on the basis of race, religion or affiliation, some aspect of them, rather than any actual crime they've individually committed. Who they are or who they choose to stand with are the supposed offense. I've said before on this podcast that concentration camps are meant to remove a group of people from society and to exile them into detention there, often without formal charges of any criminal offense. They have fewer rights, as Hannah Arendt once noted, than a citizen convicted of an actual crime. I want to look at all the paths that the administration is taking to create this dynamic of physically removing or erasing people from society. In some cases, they're talking about actually using camps. In other ways, the measures are, for now, less severe. But looking at everything across the board, it becomes obvious that it's the motivating principle to almost all the things that they're doing. I've written before about the drive to segregate homeless people in the 1920s and the 1930s and how governments in Europe and the Americas put people in concentration camps to get them out of cities. The homeless were a population the public would tolerate being mistreated, especially if they didn't have to see the mistreatment if it happened somewhere out of sight. That acceptance of camps for the homeless was a big step to normalizing concentration camps before the Nazis ever came to power. It's disturbing that the government today is pairing mental illness with homelessness here too, as mental illness as a fig leaf to involuntary confinement is likewise an approach with an extensive and grim past. Around the world, people capable of living in the community were committed to isolated institutions, often on the basis of little or no assessment. Precisely because these institutions held people the government wanted removed from society, the public tended to ignore rampant abuse that occurred there. There are difficult questions of autonomy among the desperately mentally ill and how best to help them survive in the world. But those are not the questions that the government seems to be actually interested in weighing when it wants to concentrate humans to restore order. We've seen in other preliminary actions that stop short of removal from society completely, but are nonetheless tilted toward erasure, especially with trans people and black Americans. The public purges of black leadership everywhere from the Pentagon to Harvard has been done very deliberately by the administration or its reactionary allies. Anti DEI policies have been pushed not just at government agencies, but by the government trying to influence major U.S. corporations. The administration is trying to keep companies from catering to or even acknowledging minority Americans as job applicants and consumers alike. And when it comes to trans people, the attempt to police bathroom usage through laws doesn't so much require trans people to use the bathrooms of the sex they were assigned at birth, as it does make it impossible for them to go to the bathroom anywhere, to make public spaces more difficult to navigate or to pressure them into detransitioning. The refusal in many school systems to let trans kids be trans kids without specific permission from their parents plays a similar role in trying to keep minorities in their places and, where possible, invisible. It's no accident that black and queer titles are the ones being purged from libraries. In censorship drives running from rural schools to the U.S. naval Academy, there's an attempt to bar them from public spaces and also from the public imagination. Border detention, however, is where the administration has been the most transparent already, with long standing promises to put undocumented US residents in camps to wait for deportation. That turned out not to be practicable in the short run because the government isn't yet able to arrest enough people and because the larger camp infrastructure isn't in place to do it. So Trump's administration has resorted to sending US Residents to a pre existing detention camp, whether it's at Guantanamo or El Salvador. And another area in which we can see this concentration camp tendency playing out is in Trump's drive to call for locking up people who disagree with him once he returned to power in January. This was most easily done with student protesters, because that backlash against campus protests had already begun and in fact was aided by Joe Biden in the policies of that time and the university administrators who overwhelmingly failed to protect free speech. Trump could just pick up these brutal policies and expand on them, using the supposed antisemitism of people largely seeking an end to the killing of civilians as a way instead to bully universities into submission. In other arenas that are advantageous to Trump. During his first administration, the threats to lock up opponents were emptier, but they're moving more quickly in the second administration. Think about the public threats by Attorney General Pam Bondi against Tesla protests, throwing the handful of what appear to be lone actors and incidents of actual destruction of property in with organized, peaceful demonstrations by saying we are going to fight to protect all of the Tesla owners. Admittedly, this does lead to some funnier moments, like the interim U.S. attorney for the District, Ed Martin accusing the Tesla takedown movement of domestic terrorism in the same press release in which he announces that his office is charging a district man with misdemeanor offenses for damaging multiple Teslas. Misdemeanor is not exactly domestic terrorism, but even these minor charges are concerning because they take what should be a routine enforcement of existing laws and elevate it into a crusade against public protest. Even worse are Attorney General Pam Bondi's recent comments about judges in which she said that what has happened to our judiciary is beyond me. They're deranged is all I can think of. We've seen how they might proceed the arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan in Wisconsin for what appears to be directing an immigrant to another exit from which to leave her courtroom so that he might avoid ICE agents waiting in the hallway. It is an indicator, I think, of things to come. And we see the impulses again in the Trump administration's willingness to threaten ActBlue, the leading Democratic fundraising platform that he recently targeted directly in an executive order for investigation. These kinds of actions become another dangerous front, showing the concentration camp tendency and how it's used to eliminate political opponents as well as minority groups. You could even make the case that Trump's long standing attachment to the kinds of tariffs he's now imposing, however haphazardly, also has a touch of the concentration camp tendency underlying it. My sense is that at the deepest level, Trump's tariff discomfort is about the idea that foreignness is wrong and that foreign things coming into America are suspect, that bringing in foreign goods will pollute America or make it weak, and that America should instead be sending its goods abroad to infiltrate other countries and make them dependent and weak. Other journalists have pointed out that the tariffs are about money and are intended to force individual countries into arrangements that might personally benefit Trump, his advisors or his family. And it's true that there's no more corrupt president in the history of the country. But we have to pause for a moment to realize that Trump is actually destroying global trade, not to mention the US Economy. His preoccupation is with something more important to him than even money, his perceived sense of superiority and the need to reinforce it. How did billionaires, who I do not believe to be the geniuses they seem to think they are, but who occasionally show an understanding of how finance, the stock market and business actually work, how did they come to support Trump? Anyone who wasn't deliberately hiding from reality could see that what Trump was promising during his 2024 campaign would mean disaster upon disaster, wrecked trade relations, economic distortions on the market that would hobble it. But his exclusionary language was too appealing to people from car dealers to billionaires for them to focus on their wallets instead of on their hatreds. It's a bait and switch with extravagant economic promises before the election and now talk from Trump of how the tariffs will bring pain and sacrifice. But it's been clear all along that white supremacy was the more important part for Trump. He wants power, but not just power. The most important thing is to not have to accommodate other people, to not have to acknowledge any obligation to humanity or to humans as a group, as the fundamental virtue of a society. They don't just need to believe that they're better than everyone else. They need a system that affirms that for them, without exercising power, that excludes and punishes, they can't comfortably exist. And so the flaw with everything happening in Trump 2.0 relates to the removal from society of people whom the governing powers would prefer didn't exist. Now, many of the problems with this are obvious. This approach destroys any humane political system. It beggars the country involved. It builds a police state. But I want to mention the most dangerous aspect. This impulse has no bottom. It doesn't stop until it is stopped. It will literally kill more and more people and widen the net as it goes. This concentration camp tendency eats everything in the end, as it did in Nazi Germany until it was interrupted from the outside, as it did in Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge dislocated most of the population into internal exile and upheaval. Both those governments drove their countries to genocide. But there is no allied army that will deliver America. There is no force to play the role of the Vietnamese government that halted Cambodia's genocidal experiment in Revolution in 1978 while ushering in other crises. Now, this all sounds very grim, and I mean it to be serious. There's no humane way to apply this concentration camp tendency, though America has been trying to square that circle for a long time. The best way to deal with homelessness is to house the homeless. We've seen this again and again in study after study. But no, we are going to try to punish them into vanishing, though. Half of the full time wage earners in this country don't earn enough to rent a one bedroom place at fair market rates. The best way to deal with immigration is to reform a system that hasn't functioned for decades. But no, we're going to try to have the two parties compete for votes by punishing the undocumented. So again, this might sound hopeless, but I am not at all without hope. As Americans, we have more than enough freedom left to stop Trump in pretty short order. He is helping our cause by tipping his hand so soon while we can still do so much. His missteps of moving both clumsily and in haste will make the economies crash under the weight of tariffs. Tariffs that belong to nobody but him. In poll after poll, the US Public is turning against even his cruel excesses on immigration. But even after Trump is gone, in the long run, we will have more work to do. Years ago, when I was teaching karate full time, I was the director of outreach and I ran programs for hundreds of people a week, people of every age from preschool through adulthood in the greater Washington, D.C. area. And when I taught, I used some of the ideas from Vivian Gustin Paley. Paley was a really innovative educator decades ago who taught in Chicago, and I was particularly fascinated by her book, you can't say you can't Play. Paley hated to see the kind of social exclusion that she felt was harming some of her kids, even in their first years of school. So she brought forth the idea of what to do about it and had her kids discuss it in class. The kids had amazing conversations and came to the conclusion that it wasn't fair at school, at least for kids to be able to exclude other kids from their games. They considered adopting the rule that you can't say you can't play, meaning that kids had to let people who wanted to join the game into play. What stands out in my mind from her book is that one girl who had a lot of the social power in her class tried to argue that her hurt feelings over having to play with someone else that she didn't want to were actually more significant, more important, than the hurt feelings of exclusion faced by the kid who would get shut out. But the class dissented mightily from that, and most of them agreed it was far more painful to be excluded than. Than to have to include somebody. In the end, they adopted the new rule of inclusiveness. You can't say you can't play. I've been thinking a lot about that girl and how human and easy it might be in your first years of life to imagine that the pain of inconvenience or discomfort is as bad as the pain of exclusion. Our problem as a country, and perhaps as a world, I think, is that we've raised a whole class of people for whom the pain of having to include or acknowledge the existence of others feels like suffering. And now, at this late stage in life, they can't tell the difference or they no longer care. I do have hope that this can change, and I don't mean that in some fake positivity way. What Paley shows us in the book is is that the impulse to punish others rather than suffer even the slightest inconvenience, is maybe a natural human tick. That selfishness can come to the fore pretty easily. And I would say that the role of society, as much as any other role, is to make sure that people do not get to be in positions where a trifling inconvenience to their comfort is made equivalent to human suffering like hunger or imprisonment. Because, unlike some Ayn Rand manifesto, selfishness carried to its endpoint, doesn't actually result in a stronger society of ubermention. It leads to coddled people who can't accept the existence of other humans as equals. It leads to people who. Who can't accommodate reality. For far too long we've catered to this exclusionary impulse that can't tolerate prioritizing mutual support, even when it's clear it benefits society as a whole. A society that seeks to punish or exclude whole groups is a damaged and a dangerous one, because it always ends up on the concentration camp trajectory. What can you do to push back against this tendency a lot, it turns out. This is one of the big reasons I'm always advocating for protest. Keeping the right to speak in public is huge, even in the times it might feel like a silly parade with no point. Once authoritarian leaders can repress public expression of dissent, it is extremely hard to undo their hold on society. And even when they're replaced, there's often an equally nefarious actor willing to come in and take advantage of the civilians inability to resist in public. So get out there. You can keep up with the Tesla takedown protests, which along with Musk's own missteps, are helping to drive down Tesla's economic forecasts. The stock still continues to surge on rumors that Musk will leave Doge and abandon his attempt to make the US Government his sandbox, but it's hard to see a future in which Tesla stays afloat and Musk gets to keep stripping agencies of employees and funding. Let's make him choose, and the sooner the better. You can also attend mayday protests on May 1. I have seen there's over a thousand of them planned right now, so there will surely be something that's near you. You can look them up over at 5051 so that's F I F T Y F I f t y1 and you can find a lot of post May Day protests there too, that'll be going on an ongoing basis. If May 1 is not a good day for you, there's everything from trans rights to economic rights to labor movements to climate action and justice for detainees like Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Rumesa Ozturk. So pick your interest and show up whenever you get down. Try to get out and do something, even when it's hard. A simple food drive to stock your local pantry can be a good reminder that none of us are actually alone and a lot of people are out there working to make this a better country. You can be one of them. And that's it.